https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1u8xc9m/most_l...
Seems like there are some insights here!
edit: it seems the post has been removed but comments are viewable.
1 liner summary:
To put it lightly, the dude was politically outspoken and held strong beliefs.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/google-cracks-down-posts... seems to have some context
Shazeer is an aggressive Zionist, and while Altman is better at reading the room, he has previously aligned himself with Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/openais-sam-altman-says-israel...
What does Zionist mean when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 78 years? I'm genuinely asking because the way the word is used doesn't make sense to me. There aren't similar terms for other countries to just stay the same, like for China to keep being run by the CCP. Every other country is assumed to have ontological inertia except for Israel.
I'm confused, is 78 years a long time? even the US is considered a toddler by empirical terms. zionism wasn't a thing until a minority group had the loudest voice in the room when the allies were discussing what to do with all the european refugees after ww2, and it happened to align well with the brits abandoning their failed colony in the region due to disputes with the locals
You didn't actually answer my question. How does using the word for people who want to create a Jewish state make sense when a Jewish state has existed for 78 years?
One reasonable possibility is they're referring to people like Ben-Gvir who have themselves claimed that Zionism means fighting for Israeli control over more territory like the West Bank. They're the ones calling the shots right now. I don't know whether Zionists 78 years ago would've agreed, it's possible.
To some it still means favoring any existence of a Jewish state. The inertia isn't there because aside from the original partition plan being pushed by the UK, other countries have attacked Israel several times later in ways they would've have withstood without outside support.
Let's not forget that while some people like to point to "From the River (Jordan) to the (Red) Sea" as some "gotcha!" that some Palestians want to "exterminate" Israel...
it was actually Likud's official election slogan in the 70s and 80s just as ... oh, let me check, Netanyahu, was getting involved in all of this, formally becoming Likud's leader in 1993.
Then please explain in your own words what "From the River (Jordan) to the (Red) Sea" means?
And the destruction of Israel is the explicit goal of Hamas as stated in their charter.
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it" and called for holy war to establish an Islamic state across historic Palestine.
And surely you’ll reply with what Likud meant.
Look, to be very clear: Hamas is absolutely a terrorist organization who has caused constant harm to both Israelis and the average Palestinian they purport to represent (there have been no elections since 2006, Hamas are the only people with weapons in Gaza, and the average citizen might as well be a hostage - and frankly they’d turn against Hamas a lot more if Israel didn’t steadily inflict collective punishment against them like turning off their electricity or even drinking water for days or weeks for actions of Hamas. All that is doing is making sympathizers of them).
I have no idea what likud meant and don't understand why it matters.
"Zionism means fighting for Israeli control over more territory like the West Bank."
Now that is a valid use of the term. I think the problem it that Zionism means so many different things it is nearly useless as a description. It seems more useful as a slur which has become very common in some circles.
"The inertia isn't there"
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying Israel could be defeated without US assistance?
I think it's valid to use the word the way that Israel's present leadership is using it.
> Are you saying Israel could be defeated without US assistance?
US and UK, yes. Not just cause of the weapons and money to Israel. After them, the top recipients of US foreign aid in the area are the bordering countries Egypt and Jordan, so that they don't attack.
> I think it's valid to use the word the way that Israel's present leadership is using it.
And how is that?
Israel has a population of 10 million people and a very modern military and nuclear weapons. If it's existence was ever truly threatened things would get VERY ugly.
Because that's what matters. The original Zionists aren't alive to ask what they think. Self-proclaimed Zionists are taking the West Bank and Gaza. In fact they've been kinda doing it for decades under previous governments, but more slowly. If there's some other kind of Zionism around, the most it's doing is complaining, and it's been outvoted.
I have doubts about their ability to self-defend because otherwise we wouldn't be giving so much money, the situation would be stable. Even if they can severely hurt the attackers, it doesn't really matter if the attackers stop at nothing. We just lost a war against Iran despite having full air superiority and killing their leader. And especially if you're considering the scenario where Israel never got Western support, and thus never got those advanced weapons.
Israel actually LEFT Gaza. You seem biased to the point of just plain lying.
