AS185: Tommentary Tuesday Monday Sunday

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:30 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 185. Alright, well, the new format was launched last week, as you all know, and man, I think it went really well. I got more participation and comments than ever, and I am really excited to go over some of those later in the show today. A couple quick things. First off, you may hear in this recording some rain in the background. Now, I live in California, so that never happens. I'm actually not sure how loud it is because I have no experience with this. Apparently, it's like water falls from the sky, which seems... I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but believe me, that's what's actually happening right now.

0:01:19 Thomas: There's water droplets that are falling just... I don't know what they're falling from. I don't know if someone's up there or something, but it's just water's falling down. So that's a whole new thing for me here in California, but I don't know how loud it is. If it's coming through on the recording or whatever, I think it It probably will get mostly filtered out, but I just thought I'd add that. Kind of funny. I've never had to think about it before because it never happens. And then also, I want to start this off just by, well, just as a solemn reminder. I'm not going to do too much of a commentary about it, so I'm just saying it right now, but there was another stabbing in Bangladesh, and it looks like this time it was the publisher of the slain writer, uh, Avijit Roy.

0:02:07 Thomas: Uh, sorry if that's not how you pronounce it, but, um, anyway, just, just kind of a solemn reminder that things like this podcast and, and other atheist things you may enjoy. I, I, we are so privileged. I am so privileged to be able to sit here and podcast to my heart's content. And I don't ever, ever feel, uh... any serious threat to my safety I'm pretty um I'm obviously not very well known or anything, and I'm not going after Islam too much, which I'm sure would open it up, but it's just a reminder that there are places where it's not safe to be an atheist, and it's not safe just simply express an opinion, which is awful, and is... really something that we need to be able to get rid of in this day and age.

0:02:55 Thomas: There shouldn't be places where you can't simply express an opinion for fear of being harmed physically or even killed. It's terrible. I don't want to get too much of a persecution complex going as atheists. I think that sometimes people can go a little overboard with that. I think we're safe here in America. Rarely anything happens to us. It can, but just on the whole, we're very safe here where I am, and it's not that way everywhere. So if anyone's listening from somewhere where it's not entirely safe for you to be out, I'm thinking of you, and I hope you're safe, and I hope that we can all work toward some time when that doesn't exist anymore and that danger doesn't exist, because it's ridiculous.

0:03:42 Thomas: It really is. And, uh, it looks like this person may be, they may pull through. I think they've been stabbed, but last word I see is they're in the hospital with serious injuries, but, uh. Possibly might pull through, so we'll see how that goes. With that said, let's, let's get to the Tommentary Tuesday, which takes place on Monday and is released on Sunday. The, uh, the best, the shortest, I couldn't shorten that title anymore, it's just, but I really, I'd be a fool not to take advantage of the alliteration of Tommentary on Tuesday, so I feel like, on the whole, it's worth it to, even though I have to add a few more words for it to be technically accurate, I think just the catchiness that I'm getting from the allitteration, which maybe you didn't even notice, Tommentary on Tuesday.

0:04:28 Thomas: I think that far and away compensates for any, you know, wordiness in the rest of the slogan. So that's what we're going with. Here it is. Guys.

0:04:45 Thomas: Well, I am so glad for my new format, because I have a mountain of things I want to talk about. I've got, I've got about six items. I'm trying to do three per show. We'll see if that happens. Sometimes I get a little carried away and only do two. So I'm already, I think I already have items through the next show. Now we'll see, maybe some new things will come up that'll be better and I'll filter a few things out. But on the whole, I'm just so happy to have this format where I can talk to you guys and get your feedback, and we can cross opinions and see where they go, because it's really fun. There's good discussions going on online, too. So if you're commenting on the website or Facebook, thank you for that. And I like the interactions that you guys are having there. So what should I pick first?

