I believe that in addition to the Olympics and paralympics there should be an 'enhanced' Olympics. Any artificial limbs, performance enhancing drugs, etc would be allowed. A celebration of human technological progress.
It will be in the movie version...to be honest the above just popped into my head while I was brushing my teeth earlier and I typed it in without really thinking. Didn't mean to abuse HN as my personal notebook :-/
This is why: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRTdsxjYbJA - from 1:30s halfway through the second lap, she pulls ahead as if she was ... well, a man running in the womens race.
By "cross-gender" I assume you're including categories like "biological men who identify as women", which is a very large group compared to the biological categories mentioned in the article.
I mean, I have no problem with men who want to identify as women, or indeed with men who want to identify as $6.99 Ikea table lamps, but the existence of such men isn't a challenge to binary human/lamp classification schemes.
Actually, prevalence of transsexual women (the accepted term for what you meant, since "women" is what they identify as) is probably quite a bit higher than that. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html does an analysis that concludes that said prevalence is on the order of 1 in 500.
But I don't think we were talking about transsexuality, which is something different from the intersex conditions which might make this whole business of sex testing more complicated than one might expect.
In the meantime, binary conceptions of gender solve problems like: girls in an Indiana high school want to play varsity basketball but cannot compete on the boys team.
So someone with Jewish ancestry that is a practicing Catholic, and someone that is not of Jewish ancestry that converted to Judaism are both Jewish? That sort of makes it an ambiguous term, no? What if someone was born to two parents that are not of Jewish ancestry, but converted to Judaism? Is that person a Jew by birth? What if that person becomes a Buddhist later in life? Are they still a Jew?
>So someone with Jewish ancestry that is a practicing Catholic, and someone that is not of Jewish ancestry that converted to Judaism are both Jewish?
If your mother is Jewish, then the Jewish establishment would consider you Jewish. You are considered Jewish if you convert.
>That sort of makes it an ambiguous term, no?
Unlike other religions, Judaism is a religion and a cultural identity. Many Jews are secular, but still have strong cultural connections.
>What if someone was born to two parents that are not of Jewish ancestry, but converted to Judaism? Is that person a Jew by birth?
That person is not a Jew by birth, but that person is a Jew by conversion.
Historically, the only real test of "Jewness" that matters is this: if the Nazis were around, would they want to kill you?
I'm talking about what the Jewish community currently uses. It seems sorta sad that they would adopt the same attitude toward 'Jew-ness' that the Nazis used... In a Helsinki-syndrome sort of way.
If the world were perfect then no one would have to be paranoid.
The Helsinki syndrome has nothing to do with this.
>Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response sometimes seen in abducted hostages, in which the hostage shows signs of loyalty to the hostage-taker, regardless of the danger or risk in which they have been placed. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome]
Indeed it makes the term ambiguous, but luckily in this case its easier to fix. When it matters, then just specify:
If you are saying "Jews believe that..." you are referring to people who practice Judaism.
If you are saying "Jewish genes are such that..." you are referring to someone of Jewish ancestry.
I suppose it could be more confusing with people of mixed ancestry, but we can probably generally find a usable definition by context.
The first lists the number of Jewish people in the US as roughly 6.5 million (2.2% of total), the second lists the number of transgender people as between 0.25 and 1% but warns that may be under counted.
The whole point of that article is that there isn't one biological category or the other. It's nice to see blatant discrimination so highly rewarded, though. Maligning people as 'other' and making artificial constructions of stability that simply don't exist is really sad.
What if you have a "female" with high levels of androgens? Do you just say if you are 2 standard deviations within the mean of females you are verifiably female? Which is the cutoff?
Pick one arbitrarily. It's inelegant, sure, but we use it for all sorts of other things. Significant example: are you an adult? All sorts of perfectly intelligent, rational arguments could be raised saying "It depends on the person, now doesn't it?" The law, however, says: If you have been alive for X number of years, you are an adult. Otherwise, you are not. It seems to work halfway adequately for that.
This sounds so intellectually deep and all, but did you even take roughly 30 seconds to think about what happens when you combine men and women in athletic competition?