West Bank and Gaza are different situations. West Bank settlements have been popping up continuously. Settlers were in Gaza until they exited in 2005, but now that Israel's military occupies it again, Zionists believe it should be resettled. Sorry for CNN link, but it has direct quotes https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/middleeast/israel-far-right-g... To be clear they haven't done it yet, aside from some illegal (by Israeli law) attempts, but they're trying.
It's pretty obvious from the emotional response that you've got some kind of horse in the Israel-Hamas war that I don't, which is fine, but I'm not gonna get called a liar too. So bye.
They did not. They're still occupying a buffer zone, have broken the ceasefire countless times, and are blocking people from crossing.
Israel razed Gaza to the ground. It was a genocide.
Don’t wrestle with pigs or argue with Zionists about Israel (though the former will at least avoid accusing you of things you’re not).
So Zionists are pigs?
Are Nazis pigs?
So all Zionists are Nazis?
Zionism and Nazism are very similar.
It's true that Nazism lacks the religious aspect, and Zionism lacks the pagan aspect.
I hope you can agree that these are aesthetic differences.
Both movements advocate for one ethnicity having the right to live on a particular part of the land, ime. ethonationalism (Nazis: "Blood and soil" vs. Zios: "The chosen people who god promised the land to"), both movements are expansionist (N: "Lebensraum" vs. Z: "Buffer zones" and "Greater Israel"), both movements subjugate another ethnicity that they deem lesser and evil (N: Jews, Black people, Roma, vs. Z: Palestinians, Arabs).
Both movements have commited genocide against the other ethnicities.
So, are Nazis pigs? If they are, then the label fits Zionists as well.
Israel left Gaza in 2005.stop telling obvious lies. Hamas attacked Israel on Oct 7 2023 killing at least 800 civilians in an act of incredibly bloodthirsty barbarism, including children, the elderly, and 364 victims attending the Nova music festival. Remember when Hamas paraded the body of that young German woman Shani Louk they killed like a hunting trophy?
> Israel left Gaza in 2005
You're absolutely right, and this is antisemitic propaganda. Israel left more than 20 years ago and didn't return until 2023 due to Hamas terrorism.
They certainly didn't return:
- for five months in 2006 for Operation Summer Rains
- or again in 2006 for Operation Autumn Clouds
- or again in 2008 for Operation Hot Winter
- or again in 2008 into 2009 for Operation Cast Lead
- or again in 2012 for Operation Pillar of Defense
- or again in 2014 for Operation Protective Edge
- or again in 2018 and 2019 for incursions and special-forces actions, like that covert IDF operation in Khan Younis that got fucked up and led to a firefight deep in Gaza (but that couldn't have happened, because they left back in 2005, right?)
- or lastly, before October 7, in 2021 in Operation Guardians of the Walls.
None of those large named operations could have happened, let alone anything smaller than named operations, like special forces or commando raids, because those things are purely Hamas propaganda, and not formal IDF operations.
Right?
This is what makes talking about Israel so exhausting. Everyone of those operations was a repsponse to some violence Hamas did and you just ignore it because you are so incredibly biased.
Hamas thinks it can destroy Israel with force. It can't anymore than native Americans can destroy the US. And Hamas trying and failing over and over and over and over has made the lives of Palastinians much worse. Hamas gleefully kills any Palestinians that point this out or oppose them in any way.
Just for comparison after Germany lost WW2 they lost 25% of their land and 14 million German living on it were expelled. Has Germany spent the last 78 years trying to get it back? No. Instead they have been doing the smarter option which is creating a peaceful and rich country, which is what the Palastinians should have done.
> Everyone of those operations was a repsponse to some violence Hamas did and you just ignore it because you are so incredibly biased.
You're right. It -is- exhausting. Because I never said a word about the merit, or lack thereof, of Israel's actions or reactions, or Hamas'.
I just commented that Israel has spent multiple years in Gaza "since they left".
HOWEVER, you absolutely stated, and get bent out of shape multiple times in this thread alone, at anyone even hinting Israel set foot in Gaza since 2005:
Someone comments saying this exact thing, "Israel has been operating in buffer zones", etc., etc. and you?
