Because this has to do with western medicine as a discipline and practice, in which we over-objectivized health care and the doctor/patient relationship is heavily asymetric. This leads to the fact that in most cases, doctors do not really listen to their patients, let alone believe them when they don't manage to find objective cues of a illness.
They easily discard patients' subjective experience. Recent research is calling for a change in that aspect, and change is slowly happening.
I'm a supporter of equalty outcomes, versus equality of opportunity, and I don't believe we're "all equal" in the sense you make it look like. This is a strawman. I believe we should distribute ressources depending on each people's needs, and not "merit", for instance. But that's not on the basis of the idea that "we're all equal". Btw in a world in which opportunities are bound to be dependant on ressources and social/cultural capital, reaching an actual equality of opportunity would require everyone to have "equal" social/cutlural/material capital in the begining smh. And if you let people accumulate said capitals, then the next generation... won't have equal opportunity once again.
There is still flaw in the reasoning though. Transitionning implies much more than just a change in hormone balance as you are aware. Plus emotionnal responses to subjective feelings and physiological cues are not free from social influence either.
If you're saying it in a conversation about wether or not we should allow non-white people to be in a country with low light, yeah. There is no objective, neutral statement.
>The author is almost making it seem like models are reality and that people think that. They're not and I don't think anyone has ever thought they were...
that's where you're wrong. Way too many people, many of them engineers, consider models to represent reality, and that's a real, big problem, because this is deeply linked to how they consider science.
Seems like it. I upvoted when I read the begining, because I came to discuss the problem with the lack of critical stance towards criteria and metrics used to define how innovative a country is, so I thought it was about that, then I found out it was more about chauvinism :(
Cant provide sources because I lost my written notes but Diamond's claims are often based off of cherry picking and iirc there are a lot of canibalistic societies which don't back this claim up. This is a hammer and nail issue. He wanted to push his environmental determinism everywhere and a bit tol far.