I’m not against the book and I don’t really want to be mean and I was entertained by all the exerpts I’ve seen of it, but I just think that there is ~complexity~ at play which pattern-matches to the kinds of things that have empirically been very harmful to people and ideas I care about and thus there is some cause for concern in how said ~complexity~ is addressed.
That’s fair enough, but I feel there is a certain hypersensitivity issue that comes up repeatedly around these topics.
And I realise that even by framing it in those terms I’m sort of playing into the narrative, eg. it sounds like I’m accusing people of caring too much and hence implicitly endorsing deaths and genocide, which is far from the truth. But there seems to be a greased waterslide where anything that smacks of mockery gets associated with every act of mockery ever, particularly the really nasty ones.
Ultimately it always boils down to whether the mockery is detected as coming from inside the tent or outside the tent, because mockery from outsiders cannot be tolerated or it will lead to gulags and terrible suffering.
But mockery is a common part of criticism, and forbidding criticism from outside the tent unless it can be expressed in more respectful and restrained terms even than those used by insiders basically shuts down all possible criticism.
I mean you give various examples of how mockery can have bad consequences, but they are not all very compelling. Many critics of cryopreservation mock it out of sheer frustration that people keep persisting with methods that cannot work, arguably a misallocation of resources that can lead to deaths from opportunity cost alone. (And of course proponents of cryopreservation can mock those who oppose it, when they are aren’t being outraged about Deathists).
While the dudes in dresses rhetoric often accompanies violence, I think it would be simplistic to say that it causes the violence. You could say that letting it pass unchallenged excuses the violence and sends a signal about what is acceptable.
But now the discussion has suddenly shifted from a mocking tone being used in philosophical discussions to actual violence and murder! I’ve seen plenty of jokes made at the expense of P-zombies, but as far as I know none of them have resulted in acts of aggression against people who lack qualia.
This isn’t intended as a defence of mocking people or being a jerk. But I think that some humour is justifiable in response to published texts pushing a political or philosophical worldview explicitly intended to convince others, and that forbidding any attempt at humour would make for a poorer world.
(And you know, someone would have to go searching through LessWrong and edit out any sarcastic remarks about talking snakes in the garden of Eden, and that sounds like way too much work).
My argument is basically that mocking the weird-sounding arguments that are low-status is significantly more harmful than mocking the weird-sounding arguments that are commonly accepted, and that I’d really appreciate it if people did less of the first type of mocking and if they are unable to tell the difference then doing less mocking whatsoever would be nice. (Heuristic for determining mocking: is it likely to feed into a pattern where people dismiss something out of hand based on the stereotype: “dudes in dresses lol” is a common dismissal of arguments for why trans people should be taken seriously, and “human popsicles lol” is a common dismissal of arguments for why attempts at cryonics (or alternative technologies pursuing the same goals) should be taken seriously, and “robot gods lol” is a common dismissal of arguments for why AI should be taken seriously.)
If I could achieve such an equilibrium by reducing the amount of “talking snakes lol” in the world I’d take the deal. And I want to scorn the people who only focus on mocking (not really blaming the author so much, but rather the people who take it as an excuse to engage in “robot gods lol” and “rationalists are nazis lol”) without having adequately engaged the arguments; it’s one thing to have “here’s my thorough argument for why I don’t believe in cryonics working: (…) in summary, human popsicles lol” because at least it has some actual arguments to address (and Cthulhu knows I’m sometimes snarky in my own writing), while just “human popsicles lol” makes it way too easy to dismiss attempts at addressing it with simple repetition of “human popsicles lol”.
I don’t know if this makes any sense as written, but it does in my head, and the brainpattern-to-language translation is at fault if it doesn’t.
That fucking basilisk story was totally misrepresented though.
Sure, it is entertaining to say “freaked out when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt him” and I always enjoy such entertainment, but I enjoy it as cheap self-decrepating humor while many others seem to actually take it as argumentation and that is a bad thing. The basilisk was a security hole in the software of some human brains that needed investigating and patching so that it would not present a potential issue later.
I’m no stranger to seemingly unintuitive ideas that are trivial to mock despite being actually way more serious and thus anything that smells like an attempt to avoid addressing such things by pointing out how superficially ridiculous they appear puts The One Which Watches The Watchers into Defcon 3. I don’t think I should need to point out that “haha basilisk lol look at these fucking bayesians” is exactly the same kind of argument as “haha look at this scrawny dude who thinks he can be a lesbian just by popping some magic pills and wearing skirts lolnope”.
The Basilisk story fits in with various themes of the book, such as “red pill” ideas that drive one to madness and or reveal the hidden horror at the heart of things, plus the end of humanity and various attempts to hasten or avoid it.
For the Basilisk to be an issue in the first place requires accepting a whole bunch of propositions about the nature of consciousness, artificial intelligence, and future recoverability of information. But although this particular formulation is highly specific to the LessWrong community, as a literary phenomenon it crops up elsewhere in a variety of other guises, which is interesting.
Finally, please remember that Eliezer proposed giving lectures in a clown suit to avoid building up a cult of unnecessary formality and respect for appearances. People are awfully sensitive about the merest hint of sneer culture, and it is actually possible to have mild teasing that doesn’t result in pogroms.
Because “haha human popsicles lol” has never [possibly] resulted in gross misallocation of humanity’s resources and massive amounts of [possibly] unnecessary deaths, enforced by both coercively banning and culturally scorning this silly thing no sane person would engage in
Because “haha insect rights lol” has never resulted in people dismissing the [possible] horrible utilitarian catastrophe that might be going on, enforced by culturally scorning this silly thing no respectable person would engage in (and it can be argued that ag-gag laws are also coercively trying to ban animal rights work)
Because “haha dudes in dresses lol” has never resulted in people trying to morally and violently mandate vulnerable populations out of existence, enforced by both coercively banning and culturally scorning this silly thing no sane person would engage in
Because “haha adults watching cartoons lol” has never resulted in genuinely non-conforming people suffering unnecessarily, enforced by culturally scorning this silly thing no respectable person would engage in (and it can be argued that some laws are also coercively banning parts of it)
Because we live in a libertarian utopia where the vox populi can’t eradicate unpopular ideas by scorning dem and voting the scorn into violent enforcement
Because insiders being self-decrepating and outsiders being mocking is the exact same thing
Because none of us have ever had experience from living at the bottom of the status ladder
Because such a ladder definitely doesn’t exist and any attempts to claim that there are positions of informal power which dramatically influence the actual material effects of teasing are cultural marxism and sjw propaganda
I’m not against the book and I don’t really want to be mean and I was entertained by all the exerpts I’ve seen of it, but I just think that there is ~complexity~ at play which pattern-matches to the kinds of things that have empirically been very harmful to people and ideas I care about and thus there is some cause for concern in how said ~complexity~ is addressed.
I think I find the “toaster” objection much stronger than you do. To me it goes something like this (content warning: arguing about transgender):
A: Please let me into the men’s bathroom
B: But you’re not a man, you have a uterus and two X chromosomes and stuff.
A: But I self-identify as a man. That makes me a man.
B: No. If you self-identified as a toaster, that wouldn’t make you a toaster.