0:05:30 Thomas: Well, how about this? Let's go for some old-fashioned apologetics, or maybe counter apologetics. I heard something. I listened to William Lane Craig's podcast, or it's kind of his. I guess it's theoretically, I mean, the other guy is the main host, and he kind of asks Dr. Craig about things and pretends he knows what Dr. Craig's talking about, because no one does really, half the time. But I listened to the podcast, and I heard William Lane Craig say something that just bugs me so much, that it just drives me crazy, because it is such dishonesty. Well, it's just cheating. I won't say dishonesty so much, but it really is just cheating. In apologetics, and in religion and theology, there really is no constraint.

0:06:20 Thomas: There's no constraint, you can say whatever you want. And it's not like, well, we'll all find out once we die, then I'll find out if my specific theology was correct. No, it's never going to happen. There doesn't mean nothing when we die. There is nothing when we're living, let alone when we are living. Most things, See, if I form an opinion about, say, gravity, that's going to have a pretty large effect on my life. If I decide gravity actually runs left to right on Earth, it's not up and down relative to the surface of the Earth. It's actually left to right. That is going to have profound effects on my life immediately. Constraints, I would call them. That would be my term for them. I don't know that it's official or philosophically accurate or anything. But there's certain constraints to most everyday life.

0:07:08 Thomas: I mean, some things, now it's interesting, I think you can see times where there aren't enough constraints on opinions, they can go out of control. For example, when you can form an entire worldview that's self-consistent, which is not hard to do, it's very easy to do. The constraints all of a sudden disappear. So an example is obviously, religion is one obvious example, but another maybe not so obvious example is something like, I don't know, JFK conspiracy theories, things like that. You can form an entirely self-consistent worldview over the fact that JFK was whatever your conspiracy theory might be, and there's no real effects of that.

0:07:54 Thomas: There's nothing that is going to tell you you're wrong. There are going to be a certain amount of social side effects to these things, but really, really apart from that, nothing in your everyday life, you may make decisions slightly differently being someone who's more prone to conspiracy theories that may affect certain decisions, but not in a way that you can really just hang on to and that you Can really get feedback from. That's the same thing that I think goes on with some of these theologies. There's just no constraint. It's so funny. And I think the funniest part about this whole thing to me, And I know I'm talking a little abstractly, but one of my favorite things is how there's no constraints, really. I mean, there's no real life effects to different theologies, or theodicies might be a better word, different particular beliefs about God and what you should do and all that.

0:08:49 Thomas: Nothing is going to matter. Nothing is gonna use that information, really, but still people fight to the death over it. And it's sad, but it's also funny that people will argue these things, and opinion has gone back and forth. I love how it's complete fabrication. It's like if opinion on some fiction has gone back and forth, and actually that probably exists. I mean, you could battle back and forth on the rules to Dungeons and Dragons or something and say, no, we really should be doing it this way, but even that, you can say, well, the rules have a tangible effect on, you know, this game, which we want to play to have fun. So there's like an objective and you could easily imagine rules to, to any sort of game, be it a DDR or whatever that you can imagine rules that would be completely unfun.

0:09:39 Thomas: It's not hard. It's all the rules of baseball, for example, that's not a fun game. I'm taking a dig at baseball. I'm not a big fan, but you can easily imagine a game with rules that are not at all fun. Um, so even that has a real effect, but these things like people used to fight to the death over whether the cracker actually turned into Jesus or not, you know, just things that no one's ever going to care about that answer, you know, even if there were an afterlife, the odds that anyone would really care about that, well, that's going too far. So in that spirit, I want to play a little clip from Dr. William Lane Craig, something that has always really bothered me when it's discussed in apologetics.

0:10:20 Clip: Roos goes on to say, and also, God is totally simple. And I don't see why complexity should not arise out of this, just as it does in mathematics and science from very simple premises. This is the point that I've made against Dawkins in my published work, is that God God as a spiritual entity, a mind without a body, is a remarkably simple entity. That is to say, he's not composed of parts. The way Dawkins defines complexity in the book is something that is composed of physical parts. And of course, God isn't like that. When you think about a mind, a spiritual substance, it's not comprised of anything. And so Ruth says it's totally simple. And that is in contrast to the variegated universe with all of its fundamental constants and quantities that are inexplicable, that are just there.