"Israel left... Stop telling obvious lies."
Also, it might not be permanent occupation but when you're back there nearly every year for 3-9 months, it might not feel like you ever really left.
So Israel left Gaza and then Hamas promptly took power and has been attacking Israel ever since, and eagerly killing any Palestinian who opposes them.
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here's a quote from wikipedia. it was an utter land grab and an easy way out of responsibility for those in power
> The League of Nations gave Britain mandatory power over Palestine in 1922. British rule and Arab efforts to prevent Jewish migration led to growing violence between Arabs and Jews, causing the British to announce its intention to terminate the Mandate in 1947. The UN General Assembly recommended partitioning Palestine into two states: Arab and Jewish. However, the situation deteriorated into a civil war. The Arabs rejected the Partition Plan, the Jews ostensibly accepted it, declaring the independence of the State of Israel in May 1948 upon the end of the British mandate. Nearby Arab countries invaded Palestine, Israel not only prevailed, but conquered more territory than envisioned by the Partition Plan. During the war, 700,000, or about 80% of all Palestinians fled or were driven out of territory Israel conquered and were not allowed to return, an event known as the Nakba (Arabic for 'catastrophe') to Palestinians. Starting in the late 1940s and continuing for decades, about 850,000 Jews from the Arab world immigrated ("made Aliyah") to Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine
Yes, this is the important thing to know. I've heard way too many conversations that go back and forth about every act of vengeance in either direction after this, it's all noise. Partition plan started this. But I wouldn't call it an easy way out of responsibility; UK's leaders took a clear and binding position in favor of Zionism.
Also, it was Ottoman territory for hundreds of years up to WWI. I've had friends tell me for some reason about how Palestine was an independent country before... literally wasn't.
IMO people just use the term to mean “pro-Israel” rather than in any reference to the original meaning ("supporter of the idea of a Jewish state"). Which could mean any combination of “pro-American financial support for Israel”, “moral support for Israel in their various military actions”, “opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state”, “a belief that Israel should continue to exist as a Jewish state”, and so on. It's more about the broad political alignment than the specific meaning of the word.
Thank you for actually answering my question. That is very vague and explains why I find the word so annoying.
Zionist does have a specific meaning. It means you think the Jewish people have a god-given right to the Palestinian land, and that other creeds and ethnicities should be second class within the Jewish state in Palestine.
A non-zionist Israel would be one where all peoples had the same right, e.g.
"It means you think the Jewish people have a god-given right to the Palestinian land"
It was never actually Palastinian land. It was Jewish land, then Roman land, then Ottoman land, then British land, then Jewish land after Palastinians attacked Israel and lost. At no point were the Palastinians ever a sovereign country and in fact they incredibly foolishly rejected the UN offer for one.
"other creeds and ethnicities should be second class "
Approximately 2.5 to 2.6 million non-Jews live in Israel, comprising about 25% to 26% of the country's total population. This is compared to less than 1% of the population of Gaza being non-muslim.
Ok, well, you seem to be a Zionist. And not very educated on the matter (or willfully misrepresenting things).
The Palestinians are the people who lived there. The Zionists expelled half of them and razed 500 villages to the ground in 1948. It was an ethnic cleansing. They denied them the right to return.
There was a Palestinian identity and there was a Palestinian society. They revolted against the Ottomans, and the British promised them sovereignty. The British betrayed them and caved to the Zionists, and the rest is settler colonialism and apartheid.
> And not very educated on the matter (or willfully misrepresenting things).
Right, like stomping around the comments claiming that anything less than pretending Israel didn't set foot in Gaza between 2025 and October 7, 2023 is filthy Hamas propaganda, the existence of at least six formally named IDF operations being just a pesky bit of reality that can be easily run over by a Merkava Mk V main battle tank.
What do you think that proves? It only proves how pointlessly violent Hamas is.
Maybe it will stop you from yelling at people that they are liars when they say anything about Israel being in Gaza?
Or, who am I kidding, of course it won't.