A: No, this concept can be divided into at least two axes: a physical axis based on chromosomes, genitalia, et cetera, and a social axis based on social role and self-identification. So because I self-identify as a man, I’m actually a man.
B: Hold on. Even granting your system, I think the word “man” should be used to refer to the physical axis, not the social axis. This is how we’ve used it for thousands of years and how most people understand the concept. I am happy to say you are a real woman who prefers to socially identify as a man, and to adjust the way I socially interact with you accordingly.
A: No, the real axis is the social role one. You should say I am a real man who happens to have female-typical chromosomes and genitalia, and then if you ever need to interact with my genitals you can adjust that accordingly.
B: I am pretty sure the real axis should be the physical one. Suppose you identified as a toaster. I would rather call you a human who happens to socially identify as a toaster, rather than a toaster that happens to have a human-typical body.
A: And I am saying I disagree with that. I would prefer you call such a person “really a toaster” but add if necessary that they have a human-typical body.
B: But I think that misunderstands language’s role as a system of categorization. We have lots of reasons to want to distinguish between humans and toasters. If we define humans who identify as toasters as toasters, almost everything we want to think or talk about will use the categorization system [(humans and trans-toasters) vs. (cis-toasters)], and not the categorization system [(humans) vs. (trans-toasters and cis-toasters)]. For example, (humans and trans-toasters) can walk upright, talk, do math, write books, and should be legally obligated to pay taxes. (cis-toasters) can make toast and should be legal to smash with hammers if you so desire. The category toasters (meaning trans-toasters and cis-toasters) is totally useless. Because of this, every time we want to communicate useful information about toasters, we have to say “cis-toasters”, and every time we want to communicate useful information about humans we have to say “assigned-humans-at-birth”. I don’t know if there would be any reason at all to ever use the category “toasters” without the qualifier “cis”. So it sounds like all we are doing is replacing two perfectly clear words, “humans” and “toasters”, with two longer and more awkward words, “cis-toasters” and “assigned-humans-at-birth”, plus adding the possibility of accidentally saying “toasters” at the wrong time and so offending a bunch of people and maybe getting doxxed and fired.
But I don’t think even this would work. This isn’t satisfying our hypothetical person’s desire to identify as a toaster, it’s routing around it mercilessly. We’re replacing every instance of words that could possibly make the trans-toaster sound like an cis-toaster with a different, unambiguous word - essentially rewriting the dictionary to turn the word “toaster” into “cis-toaster” without admitting any philosophical implications. If the person were to stick to their guns at all, they would then demand to be identified as a cis-toaster, the word which means what “toaster” means now. They’d probably even say that they had terrible dysphoria if you didn’t do it, and that you were literally ruining their life. So what are you going to do? Keep coming up with ever more complicated linguistic circumlocutions like cis-cis-cis-toasters? Or lose the ability to meaningfully talk about humans as distinct from toasters at all?
A: I agree language is a system of useful categorization. But the thing we actually want to categorize people as, when we talk about gender, is social. Nobody except a doctor cares what genitals you have. But many people may want to interact with you socially. And even in a purely physical sense, many trans people are biologically more similar to their gender of identification (thanks to hormones, surgery, etc) than their gender assigned at birth.
B: I think you’re totally wrong about what we actually want to categorize people by. The vast majority of the population is either heterosexual or homosexual. Those people care a lot about compatible genitals, especially if they want to reproduce some day. Let’s face it, the most important thing about gender is who is or isn’t a potential relationship partner for whom. I don’t care whether you’re aggressive and love sports, or whether you’re domestic and love knitting. In fact, even if I did, your system would fail. There are many people who identify as a gender but do not follow that gender’s roles - for example, transwomen who are butch lesbians. If you wanted to use gender to communicate something about a person’s social interaction style or interests or something, that would be a totally different proposal than the one you’re making. The one you’re making is that people should be able to choose it through self-identification regardless of their chromosomes, or their body type and hormones, or the social roles they most often take. And none of this even comes close to applying to toasters. As soon as one person in the world declares themselves to be a toaster, we open a whole new can of worms.
A: I think you are misunderstanding language’s contextual nature. If there was only one person in the world who wanted to identify as a toaster, we could generally refer to cis-toasters as “toaster”, and only refer to toasters in a self-identification sense when that person was in the room, or we were talking about them, or something.
B: But this is why I always bring up that only like 0.3% of the population identify as trans. By your theory, we should be able to talk about “woman” to mean “cis-woman” unless we are in some context obviously related to specific trans people. But in fact I have heard people protest the existence of “Women’s Health Centers” to mean “gynaecology / obstetrics centers”, because they note that some people with vaginas and uteruses are men, plus some women have penises and don’t need those centers at all. Surely you’ve been on Tumblr and noticed conversations about gender constantly getting derailed by people objecting no, men don’t have male privilege, some men and some women have male privilege and other men and other women don’t, depending on what they were assigned at birth and how they pass and so on. Your theory that people are good enough at linguistic context to effortlessly code-shift is completely false. What’s more, it will be torpedoed by direct enemy action. I predict that as soon as one person anywhere in the world identifies as a toaster, anybody who makes the statement “toasters are appliances”, even in a neutral context, even far away from that one person, will get yelled at by social justice people, doxxed, and fired from their job.
A: And I think your prediction is wrong. I’m sure there’s already someone somewhere who so identifies, and I haven’t seen any firings yet.
B: That’s just because the activists are too busy getting other people fired for other things. As soon as those issues go away, they’ll be able to focus on the toaster people. In fact, I would accuse them of hypocrisy if they didn’t. What, do they have some standard like “You must be greater than 0.29% of the population in order for us to insist everyone switch the way they use language because of you”? Even that wouldn’t work, because they still insist on the trans thing in countries that are lower than 0.29% trans.
A: I think there is a big difference between the number of people who identify as transgender - probably in the millions worldwide - and the number of people who identify as transtoaster - probably less than a dozen. A quantitative difference that large is as good as a qualitative difference.
B: What about otherkin? I bet there are thousands of people who identify as foxes. But having to replace our term fox with “cis-fox” seems just as silly as having to replace “toaster” with “cis-toaster”. What’s more, I think if we start providing incentives, these things will change a lot. Trans-women are put in women’s prisons? If I committed a crime, I think I’d much rather be in a woman’s prison than a men’s prison, given what I’ve heard about the sorts of people in the latter. If anyone identifies as a trans-fox or a trans-toaster, eventually they’re going to start demanding some kind of rights - the right to live in national parks, the right to not pay taxes - and at that point either we’re going to have to say “Sorry, guys, you’re not really foxes and toasters”, or a heck of a lot more people are going to want to identify as such.
A: Tell me honestly. If we let trans people use the bathrooms they want, do you really think that fifty years from now the government will be tying itself into knots trying to figure out whether trans-foxes should be allowed to live in national parks, and we’ll have people identifying not just as toasters but as cis-cis-cis-toasters?