0:11:16 Clip: So positing God as an explanation for the complexity of the universe is definitely an advance in simplicity. The explanation is far simpler. I think what Dawkins has done is he's confused a mind's ideas with a mind itself. And certainly a mind can have complex ideas. It might be thinking of the infinitesimal calculus, for example. But the mind itself as an entity or as a substance is remarkably simple, being a spiritual entity not composed of parts. So Dawkins, I think, is just confused. He's confused a mind with a mind's ideas, and those are obviously not identical.

0:12:02 Thomas: If there's any clearer example of having your cake and eating it too, it is this. This is one of the most obnoxious things that I ever hear religious people talk about. Well, yes, God is all-powerful. He can do anything. God can do ANYTHING. There's nothing so difficult, there's no concept so difficult God can't grasp it. There's no universe so complex. The universe is the most complex thing, by definition, that we know of. Of, or well, maybe that's a bad, actually, our brains, I would say. Human minds are the most complex things. I'm going to allege that human minds, human brains are the more complex things that we know of. That's my, I'm gonna go with that. Someone can argue with me if you want. God knows everything that's going on in our minds. He knows every molecule, what it's doing. He knows everything.

0:12:56 Thomas: He could take it apart, put it back together. He can do anything. And yet also, guys, oh, forgot to tell you this, he's also the simplest possible being. So, which is it? This is so frustrating. I know exactly why this comes up. Well, okay, that's a bold statement. I am pretty sure I know why this came up. I think it's because of Occam's razor. I think it is because an easy response to the whole God thing is to say, well, look, you're positing, because I've heard it said, why posit unnecessary beings or whatever? And then religious people can come back and say, no, God is a really simple explanation. It's as simple as it gets. Listen, let me tell you, God is just a disembodied mind. It's a simple, simple being.

0:13:42 Thomas: It's perfect. And somehow that's if you just say simple enough, then it is actually simple. And whatever you're thinking of, like laws of physics or some sort of innate laws to the universe or some pre whatever your hypothesis for the existence of the universe, Mr. or atheist, that's going to be much more complicated, according to Occam's razor, that's gonna involve more things than just one being, who's the simplest thing. And what I want to say to that is, yeah, sure, if you take anything, if you take a being and give it extreme characteristics, then you can have it be an explanation for anything. Like, what if you had video footage, surveillance footage of, of two, you have surveillance footage of two men robbing something, and someone says, I think there's two men in there because here in this one image, here at this time, there's a masked man here.

0:14:42 Thomas: But one second later, I don't know, 200 feet away, there is another masked man. Someone says, whoa, whoa. Occam's razor. That could be the same man. Why are you positing unnecessary beings? It's like, well, because that's faster than humans can physically move. There's no way he could move. Well, what about one man who's the fastest possible person that there is? That would be a much simpler explanation. This is obviously absurd. You can give things properties that they don't have. You can posit extremely amazing properties, all the infinitesimally or rather infinitely good, infinitely amazing properties. And then it can explain anything. And then on top of that, this is what annoys me so much because my answer would be, well, that's actually more complex because if you're talking about a being who's literally, he could, God knows everything that's going on about the universe.

0:15:41 Thomas: He can manipulate everything in it. He can do anything. He could create another whole universe if he wanted to. Not only that, he could create infinitely more universes. And yet somehow, and that's why I would say my answer would be, well, that's a far more complicated being. That is a needlessly elaborate being. Someone who's capable of that many things, surely that is just way more complicated than a couple of, you know, innate laws of physics that give rise to some sort of multiverse that gives rise to a universe. No matter what it is, God is by my definition, by my account, more complicated because God hypothetically would know and could control that entire universe. But that's when people like Dr.