IDF actions in response to Hamas attacks are not the same as permanent occupation of Gaza. Israel left Gaza in 2005 and Hamas has been in power ever since and has gleefully killed any Palestinians opposing them.
I'm not a zionist I think the Palastinians were fools to refuse the UN offer of their own country and attack Israel. If they had won they would have expelled all Jews. They could have had their own sovereign Nation for 78 years now.
Just for comparison after Germany lost WW2 they lost 25% of their land and 14 million German living on it were expelled. Has Germany spent the last 78 years trying to get it back? No. Instead they have been doing the smarter option which is creating a peaceful and rich country, which is what the Palastinians should have done.
You're not a Zionist, but you then proceed to make a Zionist argument?
The Palestinians were the only people living on the land before the settlers came. That included Jews and Christians, because Palestinians are not a homogeneous group.
The Zionist settlers are not indigenous, they had no right to settle there. They also took the UN resolution and just started a war where they razed 500 villages. I'm sure if the Palestinian side had won, they would have expelled the settlers. But that is only natural. And beside the point, because the Palestinians didn't start the war, and of course uou expel invaders.
"The Palestinians were the only people living on the land before the settlers came"
And native americans were living in Canada, US, and Mexico before settlers came. The Palestinians are hardly unique in losing land in a war. In fact this is basically the norm in human history. What is almost unique is how Palestinians have made their lives much much worse pathetically trying to get the land back when they have absolutely no chance of doing so, anymore than Native Americans do.
The jews living in Israel in 2026 are indigenous in the sense they are NOT leaving so any scenario where they do is a stupid fantasy. the Palestinians DID start the war, they rejected their own sovereign state in favor of gambling for everything and lost. But they have spent 78 years just refusing to accept reality while Israel has grown rich and powerful.
The Palestinians did not start the war. Israel has started every war against the Palestinians, including the 1948 one.
Israelis are not indigenous (there are rare exceptions of Mizrahis or Jerusalem Palestinians with some form of citizenship), they are colonists.
> rare exceptions of Mizrahis
It's not rare at all, the majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi.
That's not true, it's not a majority. It is true that Mizrahi are ~40-45% of Jews in the country, but all Mizrahim are not all indigenous to Palestine. I was referring to the subset of Mizrahi who are Palestinian.
What do you mean by “Palestinian”? They’re Palestinian by the classic definition of “those who live in the region of Palestine”.
If you mean citizens of the State of Palestine, that’s a political matter, and zero Jews have that citizenship.
If you mean something along the lines of “unbroken lineage of ancestors who never left Palestine", that would also exclude many people who we all consider Palestinian, such as Arafat himself who was born in Cairo.
Arabs stared the war when they rejected the UN offer of a sovereign internationally recognized Palastinian state and tried to destroy Israel instead. They lost. In retrospect this was very stupid.
It doesn't matter if Israelis are indigenous or not because 7 million people are not going to leave.
What is plan Dalet? Rejecting the establishment on your land is also not a declaration of war. Israel was the one who started the hostilities
There are more Muslims living happily in Israel than Jews in all Muslim countries combined.
More specifically there are 0 Jews living in areas under control of the Palestinian Authority, or in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen.
Illogical collectivist blather suggesting that therefore, Muslims should be treated as a collective, and deprived of rights in Israel? Also, what’s with the “happily”?
No, it just points out how hypocritical Muslims are being.
Hypocrisy is an individual quality, not a collective quality, Zio!
"Zio"
Thank you for providing a perfect example of how the word zionist has become a replacement for kike among jew-haters.
Common term for about 75% of democrats under 50, who must be Jew-haters, of course. Sorry, ethnonationalism just isn’t a popular ideology, and the word is, in practice, just a shorthand for an instance of that. You’ve lapped up hasbarist propaganda to such an extent that it’s started to be reality.
Thank you for providing a perfect example of how the word zionist has become a replacement for kike among jew-haters.
You can stay paranoid or you can choose to face reality. Up to you.
Reality is that irrational hatred of Jews has become normalized among the far left.
The left? The left is against Israeli violence. The far right hates Jews.
Let's compare figures like, say Nick Fuentes and Hasan Piker.
