So I came across this Jordan Peterson clip from some podcast where he says just the stupidest things imaginable. You don't have to watch it, I will be quoting it here.

A while back a Disney executive mentioned on video, she said "well, I have two children, five and seven, one is trans and the other is pansexual"

This is a lie, the executive in question seems to have five children who are at least in their teens. How unexpected that he would lie like this.

And I just thought mathematically right away, it's like the chance you have a trans kid is 1/3000. That is not a very high chance.

This, too, seems made up, the actual number from quick googling seems to be at least 1/200. Now here comes the good part.

And let's say the chance that you have a pansexual kid is the same, whatever pansexual means. But whatever that is, it is rarer than trans because no one ever even heard about it until 5 years ago.

Absolutely stunning display of logic and valuing facts. The actual number seems to be more than 1/100, btw.

So the joint probability that you have a trans kid and a pansexual kid is 1/9000000

This does not actually matter because of what he says next, but just so we are keeping track, I'll calculate the actual probability.

math

Of five children, the chance of at least one being trans is 1-(199/200)^5 ≈ 1/40. The same for at least one pan kid is 1-(99/100)^5 ≈ 1/20. Given the rough approximations in the probabilities and ignoring likely correlations, this is an order of magnitude calculation, and we will therefore ignore subtracting the probability that exactly one child is both trans and pan, mostly because I do not want to check my calculations (for the record I think it is about 1/5000). We get the total probability of (1-(199/200)5)*(1-(99/100)5) ≈ 1/1000

The probability is around 1/1000, three orders of magnitude more than Kermit's estimate. This is ignoring multiple factors that would make the actual probability significantly higher, most likely. Anyways, I lied before, this is the actual best part:

The odds that you are a pathological narcissist sacrificing you own children [...] is 8999999:1.

This is like saying that if you roll two dice and get two sixes, the chance that the dice are weighted to always roll sixes is 35:1. This is like saying that if you flip a coin and it lands heads, there is a 50 % chance that it actually landed tails and you are just delusional. This is like saying that if you get struck by lightning, the odds are 999999:1 that no you didn't.

The density of falsehoods and nonsense in the clip is just stunning. People unironically call this person a scientist and an intellectual!!

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Children are going to explore their sexuality. All this gender and sexual attraction shit doesn't cement itself until you're much older, and even then only in-so-far as you tend to become monogamous and your libido slows down such that you aren't trying to fuck everything that moves.

    So the odds of you having a Pansexual Adolescent is roughly approaching 1/1, with the only real deviation tending to be Asexuality (which conservatives also seem to think means you're gay, so...)

    I'd say one of the stronger arguments against children undergoing gender conversion is that kids really don't have a well-defined gender until the social constructs are impressed upon them. Even then, its a weak one simply because people are diverse and a one-size-fits-all morality code enforced by a bunch of bigots never comes to a good end.

    But however you slice it, Conservatives being shit at Math is a time honored tradition, whether they're discussing gender theory or climate science or the basics of evolutionary biology.