0:16:26 Thomas: William Lane Craig here come and say, no, no. You don't understand. God is the simplest possible being. That's another cool thing about him being God. He's not only not only is the most capable individual we've ever come across by definition, he's the best, he can do anything, but he's also super simple, he's as simple as it gets. Well, however, now I'm sure that Dr. Craig has a way, some sort of philosopher's definition of complexity, or I don't know, some definition he's going with that he thinks that makes sense, but whatever that is, I'm going to go ahead and say that's what the problem is. The problem is not that God actually is the simplest being, the problem, the problem is somewhere in your definitions, because to me, to my mind, a mind like God's, a disembodied mind, okay, let's really break this down.

0:17:18 Thomas: Okay, if we have a human mind, human brain, pretty complex, right? That's, I would say, the most complex object we know of in the universe so far. Maybe one day we may construct something more complex, but for now, most complex thing there is. Okay what if you take away the brain and you just have the mind floating somewhere? Oh, that's as simple as can be. That's is simple as can be. Now, let me ask you this. If we took away, if we took the human mind and disembodied it, like Craig has said God is, is that simpler or more complex than God's mind disembodies? Which would be more complex? I would like to ask Dr. William Lane Craig if there's such a thing as a conceivable disembodied mind, because that's how he's getting around this.

0:18:06 Thomas: He's saying, well, it's not a brain. A brain, yeah, brain is super complex, blah, blah. Or it's not its ideas. You can't judge it by the ideas it has. It's just a disembodied mind, simplest thing there can be. I want to know, is there a disembodied mind that could be simpler than God's? What about not an ant's mind. Is an ant mind simpler than God's mind? I would think it is. I would think the way you would try to judge a mind's complexity, because it's almost a theoretical object. Now, I don't believe in the mind apart from the brain, obviously. I think the mind and the brain are one thing. I do believe you can talk about the mind in certain ways that make sense. There are certain things about our identity and our capabilities, obviously, that do make sense talking about sort of free of the brain, the actual physical brain, but it's just a tool for talking.

0:18:59 Thomas: It's not, I don't think it's a real thing. But anyway, let's say we are talking just in the world of minds, in the disembodied mind world. How would you ever judge complexity? Is there anything that could exist in this realm that Dr. Craig is talking about that could be complex? Is everything simple? Is one, is two minds stapled together more complicated than one? I know, what about the size of a mind? How do you, how do you measure a disembodied mind's capability? Wouldn't every disembodied mind by definition have the same capabilities? What would, what would restrict them? What would be the, sort of like I was talking about earlier, what are the constraints on that?

0:19:45 Thomas: Like what, what keeps, how do you judge? If my mind is somehow disembodied, is it just as powerful as God's? What, what makes, what gives his more horsepower? It's not, I mean, cause we could talk about physically what gives different brains more horsepower. We can talk about why one person, we can talk About why Einstein might've been smarter than the rest of us or a lot of us nowadays, maybe not smarter than everybody, smarter than most humans. Uh, maybe he had a certain part of his brain that was bigger than whatever it is. We could explore that. Maybe he had more connections between his brain. Now, there's some explanation. If that's too hard, we can certainly explain why an ant's brain is less complicated, is less capable than a human brain. It's tiny. It has a tiny fraction of it.

0:20:31 Thomas: That's easy. What about when it comes to a mind? How would you even judge that? The only sane way, now again, I think it's all insane because I don't believe that there's a possibility of a a disembodied mind. I don't believe that's possible. There's no evidence that I've ever seen that would show that that's possible. So to me, Now, I shouldn't say it's impossible because when I argued with some philosophers on that, I can't remember if it was Blake, might have been Blake, I guess I won't say it's IMPOSSIBLE because that's a pretty high... I would have to prove that it's impossible. I think I probably could, but just for the sake of argument, I would say there's absolutely no evidence to suggest it is possible, and there's no reason I would believe in it. You know, I could think of a million hypothetical hypothetical objects, and then we could say, well, is that possible?

0:21:17 Thomas: I highly, highly doubt it. And you wouldn't be arguing for them. But because a disembodied mind is important to the concept of God, when I said you, I meant the theist has to kind of argue that that's a possibility and that's something we should take seriously. Now, even if we were to take that seriously, you would have to say that there are different levels of capability of different disembodies minds. There would have have to be. I mean, otherwise they all would be the best or the worst. They would all be the same thing. And if we're going with the idea that God is a disembodied mind of some kind, a being that exists free of a body, then how would you evaluate how complex that is? Well, to me, you would evaluate the complexities of ideas and of things that it's able to do.