Fuentes regularly spouts vile anti-semitic rhetoric, painting up a picture of Jews as greedy schemers.
Piker always makes it clear he is talking about Israel, not Jews. Painfully so.
I have not seen a single self-odentified leftist say anything anti-semitic IRL. But I have seen right-wingers do this.
And this same story is reflected in politicians statements as well. The right is anti-semitic.
The ADL claims that the left is, but that is because the ADL wants to conflate Israel with the entire ethnic group of Jews. Which is an obvious and silly bad faith trick. You're also doing the same thing.
That is just a blatant lie? There are Jews living in all those places. Not that many perhaps, but they exist.
And it's not really about religion. It's about Palestinians specifically, who are indigenous to Palestine, and are under Israeli apartheid.
The Palestinians who have been exiled by Israel, and their children, cannot live where their grandparents lived (even though they should have a right to return, under UN resolutions that Israel has accepted), but any Jew from, let's say Brooklyn, does.
Also, Islam is the only faith in Israel which is not allowed to self-organize. It is singled out among all religious communities as the only one who is not given this right. Which is of course incredibly discriminatory.
There are a lot less Jews living in Muslim countries after Israel was created than before. 800,000 were expelled and mostly moved to Israel. You don't hear them whining for the right to return.
There isn't a single jew living in Gaza. Why is that?
It is very much about religion. Hamas is an explicitly Islamic supremacist organization that calls for the destruction of Israel as a religious obligation.
What do you mean there isn't a single jew living in Gaza? How is that relevant? That is entirely beside the point.
If you had the option to live as a full citizen in Israel, being told you're part of the dominant ethnicity that's treated as human beings; or staying in Gaza, where you are being bombed to death by the IDF, I wonder which you would choose?
Your argument is essentially stating the conditions of apartheid as negative for dominant ethnic group. I didn't know someone could be so divorced from reality.
Between apartheid and genocide Hamas supporters really love using words wrong.
Where's the Hamas supporter?
You sound like one.
Based on what?
Alright. OpenAI feels like a better fit for him after all
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People who have intellectually based skills think it makes them an intellectual.
They fail to understand that their skill doesn't generalise.
That and the hyperglazing and platforming they get for having said skill makes them a prime candidate for exposing how average they are.
What a brave new world where only machines possess general intelligence.
It is possible to rationalize all sorts of irrational ideas. It's a trap many fall into.
Referring to this or what? Reddit post is gone, but Yahoo has something.
> "I do not believe that humans have an attribute called gender," Shazeer wrote, news site the Information reported Friday. "I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilize children. You have the right to your beliefs. I do not share them."
It's not dumb, and it's ridiculous if Google really has a problem with this. But it also says he kept accusing coworkers of being antisemitic, which clearly crosses the line into disrupting work.
Accusing coworkers of being antisemitic crosses the line, but accusing coworkers of sterilizing children and denying the existence of gender is ok? Surely both are bad, neither is acceptable in a workplace. Do you mean it’s not dumb because you share his views?
The first one doesn't accuse coworkers of sterilizing children. As for saying there's no gender attribute, I disagree, but it's just his belief and not a dumb one either.
The "sterilizing children" is how anti-trans activists talk about giving trans children gender-affirming care. Framing it this way makes it sound monstrous rather than an unfortunate side-effect of a medically necessary procedure, in the same way that characterizing a surgeon who performs hysterectomies for women with ovarian cancer as "a doctor who goes around sterilizing women" would be painting them in an unfair light.
And of course he's not directly accusing his coworkers of "sterilizing children", but he's 1) using language that compares politically sensitive health services that many of his coworkers or their families may have used and/or may feel defensive about to atrocities and 2) accusing his coworkers of supporting atrocities. That feels quite disruptive and inappropriate in the work environment IMO.
That all assumes it's a medically necessary procedure, which is exactly what people disagree about. And again, no mention of coworkers in that quote at least, not said in a work setting either.
What's medically necessary is for a person and their own doctors to decide on, not for you or some AI engineer or anyone else to disagree about.