Oh, I realize that. It will show how totally pointless measuring people by some yardstick is.
So what if you can run 1 second faster than some other human on a predefined course. You are still better than 99.99% of the rest of the humans.
Humanity is multi-valued, what your abilities are in one narrow (and ultimately useless) field should not in any way degrade the people lower in the 'ladder' and it should not reward those higher up.
Competition sports are historically good for two things only (and 'good' is up for debate), inspiring nationalism in people and paying exorbitant salaries to the competitors because of the media spectacle.
edit: Our capability to measure time is what drives this crazy competition forward, if we were limited to say 1 second intervals plenty of women and plenty of men would be able to compete just fine (only not in the same race, but for instance simply against the clock).
The differences between all humans competing in these races and the 'rest of us' is essentially so small as to be meaningless.
Competition sports are historically good for entertaining (actively and passively) billions of people. Do you have an alternative activity which is as engaging to as many people? Why not be entertained by watching fellow human beings push their bodies to the absolute microsecond limit? Why not reward those which are the most entertaining? Most of what we do in the end is completely pointless anyways if you get philosophical enough about it.
If we were all robots capable of performing brain intense activity all the time with no need for leisure activity, you may have a point about sports being pointless. However, we obviously are not. Sports are easy to relate to, easy to participate in, easy to admire and easy to watch. And since sports have remained popular for so long and now have such specialization, the differences amongst the most elite athletes are now only microseconds or centimeters. There is nothing wrong with measuring or finding entertainment from such small differences. I argue it makes it even more exciting.
Sure just because you're highly skilled in a narrow field doesn't mean you're a better human. It sucks that because of media we relate these skills with human worthiness, but you can't say that competition at a high level is worthless because of these drawbacks.
There are good reasons to have highly competitive sports. It lets people see what our bodies and minds are capable of, and it helps gives us an identity as individuals and as humans. Not to mention that entertainment is not pointless. Unless you're only going to look at it from a philosophical perspective, then yeah, pretty much everything we do is meaningless.
You relate these skills with human worthiness because of your own innately competitive impulses. It's because of your own rationality. It's because of your own drive to achieve. It's because of your own drive to impress your peers (especially women if you are a man). It's not the media's fault.
I downmodded this post because claiming that competition sports are "good for two things only" is absolutely ridiculous. Competitive sports are good for:
Physical well-being
Mental well-being
Self-esteem, self-worth, self-satisfaction.
Pure fun
Personal motivation and accomplishment
Social interaction
Entertainment
Proxy for real violence
... To list a few things off the top of my head.
Most athletes are not paid exorbitant salaries because most competition does not result in media spectacle. Yet sports remain an important part of life for people in nearly every culture on the planet, as they have for thousands of years.
Don't know who was downvoting you. I agree. Don't know if I'd have agreed three months ago, but I'm starting to grow increasingly weary of rankings and competition.
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of human potential. When I see people performing on levels I can't think of reaching, it gives me a fuzzy feeling. But we've gone past that in society, to the point of fetishizing achievement. I think it's awesome, for instance, that Michael Phelps broke the records he did. It's what he loves doing, apparently, and the technology behind his suit was pretty cool, and the spectacle was fun. But we aren't really given a choice about what to find fun, are we, when every media station heralds it for a week at a time. I'm sure other cool things were happening that didn't involve milliseconds in an expensive pool. Then the fame gets so ridiculous that his using marijuana became a scandal in and of itself, and he had to apologize not primarily for using but for letting kids down.
I'd like to see society move past these anal little obsessions. It's awesome that some people like some competitive sports, but I don't think it should be the center of our society. (I really don't think society should have any center whatsoever, but that's crazy talk.)
The media ruins everything through overexposure and pathetic coverage, from politics to celebrities to crime. I think it is a bit unfair to take it out on sports and competition. What people like Michael Phelps do is nothing short of amazing, and we shouldn't penalize his accomplishments, the entertainment he provides, or competition in general because the media is sick.
I'm not so sure it is 'amazing'. What I think is 'amazing' is to have a dream of putting men on the moon and realizing it, to come up with a way of connecting people all over the world and to allow people to travel around the globe in extremely short spans of time.