0:22:05 Thomas: And he says that that Dawkins is an idiot for conflating the ideas the mind has with the actual mind. Well, I don't know. I mean, there are certainly ideas that minds aren't capable of entertaining. Simple minds aren't capable of entertaining all kinds of things. Advanced mathematics, advanced any subject. Just put the word advanced in front of it, and that makes it advanced. Um, my commentaries, for example. Uh, but... What? So anyway, just to cut it short, I've been going on for a while on this. It really bothers me when theists try to claim, just have it all. They just try to have it all with this one. Well, yes, he's the best being in the world. He's perfect. He is capable of anything. Oh, he is also the simplest possible thing. Sorry, just need to sneak that in there.

0:22:52 Thomas: No, thank you. I don't agree. I humbly don't accept that notion that God is somehow the simplest possible being.

0:23:14 Thomas: Well, looks like I'm bad at keeping things short, but maybe I need to just adjust my expectations. Because I just have a lot I want to say about these things. I'm very passionate about these issues, these ideas. The next thing is also we get to listen to a bit of media, so I'm going to play a clip. Now, we're not going to...

I'm not going to go all Sam Harris on you, but recently he did have a discussion with this guy who looks like he has a very popular show called Secular Talk. It looks like he's somewhat affiliated with the Young Turks Network, which is of course a giant network on YouTube, which I'm sure you're familiar with. But anyway, Sam Harris went on this guy's show to really just talk about all the stuff that's been bugging him about Glenn Greenwald and... misrepresent his views and just constantly commit character assassination on him without actually the facts on what he believes. I don't really want to get into all that because I think you all know where I stand on that.

I've said that I think he's more academically rigorous, he actually takes people's views and deals with them, and doesn't try to slander or misrepresent people's views, regardless of whether or not you agree with Sam Harris. That's my quick two-second view on that, not what I want to talk about. Sam brought up a cool example, cool is a bad word for this because it actually was pretty terrible, but he brought up an example that I think I didn't know about, but it really says what I have been thinking about liberals who are very protective of Islam. I'll talk more about it, I'll just play it first.

0:24:55 Clip: Do you remember the scandal with the FLVS church, you know, the fundamentalist Mormon splinter group? It was probably about two years ago where they made national news. Warren Jeffs, that guy? Yeah, right. Okay, so they have this creepy leader, Warren Jeffs, and he was marrying off underage girls to men who could have been their grandfathers at that ranch, the YFZ Ranch, the Yearning for Zion Ranch. Now, what did we do, right? We sent in the fucking SWAT team, right, and an army of psychologists and social workers to rescue those girls, right? And it didn't matter how many of them stood up in those awful little house on the prairie dresses and claimed that they loved their husbands and they thought it was God's plan to bear their children. The entire country bore witness to that sickening project and said, "Sorry, we don't care about your bullshit religion."

0:25:45 Clip: "You girls don't know what you're talking about. You're being abused. You've been denied an education. You are being brainwashed. You have been preyed upon by libidinous crackpots and conmen and goons." Right. And their husbands were perp walked out of that compound and prosecuted. And Warren Jeffs, Warren Jeff's, who is their prophet of God, is in prison for rape. OK, now, if you remember the coverage of that episode, there wasn't an ounce of political correctness. I mean there were probably some civil libertarians who worried that the government had overreached a little bit and I think there was a legitimate worry that there was risk of another Waco or Ruby Ridge there. But what you didn't hear is any bullshit about it. "It's their culture" or "who are we to say what's right and wrong" or "check your privilege" or – I mean it was none of that.