B: Honestly, no. I expect people to be shameless hypocrites. All the same people who get enraged when a dentist hunts a lion but see nothing wrong with millions of cows being tortured in factory farms for their entire lives - these people will arrange for anyone who doesn’t support transgender people to be doxxed and fired, and for anyone who does support trans-toaster people to be doxxed and fired, and the horrible unprincipled monkey politics that are our society will keep ticking along regardless. Probably a few people - both idealistic leftists and idealistic conservatives - will notice the contradiction from one direction or the other, speak up about it out of genuine concern with truth and justice, and be doxxed and fired in their turn. If another equally thorny problem comes up, it will be also be settled by whoever is able to doxx and fire people the most people, and we can only hope that the process continues to produce moral progress regardless.
A: I admit that would be unfortunate, but is it as unfortunate as people being forced to suffer from gender dysphoria for their entire lives?
B: No, but I don’t want to do that either! I think there are ways to solve this which would also solve the potential future problems in a slightly more principled way. For example, we have two sets gender binary terms, man/woman and male/female. It would be easy to take one of these to refer to the social role and another to refer to the biological axis. Then it will be very obvious that a trans-man is a “real man” but not a “real male”, or vice versa. Pronouns are a problem specific to this issue that can be recast to refer to the social role. Then for future toaster-related issues we could just append trans- or -identified, eg “this person is a trans-toaster” or “this person is toaster-identified”, and leave the words “toaster” and “real toaster” (if you must) to refer to physical toasters. That would help solve the linguistics. We could decide all legal questions on a utilitarian basis. If there were millions of trans-foxes suffering intense species dysphoria for not being able to live in national parks, and they were able to convince the government that they wouldn’t damage the parks in any way, and nobody expected it to lead to so many new trans-fox-identifications that it screwed up the park system, then sure, let them be in national parks. Since this will never happen, this is an easy concession for me to make. And if it does happen, I can still be pretty satisfied with the result.
—
In my opinion anything stronger than this (ie saying that transwomen are “really women” and ”really female” and that any attempt to connect them to maleness at all is just objectively wrong ignorant misgendering - is in fact vulnerable to something like the toaster objection. If you disagree I would like to hear your reasoning.
I’m not saying that everyone making the toaster objection has thought about it as deeply as (A). But I also don’t think everybody objecting to the toaster joke has thought of it as deeply as (B), and maybe if they actually engaged with the argument and took it seriously, it would lead them in that direction. In my experience the only thing that has ever helped me get more sophisticated about anything is taking people I disagree with seriously (steelmanning if necessary, because lots of people who disagree with me are idiots) and adjusting my beliefs in order to survive their challenges.
I have some nitpicks here.
A big flaw of the toaster analogy is that humans and toasters have significantly more differences than men and women. This is what makes the “cis-toaster and trans-toaster” category seem ridiculous, since “making toast” makes the “cis-toaster”/”trans-toaster” distinction much more important.
For humans, though, “men” (a category including “cismen” and “transmen”) and “women” (a category including “ciswomen” and “transwomen”) are the best categorizations in pretty much every context outside of medicine and sometimes sex.
The general idea of “biological sex” isn’t a particularly useful categorization, and is kind of ambiguous anyway. Do you mean hormone system? Genitals? Chromosomes? In situations where these don’t match up with identified gender (i.e. for trans people), these categories often don’t match up with each other, either. Unlike with toasters, where the distinction is pretty clear.
For example, we have two sets gender binary terms, man/woman and male/female. It would be easy to take one of these to refer to the social role and another to refer to the biological axis.
Minor note on terminology: I think consensus is for male/female to also be the social role.
After all, as pointed out earlier, “biological sex” isn’t a meaningful categorization. Depending on why you’re bringing up biological sex, you might use terms like “male-bodied”/”female-bodied”, “people with [genitals]”, “assigned [sex] at birth”, or “[sex] hormone system”, but there’s no need to reserve the words “male” and “female” for a concept of biological sex that doesn’t really exist.
For instance, you might say “He doesn’t want to have sex with people with male genitals” or “People with Y chromosomes are more prone to a colorblindness” but there’s no reason to say “people who are biologically male” because 1. in what context would you prefer this to something more specific? and 2. does this category include people with female genitals and breasts but went through puberty with a male hormone system? It doesn’t seem useful terminology.
Okay, my minor note ended up being kind of long but I did say I was nitpicking today.
Another reason why I support colonising man/woman and male/female and all the other pre-existing ambiguous binaries, and claiming them for the social axis:
These are the terms people are already using in everyday life and use by default. Thus, unless they specifically need to talk about something beyond the scope of these words, they’ll continue to use them.
I am going to experience acute discomfort every time someone uses language to categorise me with cis-men. Sometimes this is going to be important but, whenever it isn’t necessary, I don’t want it to happen.
If someone needs to talk about the set of people with certain chromosomes, or certain hormone balances, or certain genitals - they can do that. I support them having words to talk about this, and not having those words swallowed up by the social axis.
But those words have to be intentional, such that people only use them in the limited set of cases where they’re actually the best words. This is the way to minimise suffering.
Yes this. We can either paste unnecessary pictures of salmon everywhere in our speech, or we can switch to language that is not only more precise and accurate for what we are trying to express, but also without the side effect of generating five disutilons every time the words are actually used.
Besides, what else am I supposed to use as the adjectival form of $gender, if not “fe/male”? I can’t think of anything, and I’m the one who wants to refactor the entire pronoun system in English.
So actually we would either need to generate new ways of speaking about more technical things that emerge from already existing concepts really easily, or get the public to adopt a completely made-up and unnatural way of speaking about really common things.
And yet they say that trans/feminists are the ones pushing people towards difficult and non-functional language…
The words you’re searching for are “masculine” and “feminine”
“Clinton will be the first female president OR Trump will be the last male president”
vs.
“Clinton will be the first feminine president OR Trump will be the last masculine president”
I rest my case; the best proposed words that would let one misgender trans people are way worse than the best words that wouldn’t.
so Scott made formal what I think has been policy for a while, which is that you get warned and then banned for misgendering people, and a lot of people responded to this by explaining how they have principles about the use of language that make it impossible for them in an intellectually honest way to use trans peoples’ preferred pronouns
and I’m exasperated because this is the internet, literally the only information anyone has about anyone else’s gender is what that person says, there’s nothing principled about “I will take you at face value about what you claim your gender is on the internet, unless you also claim on the internet to be trans, in which case I will guess your birth gender and call you that, because I feel like it’s dishonest of me to do otherwise”.
if you want to take a brave stand against language policing, “I will only believe 95% of the people I talk to on the internet about their gender, the other 5% I can’t, on principle, believe” is not such a stand.
and if you want to misgender people on the internet to prove you won’t be silenced by the Man, why not misgender cis people? you’ll cause less hurt, and you have as much reason to believe I’m really a woman as you have to believe anyone else is really a woman. in the case of all of us, you are taking our word for it.
You know, I have principles about not misgendering people, and there are many blogs where I will be banned for not calling people the pronouns of their assigned sex at birth.
I solve this problem by not commenting on those blogs.
“I want a plot that doesn’t revolve around romance!”
“I want a game that doesn’t treat my character different if I play as a woman.”
“I want a game where I’m not forced to pick one class/gameplay style!”
“I want a cool story and a large open world that I can explore!”
Okay what if i want all that and to be able to beat the game
This is the absolute truth.
For those who feel Dark Souls is too difficult, don’t give up. It’s frustrating, but not impossible, and the rewards of success include a story that I will bet you haven’t seen in any fantasy game before.
