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1/ The modern far Left has a political agenda to destroy/deconstruct biological realities under the guise of Social Justice. A common way they go about this is by dishonestly applying univariate statistics to multivariate problems. This is called the Univariate Fallacy.
Thread.
Thread.
2/ This fallacy, when deployed, is commonly done using a single sentence buried within an article or essay couched around a broader narrative on the history of a particular type of oppression, such as sexism. Let me give you some recent examples of this fallacy in action.
3/ You'll remember this @nature piece arguing that sex is a spectrum and that perhaps there are more then 2 sexes, even though over 99.98% of humans can be classified at birth as being unambiguously male or female. https://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943
4/ In this piece, they hold off deploying the Univariate Fallacy until the second-to-last sentence of a nearly 3500 word essay.
5/ See my @Quillette essay for a more in-depth treatment of this and similar articles that try to obfuscate about the reality of biological sex. https://quillette.com/2018/11/30/the-new-evolution-deniers/
6/ Then you'll remember this other @nature piece arguing how the notion that there are or may be differences in the brains of human males and females is "neurosexism." https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00677-x
7/ In this article they deploy the Univariate Fallacy much sooner, in the 4th paragraph.
8/ For a detailed look at the actual research completely debunking the Univariate Fallacy regarding sex-related brain differences in humans, see my previous thread about this below. https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1100842757227200517
9/ And now we have today's article in the New York Times claiming the importance of testosterone on athletic performance is a "myth." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/opinion/testosterone-caster-semenya.html
10/ In the 7th paragraph is, you guessed it, the Univariate Fallacy. Note the use of the words "single" and "linear," both hallmarks of univariate statistics.
11/ This is, of course, highly misleading nonsense. Testosterone directly guides males through male puberty that results in bigger, faster, and stronger individuals than if they had not done so.
12/ Testosterone supplementation greatly increases muscle growth & protein synth in males & females, which is why it's used by many bodybuilders & a banned substance in nearly every sport. Peruse the thousands of articles demonstrating this at your leisure. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=%22testosterone%22+%22muscle%22&btnG=
13/ Furthermore, the sporting agencies that allow trans women to compete with females universally require them to reduce their testosterone levels below a certain threshold, for a certain amount of time, in order to reduce their competitive advantage.
14/ But why would lowering testosterone levels matter if it didn't create an advantage in the first place? And, it's not just CURRENT higher testosterone levels that give males an advantage, but PAST higher levels that guided the development of their bodies through male puberty.
15/ This thread is not an attack on univariate statistics. It is an attack on those who deploy them on multivariate problems to push a narrative.
Don’t fall for it. It is scientific sophistry; smoke and mirrors designed to confuse you driven by a political agenda.
Don’t fall for it. It is scientific sophistry; smoke and mirrors designed to confuse you driven by a political agenda.
Realized I never really provided a simple definition of the Univariate Fallacy. Oops, sorry!
But basically it is this:
The claim that if there is no single, defining trait that can be used to separate two or more categories, then those categories do not exist.
But basically it is this:
The claim that if there is no single, defining trait that can be used to separate two or more categories, then those categories do not exist.
I am just going to keep adding to this thread as I find more and more examples of the Univariate Fallacy.
This article from the Independent critical of the recent ruling against Caster Semenya relies on the UF as the basis for their arguments. https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/athletics/caster-semenya-case-testosterone-regulations-loses-iaaf-appeal-discriminate-against-her-what-happens-a8894541.html?fbclid=IwAR1nV-DYUrv21j336UNaGqQlqzjPZcdihdGoN0JwZoX0YI-OFAJO8sXl7Z8
This article from the Independent critical of the recent ruling against Caster Semenya relies on the UF as the basis for their arguments. https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/athletics/caster-semenya-case-testosterone-regulations-loses-iaaf-appeal-discriminate-against-her-what-happens-a8894541.html?fbclid=IwAR1nV-DYUrv21j336UNaGqQlqzjPZcdihdGoN0JwZoX0YI-OFAJO8sXl7Z8
And here it is. Yes, no single factor can 100% determine sex, but that doesn't mean the categories "male" & "female" lack any coherent meaning. There may be extremely rare edge cases where we must use a reasonable heuristic, but this does not obliterate the categories as a whole.