0:26:33 Clip: OK. But again, pay attention here. What were those FLDS Mormons guilty of? They were guilty of polygamy and child marriage. Right now, what the what the Muslim community worldwide has that in spades, right? And and and just think of what those crazy Mormons we're not doing right. They weren't flying planes into buildings or planning to. They weren't practicing suicide bombings on a daily basis in dozens of countries. They weren't performing clitorectomies on those girls. They weren't forcing them to live in bags. They weren't cutting the heads off of journalists and aid workers. They weren't killing homosexuals and apostates. And they weren't hunting their critics to the ends of the earth with credible threats of death, right? And so it is true to say that if we had 20 million of those FLDS guys, they would not be nearly the problem that Islamists and jihadists are.

0:27:26 Thomas: I guess I had missed this. I kind of remember it a little bit, but not really. I didn't know the details of what he's talking about, but that's totally true. That's what bugs me so much about this double standard for Islam.

0:27:39 Thomas: Liberals in this country, in America, have no tolerance for the religious right. They have no tolerance for their views on abortion. They've got zero tolerance for their views on gay marriage.

0:27:51 Thomas: Liberals in this country are free, I even engage in it sometimes, to talk about the religious right and Christians in this country in the worst terms. I mean, I try to keep it not terribly personal or, you know, that sort of thing, but most liberals that I know don't care. They're not, they don't carry on with it. They don't want to talk to us about it. They don't care about the religious right's feelings. Now, when it comes to Muslims as a religion, Islam, if you could generalize, it's hard to generalize and you don't need to. You can just look at specific examples and specific people's beliefs and specific Muslims' beliefs and you can look at polls and all that. Their beliefs are far worse for the most part than the religious right here in the US of A and that's what it bugs me.

0:28:37 Thomas: I don't need anyone to be Islamophobe. I'm not asking for liberals to commit hate crimes or be angry toward Muslims. I simply would like the same level of treatment that any other person with those same tendency to be homophobic, tendency to off on a lot of matters of science, Just the same beliefs, whether it's held by a conservative Christian or a Muslim. That's all I want. Just the equal treatment for those two things. And I thought that example was perfect because it showed how this country reacted to that sort of thing. No one cared about the particular beliefs of this cult.

0:29:23 Thomas: No one did. But when we talk about religions abroad, and specifically Islam, there is all this apologizing and going on for all these behaviors that just would not exist if it was some sort of cult in this country. So I thought that was a really interesting example.

I, for anyone who's a fan of Sam Harris, I would recommend this, if you haven't heard it already, this interview, just because it was, it was a rare time where Sam actually just finally took the gloves off with all the people that have been really bugging him that he thinks misrepresent his views and stuff. So that was interesting. But it wasn't too terribly fascinating of a discussion.

It was mainly just like, if you want to hear Sam finally speak honestly about a lot of these people, or openly rather, I think he's always honest about it, but open, then it was interesting, but that example caught my ear, and I thought it was a perfect illustration of the double standard that's going on, which is of course exactly why he used it. All right, so I'm already out of time for my stuff, but time to get to some comments. Well, Mike Samsa clearly has a wealth of knowledge or background in the differences between men and women or maybe just psychology in general or psychological research. Mike, thanks for the really long comment. Can't go over all of it.

That would probably be a whole episode. It sounds like you know your stuff. However, I'll just try to respond to a couple things. Things So Mike imagined or offered that this particular study by Clark and Hatfield is likely what went into the information that I was getting from that article provided last week about the differences between men and women and all that,

0:31:11 Thomas: And so he also, Mike also referenced another newer study where he alleges that that a psychologist, I think, named Conley has redone that experiment but tried to control for certain things and then the difference between men and women disappeared. So, just reading this abstract for, I can't go through this entire study, but reading the abstract for this study, I want to, so it says this. In a highly influential paper, Clark and Hatfield demonstrated that whereas men were quite likely to accept casual sexual offer from a Confederate research assistant, assistant, women never did so. The current research provides a more in-depth explanation of gender differences in acceptance of casual sex offers via four quasi-experiments. First, using a person perception paradigm, I assessed people's impressions of women and men who proposed a casual sex encounter in the same manner that confederates in Clark and Hatfield did.