Also: “I want a game where the most plot-significant and formidable NPC is a trans woman”
“video games linked to adhd” gee i wonder why ppl with adhd would be drawn to an interactive medium that fully engages your brain and gives your hands something to do at the same time. it is a mystery
#it me
also: REPL, so much REPL
or in fact programming in general
think about puzzles and have something to fingertwitch at
The reaction (ha!) to Neoreaction a Basilisk from the local rationalist(-adjacent) community has been narrowly focused on these core issues:
1. Is this book accusing Yudkowsky of being neoreactionary?
2. No really, is it? I mean why else would it group him with Moldbug?
3. That fuckin’ Basilisk story, that was totally misinterpreted.
Having read it, I think it’s helpful to understand that this book is not attempting to be the annotated history of Internet politics circa 2k10, and the claims that it does make in service of its overall trajectory are modest and reasonable.
It is also worth remembering that not every work of literature is a textbook intended to be interpreted as a sequence of logical propositions. A community that sees value in communicating information in the form of fanfiction, poetry, and jokes should be well aware of this.
Finally the book does not just discuss Yudkowsky, Moldbug, and Land, but also the Matrix, Hannibal, and the works of Milton and Blake, among other things. Tying these topics together in no way implies that Yudkowsky is neoreactionary, any more than it implies that Nick Land is one of the Wachowski siblings or that Moldbug is a good writer.
That fucking basilisk story was totally misrepresented though.
Sure, it is entertaining to say “freaked out when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt him” and I always enjoy such entertainment, but I enjoy it as cheap self-decrepating humor while many others seem to actually take it as argumentation and that is a bad thing. The basilisk was a security hole in the software of some human brains that needed investigating and patching so that it would not present a potential issue later.
I’m no stranger to seemingly unintuitive ideas that are trivial to mock despite being actually way more serious and thus anything that smells like an attempt to avoid addressing such things by pointing out how superficially ridiculous they appear puts The One Which Watches The Watchers into Defcon 3. I don’t think I should need to point out that “haha basilisk lol look at these fucking bayesians” is exactly the same kind of argument as “haha look at this scrawny dude who thinks he can be a lesbian just by popping some magic pills and wearing skirts lolnope”.
where is the engagement with unusual and controversial left-wing ideas?
“why don’t these disgusting, evil subhumans engage with ideas that literally only attract people who hate their disgusting, evil discourse norms? it must be because they’re evil!”
cry more lol
Also literally Universal Basic Income? It gets way more play in the LW/rationalist sphere than anywhere else.
*crashes through the door* I heard someone say Basic Income
Yes I did too. Have I mentioned that we should have it, because I don’t think I have done so…in the last 5 minutes or something?
For friends not in the spoonie community, this is about the CDC’s recent guidelines that attempt to combat drug addiction in America by severely restricting access to opioid medications for ALL patients except for terminal cancer patients.
Without opioid pain medications, I would have had to quit working and go on disability nine years before I did.
Without opioid pain medications I would have been housebound and dependent on caregivers for another 10 years after that.
Without opioid pain medications I will be less active, more sedentary, and more sick.
The CDC says opioids don’t work for chronic pain; they’re wrong. They don’t work for some chronic pain. They don’t cure chronic pain. But they make life liveable for millions of chronic pain patients. Estimates of chronic pain sufferers in America range from a low of 39 million to a high of 110 million. That low-water mark excluded people with intermittent chronic pain, like endometriosis or migraine, as well as omitting people with neurogenic pain. Most reasonable guesses put the number at 70–80 million.
The cure for drug abuse and addiction has nothing to do with restricting pain patients’ access to medication, or forcing them to give up what quality of life they have managed to attain through having their pain managed with medication.
It’s not about labeling pain patients as addicts for taking medication to which they can build a physical dependence. (By that definition, every time I go on prednisone and have to taper off it, I’m a prednisone addict!)
It’s not about calling a patient in chronic pain asking their doctor for relief a drug-seeker.
The cure lies in combating the issues that lead to drug abuse, like poverty and an economy that sees the rich getting richer while the poor and middle class fall further and further behind. It lies in giving hope to people in hopeless situations. Not taking hope away from several million more.
Chronic Pain is the worst thing, on par with depression. When my foot was in chronic pain I was literally making plans to cut it off so I wouldn’t hurt anymore. Give people in Chronic Pain what they need. Fuck the drug war.
I guess what i’m trying to say with this post is that “running off to industry” does not have to be only about the money and “selling out”, as the academics seem to assume
It’s the difference between “you’re nothing more than a calculus-teaching monkey to us” and “we’d be lucky to have you”
It’s amazing how often people–or institutions!–who tell everyone else to fuck off, explicitly or implicitly, don’t seem to understand all the off-fucking that subsequently occurs.
I don’t think I’ve told this story on here before, but when I was going into college I was seriously considering a physics major. My first semester I took linear algebra and honors physics 1.
The fact that I wound up ditching physics after that semester is primarily attributable to two things. One is that the honors physics class was terrible. By which I mean the lecturer was terrible, by which I mean he might be the most soporific lecturer I have ever heard. He told stories about Feynman pranks–he had been in grad school at Caltech when Feynman was teaching there–and made them boring. It was kind of impressive.
But more important is that I was interested in theoretical physics. And the physics department made it pretty clear that those of use who were interested in theoretical physics were not physicists and did not count and were not welcome. Because physics, you see, consists of experiments, and if you are not personally doing experiments you are not a physicist.
I had a friend who was in the same position I was, except his advisor was the head of the physics department. And this gentleman told him, and I believe this is a direct quote, “Theoretical physics isn’t really physics. If you want to do theoretical physics you should go be a math major instead.”
He was both shocked and angered when my friend changed from a physics major to a math major, and switched advisors to someone in the math department. Angered enough that he went to talk to my friend’s new advisor and explain to her that my friend was a good physicist and she needed to get him back into the physics major.
As far as I know, the physics major at my undergrad is still small and unpopular. As far as I know, the physics department has no idea why.
I had previously been under the impression that babies don’t have object permanence– the knowledge that things continue to exist when you’re not looking at them. However, I recently learned that the balance of the evidence in developmental psychology is that babies have object permanence from an extremely young age. If babies perceived the world as a series of images rather than a set of stable…
There’s something delightfully geeky in these studies, something that made my brain return “ah yes, it would be silly to refactor the entire perception system on the fly from procedural to object-oriented, but the "Item::fetch” method needs to be debugged to deal properly with a changing environment…“
Okay so prop 8 was kind of dick move but nothing to fire a guy over, but could we discuss the Actually Problematic things Eich has done, like javascript? It has too many semicolons and curlybrackets so I now I’m procrastinating learning javascript by learning lisp and julia instead and while this is definitely intriguing (lisp has this certain fascinating purity, and julia just seems incredibly awesome) it isn’t exactly what I’m supposed to be doing right now
Coffeescript.
It fixes the syntax problems with javascript decently, but doesn’t do much for the lack of type system or the impurity.
Wait wait wait my idea of “I’d rather write a program to convert ruby to javascript…” _has actually been done_?