Athletes are - I'm sorry - overrated. Yes, it is great that they can do what they do, and I'm happy for them that they achieve their goals. But I'm just as happy for some local kid competing at ping-pong and winning, there is not much class difference there (in my opinion).
Sports are a means of finding your own limits, then exceeding those limits.
The media indeed messes it up, and for all those other categories you listed as well.
The amount of work, dedication, persistence, and pain Phelps has endured to achieve the results he has is no less than the work, dedication, persistence and pain an engineer on the first Apollo mission endured. Phelps and the engineer just happen to be good in different domains. They are both amazing people with amazing accomplishments. The world takes all kinds.
Don't look at the effort. Look at the final result. Lolita took all of four months to write, and it's terrific. That's less time than it took Ed Wood to make any of his movies, all of which bombed.
Are you sure Nabokov didn't think about the issues that led to writing Lolita in the years before he started putting words on paper? Maybe he really did put in more effort (e.g., in writing other novels) before Lolita was such a result in such a seemingly short time. Nabokov's autobiography suggests he worked hard for a long time developing his craft.
I think whether he spent 10 years on it or 15 minutes doesn't really matter, the work stands on its own, it is a creation. Sports as such - especially top sports where the 1/100th of a second counter makes the difference - does not create anything of inherent value.
The guinness book of records might make you believe otherwise, but it really does not matter who ran a little faster than his fellow humans.
Without Nabokov, Bach or van Gogh though, we'd all be a little poorer.
I don't think it's penalizing him not to place the spotlight on him. I do think it's penalizing a lot of other people to make the entire Olympic week about Michael Phelps.
You mean the NBC treatment of the Olympics. Whoever decided that slow-motion, voice-over, life-story, was the way to cover live sports events should be shot.
This started about a week ago, maybe a bit longer, no matter what I write, first it will go to -1 or -2, then slowly back up. Weird...
> really don't think society should have any center whatsoever, but that's crazy talk.
I don't think that's crazy at all. We value things like beauty, speed, strength and so on. But everybody has a story, and when you dig deep enough everybody has hidden strengths, all it takes is the right circumstances to bring them to the surface.
What we need to recognize is that 'spectator sports by the clock', beauty contests and so on have essentially become so meaningless that what you wear in a race (or in a beauty contest!) will make the difference between winning and losing.
I'd like to see a guy like Lance Armstrong compete on a 70's racing bike. Those bikes were plenty fast, but I highly doubt he'd make a chance.
All that drives it now is money and some weird nationalistic drive.
Let's refocus from sports to stuff that actually matters (and no in the /. sense), let's hold a competition who has done the most good for their neighbourhood. Let's have countries outcompete each other on slashing their defense budget, on minimizing their crime rates and political record.
All that energy going towards slicing .01 of some record or other it fails to excite me.
I was being a bit ironic when I said crazy talk. I think society ought to decentralize and focus on smaller communities, with more emphasis on the local than on the global, without many exceptions. It's crazy talk because it won't happen, though I think it would be better in the long run.
Let's have countries outcompete each other on slashing their defense budget, on minimizing their crime rates and political record.
I find it sad that Americans aren't competitive in things like that. We're, what, #37 for health care satisfaction? Push it up again! USA! USA!
This started about a week ago, maybe a bit longer, no matter what I write, first it will go to -1 or -2, then slowly back up. Weird...
That means you've made it on HN! Either there are bots, or your name is well-known enough to provoke random downvoting. When I tried using HN with a second account for several months, I was surprised that I wasn't bobbing under -1 every time I posted in a popular thread. Now it's back. Oh, well.
Perhaps you haven't really paid attention to how much endurance and power Lance Armstrong brings to the table, even late in a multi-stage race. In the history of biking there have been very few people with his abilities. Seems like a poor choice as an example for your point.