0:32:07 Thomas: Women and men agreed that female proposers were more intelligent, successful, and sexually skilled than men who made the same proposals. Second, I demonstrated that the large gender difference from the original Clark and Hatfield study could be eliminated by asking participants to imagine proposals from attractive and unattractive, famous individuals, friends, and same-gender individuals. Next, I assessed factors associated with the likelihood of agreeing to the casual sex proposal. The extent to which women and men believed that the proposer would be sexually skilled predicted how likely they would be to engage in casual sex with this individual. Finally, I examined these factors in the context of actual encounters from the participants' previous experiences, and the results were replicated in this context.

0:32:58 Thomas: Overall findings suggest that the large gender differences Clark and Hatfield observed in acceptance of the casual sex offer may have more to do with perceived personality characteristics of the female versus male proposers than with gender differences among Clark and Hatfield's participants and that sexual pleasure figures largely in women and men's decision making about casual sex. That just strikes me as so not true. Well, okay, I'm going to try to break this down. So it looks like he tried, or he or she, I don't know who Conley is, but this person tried to eliminate the kind of the creep factor, I guess, by saying it was going to be a famous person or whatever. So they're taking out that variable, which I think already is invalid because the whole point about, well, okay, maybe it made sense in the context of the experiment, but the whole thing we're trying to talk about is how men and women tend to function in everyday life.

0:33:56 Thomas: And when you try to eliminate that variable by posing it as a question about someone famous or someone they would actually already enjoy casual sex with, it takes away that variable. And also, I have to say, why is it that the women interpreted the men who propositioned for casual sex to be creepy and to be just less desirable? Like, why is that? Why would that such a large effect come into play? I mean, it doesn't really... Somewhere there's a difference. Somewhere there is a difference between men and women. And I don't really see this, especially when it concludes, once it eliminates that variable by, you know, having people imagine someone famous or friend or whatever, then it says the likelihood that men would, men and women, women and men would accept a proposal for casual sex had to do with how sexually gifted the partner would be.

0:34:54 Thomas: I can't even relate to that on any level. That is the weirdest thing. I don't know, I mean, maybe I'm just me and I'm different from everyone, but I cannot, that does, that would not factor into any decision I would ever make. I mean it's, when it comes to a casual sex encounter, for me it's all about attractiveness of whoever it is, and I know that for most of my male friends that's how it is. So now it's possible that I'm juste different and every male I've pretty much ever talked to is different, but, I just don't, I don't find this study all that convincing for that that reason. Maybe it's worth getting, I don't know if I have to buy it to read it or something, but Mike, if you know more about it, let me know what you think about these issues I've brought up.

0:35:41 Thomas: It's just, it strikes me as incredibly just not accurate. I don't know, again, I don't know what to say about it. I understand that there might be people from the original study or who would read the original story and say, well, that's just not, that doesn't represent me. And fair enough. Enough. So I guess we're at a standoff until I can evaluate the study better or have Mike do it, but that really does not sound right to me. The next thing I got to say Mike pointed out that I thought was pretty, I'll be honest Mike, a little annoying. He said, I'd also point out that often when people say men and women are equal, they aren't referring to things like physical and mental attributes, instead are referring to something like their intrinsic value or potential. So if we say men, and women, are equal so shouldn't be discriminated against by an employer, the claim isn't that male and female applicants for a job will be equally qualified and capable, but rather they are equal in terms of their worth and on the basis of their gender.

0:36:38 Thomas: Shouldn't weigh into this decision. And you said, it can still turn out that men are far superior at some job and the claim that men and women are equal won't be affected at all. Yeah, I know. I'm not trying to say men and woman aren't equal in that way. I hope that went without saying, and I thought I kind of mentioned it. Maybe I didn't. Yeah. Men and women should have completely equal rights. When I made the claim that men and women have some significant differences, I said, in no way am I trying to make any other political claim with that. I think men and women should be free to both pursue whatever they want, and women should be allowed to pursue whatever the hell they want. Everyone's equal. There shouldn't be any discrimination based on gender.