And here it is again, this time in a Deadspin article defending the trans powerlifter JayCee Cooper. In case you forgot, Cooper recently transitioned and trained for 1 year before breaking the Minnesota state record for women's bench press. https://deadspin.com/shes-got-the-strength-but-who-has-the-power-1834560163
This Guardian article deploys a popular version of the Univariate Fallacy w/ respect to human population genetics known as Lewontin's Fallacy. This latches onto the fact that most genetic diversity exists within a population than between populations. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/18/race-science-on-the-rise-angela-saini?CMP=share_btn_tw
While technically true, this fact says almost nothing about the relatedness of any two individuals. The author's claim that she (an Indian woman) may be more related to her white upstairs neighbor than to another Indian person simply isn't true.
This faulty conclusion is the result of looking at genes at a SINGLE locus rather than the CORRELATIONAL STRUCTURE among many different loci. This is simply the Univariate Fallacy applied to genetics, otherwise known as Lewontin's Fallacy. Link to paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bies.10315
It is important to note that what we colloquially refer to as "races" are very low resolution descriptors of relatedness, but statistically significant nonetheless. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/
Also, it is true that no human population is entirely genetically distinct. That would be impossible, but significant genetic structure due to relatedness exists. However, this is certainly no basis whatsoever for truly racist notions of racial essentialism and superiority.
And here's a @nytimes article by Anne Fausto-Sterling from October of last year using the Univariate Fallacy as the foundation for their entire argument that sex is not binary because bruh, intersex. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/opinion/sex-biology-binary.html
"It has long been known that there is no SINGLE biological measure that UNASSAILABLY places each and every human into one of two categories—male or female."
Emphasis mine.
Emphasis mine.
And again with this Medium article. https://elemental.medium.com/why-we-cant-define-sex-through-testosterone-ce5ed0ba2be4
Feast your eyes.
Angela Saini, the same person who authored the above Guardian article on "race science," managed to get a book review in Nature that again deploys Lewontin's Fallacy, which you'll remember is just the Univariate Fallacy applied to human population genetics. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02244-w?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=organic&utm_campaign=NGMT_2_JNC_Nature
Sure, if you look at individual loci in isolation this statement might have a veneer of truth, but this ignores the correlational structure between loci that generate the "family resemblance" we observe at the population level that are commonly referred to as "races."
This new video from @voxdotcom is one long exercise in univariate thinking. Remember, if females had no protected sports category, they would never be able to compete. Thankfully sex is clear cut >99.98% of the time.
It's always useful to keep in mind that all conversations about what constitutes a "female/male" all take place within the little white box below. There is no sex spectrum, just a small number of people who's sex is ambiguous or their sex genotypes don't match their phenotype.
Here we see the Univariate Fallacy deployed in an article about sex and sports. https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/shades-of-gray-sex-gender-and-fairness-in-sport/
The author even goes on to advance the absurd and extreme claim that the term “biological sex” is "meaningless and is ill-advised."
The Univariate Fallacy is being used to forward the narrative that the police are "systemically racist" by presenting figures that show blacks are more frequently killed by police than one would predict by chance alone.
This methodology is overly simplistic, since it fails to account for other variables, such as differences in crime rates, class, etc. In other words, univariate statistics are being applied to a complex, multivariate phenomenon, leading us to erroneous conclusions.
As @EPoe187 points out in this thread, males are shot by police at a MUCH higher rate than females, yet this is not evidence that the police are "systemically sexist" because we're all aware that other important variables are at play here. https://twitter.com/EPoe187/status/1267860564937752576?s=20
This fact does not excuse police abuse and brutality, nor does it mean police reform isn't necessary. Nor does it mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that racism isn't a real problem in America. It is. But our beliefs and actions on any issue must be driven by data.
More Univariate Fallacy regarding male/female brain diffs. The keyword in the title is "Key." There's no single "key" factor that separates male & female brains, but many small differences correlate so that male & female brains form distinct clusters. https://www.sciencealert.com/a-century-of-studies-on-male-and-female-brains-has-turned-up-no-major-intrinsic-difference
Here we see it again in The New York Times when discussing the rules for determining one's sex for sports. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/sports/transgender-athletes-womens-sports-idaho.html?smid=tw-share
"Scientists have long said there is no single biological factor that determines sex, and the sex assigned at birth is not considered the sole determinant of gender."
It's fine to talk about edge cases, but most trans individuals are not edge cases regarding biological sex.
It's fine to talk about edge cases, but most trans individuals are not edge cases regarding biological sex.