Not when public money is involved, which pro-trans voices absolutely want it to be. And even without it, society does have reasons to concern itself with how parents treat their children. There's no side that separates the responsibilities, it's just a matter of who thinks this is socially right.
I actually don't know how much of that's especially true where doctors are involved. We as a society strictly regulate who can call themselves a doctor and the credentials that are required to do so, and then in doing so entrust them as a class to be reliable arbiters of what constitutes what's medically necessary, how public medical funds should be spent (which, even if that's something activists agitate for, is still a separate issue), and so on. We also entrust them to help monitor how parents are treating their children.
Anyway, to double back once, it actually doesn't really "assume it's a medically necessary procedure"; we can soften it to something like a "medically desired procedure" and the point in fact still stands that Shazeer's wording - which really should be the point here, not re-enacting the tired trans healthcare debate - is deliberately incendiary and manipulative. Broadly, no one is advocating for parents to be sterilizing their children as an end to itself, so it shouldn't be characterized as such.
Doctors are allowed to make judgement calls within whatever rules the insurance providers and laws give. The status quo before all this was that gender-affirming care was never covered, which changed to always covered in discrete steps across the 2000s and 2010s. Doctors didn't get to decide that on their own. Before that even, medical schools instill rules and values that come mostly from the outside, while the medical knowledge and experience is from the inside.
Another controversy is physician-assisted s–... euthanasia. Some doctors would consider it medically necessary, but they can't legally perform or even recommend it, as it's considered murder. They can in Canada. Abortion of a viable fetus not threatening the mother is illegal in all 50 US states, but legal in many states in earlier stages, again based on what the states consider murder (but the doctor judges what is viable or a threat to the mother).
Anyway if gender-affirming care is just medically desired but not medically necessary, the sterilization is accepted but not necessary. I agree with the spirit of the wording, even though it's imprecise, because it highlights that children are taking on an irreversible side effect. It's a short quote and not a whole essay where he gets to clarify.
I’m curious, do you personally know anybody who’s gone through gender-affirming-care?
For me it was a really confusing issue until I became close friends with someone whose childhood best friend is trans.
If he was born a decade earlier, he probably would have killed himself (this was the path he was on, which is incredibly tragic and all too common); the gender dysphoria invoked depression was unbearable.
Instead, he was able to work through therapy and medical care to understand his gender dysphoria and receive gender affirming care in his late teens.
Now (over a decade post treatment) he’s among the most cheerful people I’ve ever met. He inspires joy as a band teacher, is inspiringly happily married, and is raising a beautiful baby girl.
I often think about him when people talk about the issue in the abstract. The hundreds of children whose lives he’s impacted for the better, let alone the lives of his friends and family. Removing gender affirming care is implicitly saying you don’t want any of that to happen, because the logical conclusion of removing is people like him in a pit of depression and despair that often ends in suicide, all over an affliction that they did not choose.
This is where the “medically necessary” part of gender affirming care comes from.
I didn’t understand it before I knew him and his story so I don’t begrudge people who are in shows I used to walk in. But I’d encourage people to try to understand and lead with empathy and meet people where they are.
Since you ask, I know three. One guy I knew in high school transitioned to female around 2013, and requested I say "she." She was bullied a bit for it, not too much thankfully, but it was clear she was never comfortable with being male before. Another was similar but later.
It's different now and children are being encouraged to transition. They aren't just told that some are naturally uncomfortable with their gender, but that conforming to a gender is abnormal. Way more are doing it than before, and even afterwards are committing suicide at high rates. So I can't support it. I still think people should have the right to do it on their own dime, and won't judge them for it either way. I can't trust any studies on this anymore because it's become politicized and weirdly speech-policed. This isn't a unique or nuanced opinion, it's probably the majority one and I sound like the rest.
> It's different now and children are being encouraged to transition. They aren't just told that some are naturally uncomfortable with their gender, but that conforming to a gender is abnormal. Way more are doing it than before, and even afterwards are committing suicide at high rates
The range of human (mis-)behavior is extremely wide, so I wouldn’t doubt that some doctors and patients are doing what you fear here. I don’t think we should form opinions on such a broad situation on the basis of a few extreme people and situations.