Okay so prop 8 was kind of dick move but nothing to fire a guy over, but could we discuss the Actually Problematic things Eich has done, like javascript? It has too many semicolons and curlybrackets so I now I’m procrastinating learning javascript by learning lisp and julia instead and while this is definitely intriguing (lisp has this certain fascinating purity, and julia just seems incredibly awesome) it isn’t exactly what I’m supposed to be doing right now
I think I find the “toaster” objection much stronger than you do. To me it goes something like this (content warning: arguing about transgender):
A: Please let me into the men’s bathroom
B: But you’re not a man, you have a uterus and two X chromosomes and stuff.
A: But I self-identify as a man. That makes me a man.
B: No. If you self-identified as a toaster, that wouldn’t make you a toaster.
A: No, this concept can be divided into at least two axes: a physical axis based on chromosomes, genitalia, et cetera, and a social axis based on social role and self-identification. So because I self-identify as a man, I’m actually a man.
B: Hold on. Even granting your system, I think the word “man” should be used to refer to the physical axis, not the social axis. This is how we’ve used it for thousands of years and how most people understand the concept. I am happy to say you are a real woman who prefers to socially identify as a man, and to adjust the way I socially interact with you accordingly.
A: No, the real axis is the social role one. You should say I am a real man who happens to have female-typical chromosomes and genitalia, and then if you ever need to interact with my genitals you can adjust that accordingly.
B: I am pretty sure the real axis should be the physical one. Suppose you identified as a toaster. I would rather call you a human who happens to socially identify as a toaster, rather than a toaster that happens to have a human-typical body.
A: And I am saying I disagree with that. I would prefer you call such a person “really a toaster” but add if necessary that they have a human-typical body.
B: But I think that misunderstands language’s role as a system of categorization. We have lots of reasons to want to distinguish between humans and toasters. If we define humans who identify as toasters as toasters, almost everything we want to think or talk about will use the categorization system [(humans and trans-toasters) vs. (cis-toasters)], and not the categorization system [(humans) vs. (trans-toasters and cis-toasters)]. For example, (humans and trans-toasters) can walk upright, talk, do math, write books, and should be legally obligated to pay taxes. (cis-toasters) can make toast and should be legal to smash with hammers if you so desire. The category toasters (meaning trans-toasters and cis-toasters) is totally useless. Because of this, every time we want to communicate useful information about toasters, we have to say “cis-toasters”, and every time we want to communicate useful information about humans we have to say “assigned-humans-at-birth”. I don’t know if there would be any reason at all to ever use the category “toasters” without the qualifier “cis”. So it sounds like all we are doing is replacing two perfectly clear words, “humans” and “toasters”, with two longer and more awkward words, “cis-toasters” and “assigned-humans-at-birth”, plus adding the possibility of accidentally saying “toasters” at the wrong time and so offending a bunch of people and maybe getting doxxed and fired.
But I don’t think even this would work. This isn’t satisfying our hypothetical person’s desire to identify as a toaster, it’s routing around it mercilessly. We’re replacing every instance of words that could possibly make the trans-toaster sound like an cis-toaster with a different, unambiguous word - essentially rewriting the dictionary to turn the word “toaster” into “cis-toaster” without admitting any philosophical implications. If the person were to stick to their guns at all, they would then demand to be identified as a cis-toaster, the word which means what “toaster” means now. They’d probably even say that they had terrible dysphoria if you didn’t do it, and that you were literally ruining their life. So what are you going to do? Keep coming up with ever more complicated linguistic circumlocutions like cis-cis-cis-toasters? Or lose the ability to meaningfully talk about humans as distinct from toasters at all?
A: I agree language is a system of useful categorization. But the thing we actually want to categorize people as, when we talk about gender, is social. Nobody except a doctor cares what genitals you have. But many people may want to interact with you socially. And even in a purely physical sense, many trans people are biologically more similar to their gender of identification (thanks to hormones, surgery, etc) than their gender assigned at birth.
B: I think you’re totally wrong about what we actually want to categorize people by. The vast majority of the population is either heterosexual or homosexual. Those people care a lot about compatible genitals, especially if they want to reproduce some day. Let’s face it, the most important thing about gender is who is or isn’t a potential relationship partner for whom. I don’t care whether you’re aggressive and love sports, or whether you’re domestic and love knitting. In fact, even if I did, your system would fail. There are many people who identify as a gender but do not follow that gender’s roles - for example, transwomen who are butch lesbians. If you wanted to use gender to communicate something about a person’s social interaction style or interests or something, that would be a totally different proposal than the one you’re making. The one you’re making is that people should be able to choose it through self-identification regardless of their chromosomes, or their body type and hormones, or the social roles they most often take. And none of this even comes close to applying to toasters. As soon as one person in the world declares themselves to be a toaster, we open a whole new can of worms.
A: I think you are misunderstanding language’s contextual nature. If there was only one person in the world who wanted to identify as a toaster, we could generally refer to cis-toasters as “toaster”, and only refer to toasters in a self-identification sense when that person was in the room, or we were talking about them, or something.
B: But this is why I always bring up that only like 0.3% of the population identify as trans. By your theory, we should be able to talk about “woman” to mean “cis-woman” unless we are in some context obviously related to specific trans people. But in fact I have heard people protest the existence of “Women’s Health Centers” to mean “gynaecology / obstetrics centers”, because they note that some people with vaginas and uteruses are men, plus some women have penises and don’t need those centers at all. Surely you’ve been on Tumblr and noticed conversations about gender constantly getting derailed by people objecting no, men don’t have male privilege, some men and some women have male privilege and other men and other women don’t, depending on what they were assigned at birth and how they pass and so on. Your theory that people are good enough at linguistic context to effortlessly code-shift is completely false. What’s more, it will be torpedoed by direct enemy action. I predict that as soon as one person anywhere in the world identifies as a toaster, anybody who makes the statement “toasters are appliances”, even in a neutral context, even far away from that one person, will get yelled at by social justice people, doxxed, and fired from their job.
A: And I think your prediction is wrong. I’m sure there’s already someone somewhere who so identifies, and I haven’t seen any firings yet.
B: That’s just because the activists are too busy getting other people fired for other things. As soon as those issues go away, they’ll be able to focus on the toaster people. In fact, I would accuse them of hypocrisy if they didn’t. What, do they have some standard like “You must be greater than 0.29% of the population in order for us to insist everyone switch the way they use language because of you”? Even that wouldn’t work, because they still insist on the trans thing in countries that are lower than 0.29% trans.
A: I think there is a big difference between the number of people who identify as transgender - probably in the millions worldwide - and the number of people who identify as transtoaster - probably less than a dozen. A quantitative difference that large is as good as a qualitative difference.
B: What about otherkin? I bet there are thousands of people who identify as foxes. But having to replace our term fox with “cis-fox” seems just as silly as having to replace “toaster” with “cis-toaster”. What’s more, I think if we start providing incentives, these things will change a lot. Trans-women are put in women’s prisons? If I committed a crime, I think I’d much rather be in a woman’s prison than a men’s prison, given what I’ve heard about the sorts of people in the latter. If anyone identifies as a trans-fox or a trans-toaster, eventually they’re going to start demanding some kind of rights - the right to live in national parks, the right to not pay taxes - and at that point either we’re going to have to say “Sorry, guys, you’re not really foxes and toasters”, or a heck of a lot more people are going to want to identify as such.