How is that worse than having the same category for tall and short people? I see nothing magic about sex as a differentiator. It's not the sex organs that would cause the imbalance. It's sport-specific physical differences, like height and muscle mass, which happen to be partially linked to sex. But once you admit that some people should have their own category because of a genetic coin-flip, why would you limit this to women? (Sounds pretty sexist to me!) Wouldn't it be equally fair to have an olympic medal for, say, fastest 100m run by a man under 5'6"?
To answer your question, what I'd like to see is for people to realize how silly the current set of sports are -- virtually all slight variants of either "person moves an object downfield into a goal" or "person runs/jumps/lifts very fast for short distance" -- and a shift towards sports which are more equal to all people. Where are the sports that reward balance and rhythm and endurance more than speed and strength? Where are the sports for which sufficient training negates virtually any genetic luck?
For example, most of the best rock climbers and martial artists I know are not just short, but downright tiny. In races, women do better relative to men when distances are longer: I doubt I'll ever see a woman make up the 0.9 seconds to overtake the fastest man in the 100m, but I also doubt I'll ever see a man make up the 5 hours to overtake the fastest woman in the decaironman.
If you start with the set of sports for which men hold a huge relative advantage (like any professional team sport in the USA), no categorization will ever truly make up for it. The fix, then, is to change the sports. This isn't as radical as it might sound, e.g., (American) football started with a round ball which gradually got pointier as people decided they liked passing more. We get the sports we optimize for, and I don't know what we're optimizing for but it certainly isn't sexual equality. As long as we have sex categorization, that's basically impossible.
>I doubt I'll ever see a woman make up the 0.9 seconds to overtake the fastest man in the 100m, but I also doubt I'll ever see a man make up the 5 hours to overtake the fastest woman in the decaironman.
In general men's times are significantly better than women's for ultra-ironman races, including the deca. The one woman who did set a bunch of records, Astrid Benöhr, is a verified cheater.
http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/ultramentor/results/mexi...
>Marco Flores reports: "During the Deca, Astrid Benöhr was disqualified due to taking shortcuts during the running trial. This was done in the middle of the night and was observed by athletes, maintenance people and support crews. Nobody reported this to the organizers until, finally, one of the members of Guy Rossi's support crew was surprised by the disappearance of the athlete on the course and reappearing very soon after Guy's arrival. This was reported. The times were checked and this gave way to suspicion, on behalf of the organizers, who stationed inspectors all night. They confirmed the occurrence and a video was taken of this athlete taking a significant shortcut of the running course, which is run in a loop. Subsequently the athlete was disqualified."
This link is a bit dated, but it does show records as of 1997 for ironman, double ironman, triple, quadruple, penta and deca events. Men are ahead in all of them.
In 1999, Astrid Benöhr set records in the quintuple and the deca. If her victories were legitimate, a possible factor may be that she limited herself to only about 8.5 hours of sleep for the entire 187 hours of her race. It reminds me somewhat of how a 61 year-old farmer, Cliff Young, won a grueling 875 km race from Sydney to Melbourne, despite the fact that the competition included professional athletes. He absolutely crushed the field and set a course record. Was it because old men have a biological advantage? No.
It was because he was the only runner who chose not to sleep.
That's nice except that it would wind up defeating the whole purpose of gender categories to begin with, which is to give opportunity to a gender with biological disadvantages in that particular sport. For most traditional sports men have the advantages. In other words, one category would be discrimination.
Splitting it into two categories allows a statistically significant number of people to compete in a fair yet meaningful context.
What if instead of segmenting by a surrogate class like sex, we class people by their output. Your performance over the last season sets you in a potentially different class the next season.
For instance, Mike is (height=1.7m, runs=5m/s, scored=45, etc. )
and Michelle is (height=1.4m, runs=4m/s, scored=77, etc). You could even use machine learning techniques to figure out how to initially class someone, and have an appeals board to deal with edge cases.
The real problem is deciding how many classes you want to have.
The idea has potential, but the real problem isn't deciding how many classes to have, there are multiple problems.
For one, this method may be a lot of extra work to wind up with the same number of, or potentially even more edge cases. And chances are good you'll wind up with virtually the same results for everything but the edge cases.
Deciding what criteria to use is also non-trivial. There are a number of intangibles that may matter. "Women's Champion" isn't the same as "Class B Champion." Saying the "best female" conveys something much different than "best in statistical category F."