The question I would ask is would you rather have more people suffer from not having care, than some people suffer from receiving care that they later regret? The latter is something that’s incredibly sad, no doubt, but it’s an intractable and tragic side effect of offering major medical treatments and interventions in general; the “false positive” aspect is not unique to gender affirming care, either in its existence or its magnitude. (The politicizing of the false positive is, though, because gender in general is incredibly politicized).
Gender dysphoria solved by one-way-door gender affirming care is quite rare (there are many intermediary steps people can try and ultimately be helped with), but education about the issue and the availability of treatment helps people like my friend. I think it’s pretty unambiguously positive to universalize the availability of that care in the same way as any other form of healthcare and education, because it’s genuinely the only way some people can feel comfortable in their skin. And although there may be problems with the standard of care, the standard for care can only improve with time and experience.
I would rather have some people suffer from not having care, than have way more people suffer from regretting the care, or more likely having no care but just mental anguish from being pushed into internal conflict about this at an early age. Bad as it sounds, we've already had to make plenty of calls like this.
Maybe 15 years ago there was an option to have neither, maybe we can go back to that. As it already is in some other countries.
That's analogous to how frontal lobotomies were justified as a medical procedure. But it still caused significant, lifelong harm to tens of thousands of people, most of them children and young women.
> It's not dumb, and it's ridiculous if Google really has a problem with this.
Google knows Shazeer's value & paid $2bn to c.ai for it: Its undesirable for anyone (regardless of their seniority) to engage in a discussion without being invited to it. Flaring up discord isn't how someone in a leadership position at a huge company is supposed to operate. It is another thing if they've got the "fuck you" money & a few feathers to rattle; then they do whatever without care.
> But it also says he kept accusing coworkers of being antisemitic
Per reports, Sergey Brin said something similar in the internal forums, too. Don't think its the only problem. After all, Shazeer can literally pick & choose where they want to work, and probably has more leverage over GDM than GDM does over him.
I know about the Sergey Brin thing too, same issue but tbh less important of a person
yeah, the argument is ridiculous; like, formally, it is ridiculous. i also disagree with the sentiment and conclusions of the argument, but the actual form of the argument is garbage: "i introduce an axiom that says there is no gender and therefore the distinction between sex and gender doesn't exist".
He thinks there's no gender. I could give reasons why I disagree, but not proof, same with the religion he kinda mentions.
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the g-slur? I won't say it in case it is a slur, is that the word the jews call non-jews?
That makes way more sense, I thought he meant gypsy. In either case he should just say the word, this site isn't for children.
Avicebron is correct. I avoided being specific because I didn't want to derail the thread with responses from people that fulminate over specific keywords.
Whether or not “goy” is a slur is pretty complicated. It has pejorative uses, and outside of a strictly religious context any non-Jew is almost certainly only going to see those pejorative uses. But strictly speaking it’s a Hebrew word that means “nation,” and isn’t any more or less offensive in the abstract than Jew, Arab, Brit, etc.
(To my understanding, the closest equivalent is “ummah” in Arabic, where the connotation is flipped: goy can refer to a Jewish person but typically does not, whereas the ummah typically refers to Muslim peoples as a collective but can also be a general stand-in for “nation” or “world.”)
It’s not literally a slur, but because it has developed negative connotations Jewish people tend to avoid it nowadays. Online, you are more likely to see it used by antisemites.
Which is why I think that story is very likely bullshit. It’s from an account that very frequently posts pro-IRGC content, and has previously used “the G word” itself.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247908
A bit bizarre that you're dragging a six-month old post, but I stand by what I said. Nothing in that comment is pejorative.
I explained my reasoning for avoiding the word downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48591986
I think “goybucks” is straightforwardly pejorative. You maybe didn’t mean it so, but that’s the straight line read of it given the white nationalist template of “goy$x” for some x.
I think he ment Gypsy and not Gentile.
Goyum?
Your contribution to a story about a Jewish person is that you once worked for a Jew and you didn’t like him.
Thank you for your input, six-number throwaway. I am answering the parent's question while humanizing a complex, intelligent person that I worked for.