A: Tell me honestly. If we let trans people use the bathrooms they want, do you really think that fifty years from now the government will be tying itself into knots trying to figure out whether trans-foxes should be allowed to live in national parks, and we’ll have people identifying not just as toasters but as cis-cis-cis-toasters?
B: Honestly, no. I expect people to be shameless hypocrites. All the same people who get enraged when a dentist hunts a lion but see nothing wrong with millions of cows being tortured in factory farms for their entire lives - these people will arrange for anyone who doesn’t support transgender people to be doxxed and fired, and for anyone who does support trans-toaster people to be doxxed and fired, and the horrible unprincipled monkey politics that are our society will keep ticking along regardless. Probably a few people - both idealistic leftists and idealistic conservatives - will notice the contradiction from one direction or the other, speak up about it out of genuine concern with truth and justice, and be doxxed and fired in their turn. If another equally thorny problem comes up, it will be also be settled by whoever is able to doxx and fire people the most people, and we can only hope that the process continues to produce moral progress regardless.
A: I admit that would be unfortunate, but is it as unfortunate as people being forced to suffer from gender dysphoria for their entire lives?
B: No, but I don’t want to do that either! I think there are ways to solve this which would also solve the potential future problems in a slightly more principled way. For example, we have two sets gender binary terms, man/woman and male/female. It would be easy to take one of these to refer to the social role and another to refer to the biological axis. Then it will be very obvious that a trans-man is a “real man” but not a “real male”, or vice versa. Pronouns are a problem specific to this issue that can be recast to refer to the social role. Then for future toaster-related issues we could just append trans- or -identified, eg “this person is a trans-toaster” or “this person is toaster-identified”, and leave the words “toaster” and “real toaster” (if you must) to refer to physical toasters. That would help solve the linguistics. We could decide all legal questions on a utilitarian basis. If there were millions of trans-foxes suffering intense species dysphoria for not being able to live in national parks, and they were able to convince the government that they wouldn’t damage the parks in any way, and nobody expected it to lead to so many new trans-fox-identifications that it screwed up the park system, then sure, let them be in national parks. Since this will never happen, this is an easy concession for me to make. And if it does happen, I can still be pretty satisfied with the result.
—
In my opinion anything stronger than this (ie saying that transwomen are “really women” and ”really female” and that any attempt to connect them to maleness at all is just objectively wrong ignorant misgendering - is in fact vulnerable to something like the toaster objection. If you disagree I would like to hear your reasoning.
I’m not saying that everyone making the toaster objection has thought about it as deeply as (A). But I also don’t think everybody objecting to the toaster joke has thought of it as deeply as (B), and maybe if they actually engaged with the argument and took it seriously, it would lead them in that direction. In my experience the only thing that has ever helped me get more sophisticated about anything is taking people I disagree with seriously (steelmanning if necessary, because lots of people who disagree with me are idiots) and adjusting my beliefs in order to survive their challenges.
I have some nitpicks here.
A big flaw of the toaster analogy is that humans and toasters have significantly more differences than men and women. This is what makes the “cis-toaster and trans-toaster” category seem ridiculous, since “making toast” makes the “cis-toaster”/”trans-toaster” distinction much more important.
For humans, though, “men” (a category including “cismen” and “transmen”) and “women” (a category including “ciswomen” and “transwomen”) are the best categorizations in pretty much every context outside of medicine and sometimes sex.
The general idea of “biological sex” isn’t a particularly useful categorization, and is kind of ambiguous anyway. Do you mean hormone system? Genitals? Chromosomes? In situations where these don’t match up with identified gender (i.e. for trans people), these categories often don’t match up with each other, either. Unlike with toasters, where the distinction is pretty clear.
For example, we have two sets gender binary terms, man/woman and male/female. It would be easy to take one of these to refer to the social role and another to refer to the biological axis.
Minor note on terminology: I think consensus is for male/female to also be the social role.
After all, as pointed out earlier, “biological sex” isn’t a meaningful categorization. Depending on why you’re bringing up biological sex, you might use terms like “male-bodied”/”female-bodied”, “people with [genitals]”, “assigned [sex] at birth”, or “[sex] hormone system”, but there’s no need to reserve the words “male” and “female” for a concept of biological sex that doesn’t really exist.
For instance, you might say “He doesn’t want to have sex with people with male genitals” or “People with Y chromosomes are more prone to a colorblindness” but there’s no reason to say “people who are biologically male” because 1. in what context would you prefer this to something more specific? and 2. does this category include people with female genitals and breasts but went through puberty with a male hormone system? It doesn’t seem useful terminology.
Okay, my minor note ended up being kind of long but I did say I was nitpicking today.
Another reason why I support colonising man/woman and male/female and all the other pre-existing ambiguous binaries, and claiming them for the social axis:
These are the terms people are already using in everyday life and use by default. Thus, unless they specifically need to talk about something beyond the scope of these words, they’ll continue to use them.
I am going to experience acute discomfort every time someone uses language to categorise me with cis-men. Sometimes this is going to be important but, whenever it isn’t necessary, I don’t want it to happen.
If someone needs to talk about the set of people with certain chromosomes, or certain hormone balances, or certain genitals - they can do that. I support them having words to talk about this, and not having those words swallowed up by the social axis.
But those words have to be intentional, such that people only use them in the limited set of cases where they’re actually the best words. This is the way to minimise suffering.
Yes this. We can either paste unnecessary pictures of salmon everywhere in our speech, or we can switch to language that is not only more precise and accurate for what we are trying to express, but also without the side effect of generating five disutilons every time the words are actually used.
Besides, what else am I supposed to use as the adjectival form of $gender, if not “fe/male”? I can’t think of anything, and I’m the one who wants to refactor the entire pronoun system in English.
So actually we would either need to generate new ways of speaking about more technical things that emerge from already existing concepts really easily, or get the public to adopt a completely made-up and unnatural way of speaking about really common things.
And yet they say that trans/feminists are the ones pushing people towards difficult and non-functional language…
conversations with allistics have a turn based mechanic, with a time limit on each turn after the allistics will become displeased. it is thus important that you give everyone else in a conversation opportunities to talk about your special interest as well
give everyone else in a conversation opportunities to talk about your special interest as well
LOOOOL
Really, though, being incredibly blatant in your transitions between topics is nice. The “take turns doing a combination infodump/Q&A session” conversation mode can be fun.
@socialjusticemunchkin, you were recently talking about a libertarian approach to human genetic engineering, perhaps you would be interested in the dialogue conducted by @davidsevera under way at veracities.online on this very subject.
Given the number of libertarians and libertarian-leaning folk in these parts I am curious how the precautionary side of the debate will be received and whether anyone is willing to jump in and play devil’s advocate!
I sorta would want to argue about this, but my issues are about possible negative consequences rather than certainties.
In truth, I don’t think it should be categorically forbidden, but think some caution is in order. One big issue is that the argument here is over a hypothetical we’re still a not at with consequences that won’t become apparent for a while. Honestly, the thing I would most want is for people not to oversell it.