It does now because we've never split things up this way, but it might not be so weird once we get use to it.
On the other hand, I see a bigger problem. If we are using this technique for the 100 m dash (for example) then we're going to basically split people up into "best category", "second best category", etc... and we'll end up comparing between categories anyway since there is an objective measure to use (the clock).
That bigger problem is exactly the one I was talking about. Competition sorts people by performance already. Adding another new layer of sorting based on computer analysis of last year's performance doesn't really gain you much.
Virtually all sports rely on some level of arbitrary meta-organization. While you could write essays about why that is, it boils down to one: It's interesting that way. It's not just gender, either. Playing fields across most sports are divided by geography, age, affiliation or nationality, or simply arbitrary divisions like in the MLB. So long as the boundaries are recognized by everyone there isn't a problem.
I don't think that's the only reason sports are divided up. It's also because you need people of nearly equal skill before the competition actually is competitive and not just one player trouncing everyone else. Statistical methods would ensure that this happens, but may lose the other sort of divisions.
Works out poorly for most women who then wouldn't get a chance at the podium in the majority of sports. I mean it's fine with me, I'm a male who's not too into sports, but...:)
So, your average female sporter would probably blow you away in most contests then. But that should not degrade you just as it should not degrade her when competing against a more capable person, male or female.
It's the personal achievement that counts, you against the clock or your sense of self worth, not you against somebody else.
Unless 'racing' someone will spur you to work harder.
What about number 4 then, he never gets to be on the podium either, why only 3 top spots ? And if you make 4, what about #5 ?
"So, your average female sporter would probably blow you away in most contests then."
This is irrelevant. In track and field, elite to sub-elite high school boys beat all women ever in the sprints and field events, and even in longer distances the best US high school boys beat the women's world records. In basketball, for instance, the difference is even greater because height makes a big difference -- in fact, D1 women's basketball programs apparently bring in men who are semi-serious intramural basketball players to get better competition in practice.
Sports only measure the sporting ability of a person or team against another person or team, that's it. They have some relevance to useful characteristics for combat too.
Utility is not really an issue.
For me, the point of sport is fun - that's why I don't watch Professional Football (soccer), it's all about money, not about fun IMO. The only way I really find fun in sport is doing it.
> For me, the point of sport is fun - that's why I don't watch Professional Football (soccer), it's all about money, not about fun IMO. The only way I really find fun in sport is doing it.
Yay :) That's it. I could play pong all day or soccer or ride a bike or swim, it really doesn't matter. But to look at the performance of my 'national team' or so doesn't translate into a % of the same feeling of actually doing something.
If you want you can live your whole life second-hand today.
"Unless 'racing' someone will spur you to work harder."
You don't think this is the case? When I was on cross country I usually just tried to pass the person in front of me... having other people to compete with is a huge part of what drives athletes, especially in sports that are directly competitive like basketball as opposed to sports that are about the clock (such as running).
That will only work if there is a sufficient number of competitors. I'm sure "none of the aboves" are overrepresented in women's olympic sports but I am still skeptical they constitute a large enough population to create a whole new category.
Also, you'll create a new problem: second-rate male athletes will try to get into the "none of the above" category, where they'll presumably be more competitive due to the low number of genuine contestants. How do you prove yourself "not verifiably male"?
Why not just ban those who aren't either verifiably male or female from competing?
What's that you say? It's unfair that these people, through a genetic quirk and no fault of their own, can no longer compete in international athletics? Well boo hoo, neither can I, so go get a real job like the rest of us.
There's no need to ban them. Because of what the goals are and how every sport works out, the relevant categories are "female" and "not female". The point of the article is that the sporting bodies need to come up with clear well defined rules that don't leave the athletes sitting there not knowing whether they qualify.
When the point of a contest is to discover the best at some particular skill, fairness is an essential component of the rules.
While individuals may try to subvert the system for their own advancement, the spirit of competition is to win and win fairly. Winning because a challenger gets disqualified for silly reasons is less desirable than winning, as the saying goes, "fair and square."