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Please don't comment like this here. The HN guidelines ask us not to engage in political or ideological battle or use swipes like "comically stupid take". Same goes for your other comment in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48590901) – "sigh how are so many brilliant people this stupid?" adds nothing but venom to the discussion.
Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
the first post was a swipe, i'll grant you. probably shouldn't have said it. it was a knee-jerk reaction to a structurally fallacious argument that leaves no room for discussion: "i reject your stance not based on reason, evidence, or anything that you can interact with, but based on an new presupposition i've just now decided is true". though i'll admit the severity of my knee jerking was probably amplified by some of the other opinions he holds.
the second post is actually about (a) me having understanding for a position of someone i disagree with harshly, and (b) the logical structure of an argument, not the underlying topic itself. it was in reference to the content of the link that was posted.
anyway, mods can take it down, i get why the rules are there. you're also right to ask folks to keep it clean. but i stand by it; dude just seems to have a trifecta of awful traits and i'm so so so tired of super rich tech dudes ruining the world.
Thanks. We don't take anything down (except in rare cases when a user explicitly asks us to remove one of their posts for privacy reasons). We just need everyone to make the effort to observe the guidelines at all times when participating here, no matter the topic or how they feel about it.
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What you're describing about gender is.... not really scientific. It was basically declared by fiat by researchers. It's not an authoritative definition and many people disagree with the concept, at least when it gets conflated with scientific topics.
there are some things that clearly exist that are really hard to nail down with definitions; once we get into anything social, we are kinda playing with that territory. everything is so fuzzy that our normal way of defining things breaks down. so saying precisely what gender _is_ is going to be almost impossible. but there are definitely roles and traits that are highly correlated with a person's birth sex that are distinct from their birth sex. there can even be genetic reasons why those correlations emerged. but they are still distinct.
as evidence, what it _means_ to be a man, woman, etc, differs from society to society. if you ask me to quantify this precisely, i will struggle. but it's plain for all to see.
sorry, is this in response to my post? in which case, this is exactly the distinction i'm making. the entire argument is whether or not there _is_ a distinction; my point is that this guy just, a priori, decides gender doesn't exist. but there is plenty of evidence that it does. there are plenty of social traits associated with sex that differ across different cultures: pink used to be a manly color, now it's a feminine color; "be a man" doesn't literally mean "make sure your sex is male"; etc. there are traits that are heavily correlated with a person's sex that are culturally reinforced, and this is distinct from their sex.
I think you need to read their comment again - they are clearly talking about sex and gender as two different concepts.
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> Basically saying that women and men should present and behave within a narrow set of parameters.
I think you're putting words into peoples mouths there.
Acknowledging that there is a social construct we generally know of as "gender" and acknowledging that certain stereotypes and common understandings of that concept exist is not at all the same thing as demanding that people should fit into the narrowest stereotypes that you can think of.
Also worth noting that you acknowledging the existence of sexist stereotyping is an acknowledgement of the existence of gender as a social construct.
There are both descriptive and normative uses of gender. To use a less charged example, it's not prescriptive to identify as American. It's not prescriptive to say other people identify you that way, even if your passport says Canadian.
An example of using the category normatively would be saying someone isn't American because they burn the flag. My experience is that most of the people using "gender" normatively don't differentiate it from sex.
This is a motte and bailey though. A regular person on the street has never seen a distinction between these two words, and common sense prevailed after years of Silicon Valley policing of speech to try to make an unpopular position seem tenable and widely agreed upon to get the average person to step in line.
Are you seriously trying to claim that e.g. wearing dresses or liking the color pink is somehow fundamentally tied the the genitals in your pants or the chromosomes you have?
The idea that gender is a social concept is so blindingly obvious that, like bbeonx I kind of assume that anyone making comments like yours about "common sense" is either blindly parroting talking points without thinking about them, or arguing in bad faith.
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This isn't an either-or thing. Google is an American company, neither of those entities is American. The people who care about this foreign war so much can donate their own money or go fight it themselves.
What's even worse is Google refused to work with the American military in the past, but as soon as it was Israel, #1 priority for them. So it's pretty clear where their loyalty is.
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