Precautiones is all about the precautionary principle, after all! :)
There are some possible tragedy of the commons effects, as with existing issues like sex-selective abortion, which is just an extreme case of parents exercising choice over the genetics of their children.
(Also accidentally causing human extinction when parents universally choose mutations which boost IQ by ten points but also turn out to cause sterility, oops).
Yeah, one the big ones is: “We still don’t really understand the genome or the mind very well, please don’t accidentally make an entire generation of psychopaths“
It’s definitely too soon to know anything for certain. I think it’s interesting if not necessarily too useful at the moment to think through the potential pitfalls and probable dynamics as sort of a roadmap.
I’d imagine that, at least at first (and possibly for quite a long time?), any alterations to the genome would be made by selecting from within preexisting natural variation. Most personality traits are influenced by countless genes, so it’s not likely that we’d hit upon some weird combination of alleles that led to psychopathy, but there’s no guarantee of what might happen if we push the distribution of a given trait dramatically in one direction. Certainly I’d hope we have an understanding of how various pathologies arise well before making any major changes on a large scale, and I’d hope the research moves fairly slowly.
Libertes all the way.
My anarcho-utopian side says that letting children pursue grievances against their parents (instead of treating them as almost property like now) would be a far better solution than having men with guns kidnap or ransom people who try to do different things than what the mob wants them to do.
My cynical pragmatist side says: “Hello, convicted fucking criminal speaking; if the PoliceMob ransomed me forestradiol, how in hell would I trust them not to fuck up regulating genetic engineering just as horribly?” They can pry CRISPR from my cold, metallic upload hands once I can just sudo straight to my root account, but until then I will not surrender one inch of bodily autonomy.
Yes, there will be terrible consequences if we let parents CRISPR their kids freely, but the only way to reduce the obvious consequences would be to sweep them under the rug and turn them into even more terrible but just less-visible consequences with an FDA of genetic engineering. Sure, kids won’t have two heads, but neither will they have very useful augmentations. I’m not expecting anyone to start shooting bees or lightning from their fingertips so this is kind of a no-brainer.
Seriously, the things the system does to trans people or drug users are very illuminating of how it “wants” to treat all unpopular self-modifications and exercisings of bodily autonomy: with brutal repression and giving in only as little as it can. I won’t make its job one bit easier by consenting to such things instead of resisting all the way. I trust a free society to do better than the state, because the bar is set so low I’d need the help of an oil company to reach it (snark intended).
My anarcho-utopian side says that letting children pursue grievances against their parents (instead of treating them as almost property like now) would be a far better solution than having men with guns kidnap or ransom people who try to do different things than what the mob wants them to do.
I like this idea.
However, I seriously doubt the average parent can afford to cover the appropriate cost for giving someone a severe chronic pain condition or genes that will kill them by 30, and if we don’t force them to buy insurance they probably won’t. (More generally, people are not likely to buy liability insurance unless they have to.)
And then, of course, there’s the incentive issue where if you don’t want the kid you inflicted the severe chronic pain condition on through neglect to sue you, you might want to convince them that they don’t want to do anything about it.
Yes, terrible outcomes would result because terrible outcomes always result, but if parents effectively have to have insurance to have legal protection (ArguProtect regular plan, as the platinum family plan would be way too expensive because only abusers and really principled assholes would buy the “children are property, do what you want” one instead of the “children have rights, don’t be evil” one, and thus compensation payments would be really predictably ultra-likely) and abused children can authorize the Dia Paying Group to collect millions from ArguProtect if the brainwashing fails; and if the culprits themselves don’t have the money then all the better because ArguProtect’s other customers would be incentivized to tell them to stop ruining their insurance premiums, it would reduce the problems. Even if only one in ten abused children can break out of the brainwashing and demand compensation, it would eradicate the abuse people aren’t willing to pay 10% of the compensation to continue doing.
And furthermore, this can’t really be done in a monopoly law system, because people won’t have the liability insurance as they very seldom need it, and it would soon degenerate into either PoliceMob kidnapping any parents who do anything that seems slightly risky, or PoliceMob giving tacit approval to all kinds of “children are property” bullshit when they don’t want to have too strict universal rules and therefore conclude that kidnapping children to dangerous and autonomy-violating boot camps against their will is totally ok (as I’ve understood, the US seems to have managed to kind of have *both* at the same time). Monopoly law is subject to enormous democratic pressures which means that people’s religious etc. objections to childrens’ rights are very effectively coordinated whereas Dia Paying Group could just say it doesn’t give a shit about anyone’s religion because someone’s consent and autonomy were violated and they need to pay for it no matter what.
And while I have been focusing on the business side, there would be nothing actually preventing people from having their security provider be something else; I’d expect communists to run their own grassroots democratic collectives sharing property and fulfilling many such functions on a non-commercial basis (but they would still be expected to fork over the cash or otherwise compensate the victims outside the collective, incentivizing people to keep tabs on each other’s nonconsensually risky behavior to avoid being held liable for them, thus enabling enforcement of prosocial mores without binding people to non-consensual communities which is a severe failure mode of traditional clan systems), charities doing pro bono or sliding-scale-priced security, etc.; it’s just that having a sound business logic/incentive structure is the core question altruism can easily operate on top of. I wouldn’t be surprised if eg. trade unions took on many of these duties*.
Also, mandatory liability insurance would probably improve even monopoly law IF said monopoly law is established on a strong principle of bodily autonomy. Insurance would make prison abolition (mostly; there would still be people who need to be segregated from potential victims but a very small amount) dramatically easier when the solution to “poor person violates your rights” could be “make the associates of the poor person pay sufficient compensation” instead of “kidnap the poor person because they can’t pay a sufficient compensation”. It would have the problems of determining what counts as valid insurance and it might degenerate into an overregulated bullshit system, but it would open new avenues for less-coercive behavioral control and more sensible management of risks (for example, a working-class single mother could leave her child in the car during a job interview without getting kidnapped, because her insurance provider would be more likely to understand the problems of poor people than the System as a whole is (because incentives; if insurance is oligopolized by big overregulated cronyist corporations it doesn’t work but if the market is actually functional people would be incentivized to cater to their customers’ needs and situations) and thus more sympathetic to the idea that sometimes people have only bad and worse options and punishing them for choosing bad over worse doesn’t make sense; of course in a proper system she should have access to eg. a childcare cooperative or another arrangement of mutual aid).
* In fact, trade unions are already an example of polycentric law functioning around us (although due to corporatist regulations, they may be monopolistic locally or industry-wide; for example in Finland there is no national minimum wage, but it’s instead negotiated bindingly for each industry separately) in the sphere of work. In essence, a trade union acts as its members’ Dia Paying Group for negotiating the specifics of employment contracts, and when unregulated, in a way that is very much like the ad hoc monkey-patching I’d expect a polycentric system to provide for other things as well.
