On Wed, 15 Jul 1998, Eugene Leitl wrote:
> Sharon Presley writes:
> > I just joined the list and am jumping into the middle of this particular
> > thread but have some comments for the people who made the following remarks
> > (and others making a similar claim):
>
> My instant Pavlovian canine's salivation to this: why are the
> extropian women so very consistantly fascinated with the gender
> (non)issue
I don't have enough data to be sure that this is the case. Let's assume you're right, for the sake of argument. Then a reasonable statistical hypothesis would seem to be that Western women, at this point in history, have damn good reasons to be interested in gender issues -- because policies on those issues are in a state of flux, which may, if handled right, give those women greater opportunity to increase their extropy.
> (why, I certainly do see a pattern here, as well to
> the homosexual males' being statistically relevantly overpresented),
On what basis do you draw that conclusion? In fact, could you explain what you mean, there; what does "relevantly overpresented" mean? Do you mean "relatively over-represented"?
> and is this of any (more) relevance to the list than the permanent
> gun(ho)/anti-gun debate?
Well, of course it's relevant to the list. Discrimination on the basis of gender or sexuality (or anything else) which results in people being "kept down" _unfairly_ certainly minimizes their extropy. I'll agree that the gun debate is rather beside-the-point, though.
Michael Nielsen
http://wwwcas.phys.unm.edu/~mnielsen/index.html