0:37:23 Thomas: I thought that all went without saying, sorry. That's not what what I'm talking about. There are, I'll have to find, if, well, I don't know how interesting this is, so we'll probably not continue this thread, maybe, or for the time being. But next time we do continue it, maybe I'll Have to find some specific examples of people I've seen who talk about men and women as though they are identical. And fortunately, it seems as though that's not too many people that are listeners. So, and that was a question I asked last week. I said, I wonder how many of my listeners subscribe to this view. If no one does, and it sounds like none of my listeners really do, Mike maybe more so than others, but if that's the case, there's no sense in talking about it to you guys. It seems like a waste of time.

0:38:10 Thomas: If it's true that most everyone accepts there are significant differences between men and women, that's all I wanted to say. That's it. I literally do not care beyond that. I just don't like when there are people I've interacted with who don't believe that, who believe there are no differences, that we're entirely identical. And something that you brought up, Mike, was that you thought the differences between men and women in sports was a question of training. And that's just not true. And I think, actually, someone who I need to mention, La Tonya, it is weird, it's frightening how often we agree. It makes me a little uncomfortable. We actually agree too much. And it's not just like La Tonya says, yeah, I agree with Thomas. On this. It's not that at all. She'll explain something a little bit differently and I'll be like, yeah, that's exactly what I think, which is just frightening.

0:38:59 Thomas: So we may be, you know, Latanya, I guarantee is not just a dummy account that I made to help, to help you know bolster my points. But someone, Mike, I think had said that he thought it was the difference in training would mostly account for the difference between men and women in sports. It is just not true. You, the top female athletes and even just the top, like, high school female athletes, train their asses off. There's no, it's not like someone's holding them back because they're women. Like, you shouldn't train as hard in this. You're female. Come on. That's not what happens. I mean, I don't know, Mike, what your experience with athletics is, but I did lots of sports in high school, co-ed sports, of course, like track and field and all that. Women train incredibly hard.

0:39:45 Thomas: They're just don't, their records, as La Tonya pointed out, the records at the the Olympics, Olympic female athletes, you have any idea how hard they train and the top records they're able to achieve are just, they're not the same as the ones men are able to achieve, they just aren't, I mean, across the board, it's, it's really, it's actually kind of weird, I would actually have thought they would be closer than they are. It's crazy how not close they are, who knows if that'll change. I don't know if we have more exceptional women as our population gets bigger, where obviously, but then again, I guess the men likely will have those exceptions increase as well. I dunno. But anyway, I just really, that's not the case. Someone did, multiple people brought up interesting points though.

0:40:30 Thomas: I'm all for actually women playing in men's professional sports. If they can. I'm actually, maybe I didn't make that clear. I'm 100% for that. I don't mind at all. If there's a female basketball player who's good enough to play in the NBA, that would be awesome. I think that's really cool. The only one problem people did bring up, which I thought was interesting, is once you let all the top women go over to male sports, Or leagues, then... What is anyone's incentive to still watch the female leagues which already have a very difficult time because they're just not, I don't know, they aren't as interesting to people, I guess. So that's something to think about. I actually hadn't really thought of that because if you did, I was already under the impression that professional sports league leagues would allow women to play in them like the NBA, NFL.

0:41:21 Thomas: I'm pretty sure they would let women and play in them if women could. I don't think they're holding anyone back. But there is that interesting concern of whether or not, you know, then would women's leagues disappear if it got to the point where it would be integrated enough? I don't know. That's an interesting topic, maybe for another time. But I'm out of time, and I will say thank you so much again for those comments. I'm curious for your comments for another week of shows. And then Thursday, I've got Noah. I'm interviewing Noah Lugeons about politics because he's got his politics show, The Skeptocrat. He's got, well, he's got God Awful Movies. He's got three shows now with Eli and with Heath and all that. So really fun stuff. Cool interview coming up on Thursday. And thank you for listening to my Tommentary Tuesday, which takes place on a Monday, which, of course, is released Sunday night.

0:42:14 Thomas: I really appreciate the back and forth with my really smart and thoughtful listeners. So thank you for that, and I will see you on Thursday.