For example, the employer argues that the workers should be paid $10 an hour and have their bathroom breaks controlled; the union argues that the wages should be $15 and bathroom breaks should be deregulated. The employer says going on strike is a contract violation, the union says that controlling bathroom breaks is a violation of what the contract is supposed to be. Then they negotiate what the contract actually means in this situation. Maybe they settle on $12 and no bathroom control, because the employer threatens to fire the workers and the workers threaten to tell everyone the employer is shitty and they should either be customers somewhere else or keep bothering the employer with customer feedback until a deal is reached. Maybe they settle a deal right away to avoid a protracted labor struggle, maybe they get into a protracted labor struggle. What’s known for sure is that the 19th century nastiness wouldn’t be repeated if PoliceMob doesn’t take sides and permit pinkertons to do nonconsensual violence to workers without getting in trouble for it.
Similarly, Dia Paying Group would argue that causing a severe chronic pain condition necessitates compensation regardless of intent, and ArguProtect’s rules would then determine whether the parent has to pay what they can afford or if it is pooled among all customers. Since causing a chronic pain condition is clearly a violation of a person’s rights, ArguProtect would have very little to stand on and would be incentivized to minimize the causings of chronic pain conditions.
On the other hand, if the child argued that their autonomy was violated by a vital vaccination at age 3, the case would probably be laughed out of arbitration because nobody wants to do business with someone who doesn’t let people be protected from dangerous diseases that expose innocent third parties to excessive risks (compensating the families of immunocompromised people who caught measles from some hipster’s brat isn’t cheap).
There would be the uncomfortable territory of evolving law on topics such as “is a person who was circumcised by their parents entitled to compensation just for that even if there were no complications”, and Dawn Defense might say “yes, anyone who wishes they hadn’t been circumcised should be paid”, Dia Paying Group might say “no, if the circumcision was based on sincere religious belief (as we have defined in our policies on page x…)”, and then they would just have to figure out the least unsatisfactory agreement with the knowledge that later decisions in a different context might be different. The problems of public opinion would still be there but at least they would be more limited in scope. If all situations where something is obviously not a violation of another person’s bodily autonomy, such as “driving while black” or “walking while trans” were immediately thrown out as completely frivolous, the opportunity for popularly-sanctioned oppression would be far smaller even though it couldn’t be eradicated altogether.
(And how would the system deal with boudary cases? Let’s say Adam writes a blog post Steve doesn’t like, so Steve begins stalking and harassing Adam, and ArguProtect says they won’t limit Steve’s freedom of expression. In that case, Dia Paying Group purchases the same plan Steve is using for their own very large employees, who then begin expressing themselves in Steve’s inbox, voicemail and doorstep, or if Steve doesn’t mind, they inform other customers of ArguProtect that unfortunately they would have to express themselves in obviously ArguProtect-approved ways to them if Steve won’t stop expressing himself to Adam. If ArguProtect is a bunch of weird assholes who all enjoy harassment in both directions, Dia Paying Group shouldn’t have excess difficulty in convincing Dawn Defense, BLM security etc. that ArguProtect should be scorned until they keep their harassment strictly internal-only.)
(And if ArguProtect wants to enforce its own informal “bathroom bill” by having its large employees creep in other people’s bahrooms just to impose its own sense of morality on the rest, others can simply ban ArguProtect employees and customers from their bathrooms.)
(In fact, diminishing people’s ability to coordinate meanness is kind of “the point” of libertarian policies, because people are probably doing way too much coordinated meanness. When it is combined with better protection against uncoordinated meanness as well, the result is expected to be a less mean society. And the exact nature of the coordinated meanness is important too; taking taxes to fund a basic income is way less mean than voting to ban $group for being offensive by simply existing.)
And we wouldn’t need to worry about bathroom laws if the state had no right to intrude into bathrooms in the first place.
While technically true, decentralized oppression and nonsense about bathrooms can still exist without a state to sanction it – in fact, given the limited ability of the state to police every public bathroom, we can dismiss the laws as the ruse they are, a formal mask on the informal social anxiety about the subject. And that is what is really at the heart of the matter.
Yes. My point exactly. Such decentralized oppression can’t exactly be addressed by the state, but the oppression of PoliceMob bullying trans women on top of that can be, by reducing the things it’s acceptable for PoliceMob to intrude to. We can’t have PoliceMob kidnap all the cissexists even if we wanted to, so removing the state’s ability to create these laws in one direction or the other would be a win for the “less oppression and bullying” side. Then we’d only have to deal with the cissexists, instead of cissexists + PoliceMob + cissexists again because they are butthurt about the state legalizing gay marriage and are looking for targets to take out their frustration on.
Regardless of how you feel about the specific issue of anti-discrimination laws, I get the sense that they were more about creating a cultural norm of “racism is bad m'kay,” in the same way that gay marriage and transgender restroom right are really just the legal battlefields we’ve chosen to fight culture wars on. I’m personally convinced that anti-discrimination laws are a reasonable infringement on liberty for the greater good, but if I’m honest the real reason I see them as a victory is for cultural reasons. I don’t know whether I like the trend of making laws into cultural proxy battlegrounds, but I’m sorta stumped about how else to go about fighting culture wars in a reasonably civilized way that everyone will see as legitimate and meaningful.
Well yes; if the state has previously worked to socially engineer a system that fucks over $group, it’s certainly understandable that social engineering might be used to try to reverse that.
But I really would prefer to reach an equilibrium where the state won’t try to regulate morality in any direction, as each incremental liberation nonetheless always leaves people outside it.
Sure, there might be gay marriage now, but we don’t have poly marriage; privatizing marriage would abolish these issues. (And wow it’s really fucked up that the word for “let’s not intrude onto these matters from outside” has turned to often mean “let’s hand this over for cronyist corporations to make a cash cow out of”. I feel kind of silly in having this realization right here right now but I guess it tells something about our society that we only have words for “the state” and “the state’s buddies”.)
Sure, binary trans people might have legal gender recognition, but enbies are screwed as usual; not having the state regulate gender in the first place would have made the question utterly immaterial in the first place.
And we wouldn’t need to worry about bathroom laws if the state had no right to intrude into bathrooms in the first place.
And hate crime laws are a joke when the same system that enforces them systematically engages in racially selective mass incarceration exceeding the Soviet Gulags in scope.
In a civilized system, we should see the culture wars engaged on a private level. Instead of the state setting bathroom policies for all from up above, we would be doing advocacy on the streets and in the businesses, and perhaps even humanizing the sides for each other when the outcome isn’t enforced by scary men with guns, but rather the result of negotiation with These Actual Real People Right Here. The heavy lifting happens outside the government anyway, and the way I see it taking away the main weapon of my enemy is worth an insignificant disarmament for myself. No advance in civil rights has ever happened before it had been created and popularized privately, and the state has only pushed hard on the brakes. Take away the brakes, we don’t need the mostly entirely hypothetical gas pedal.
There’s a bit of a problem with the group of transhumanists we have around nowadays. A fair number of them are merely passive, accepting, waiting for the next change. I realize that not everyone has the time or energy to commit to any kind of action, but I’ve seen the issue raised of “how about we, y’know, do something about this?” and someone pipes up, “I prefer transhumanism as a philosophical movement!” and everyone starts agreeing and saying politics is a dangerous practice full of -isms and so on and so forth that is corrupting to Pure Ideals. Some say, “well, I think everything is inevitable” and thereby justify their non-involvement, to great applause.
This is a non-productive stance. We owe it to our selves and our future to work to change it to one that is better. No force is unstoppable, and no philosophy is pure. (788 words)
Why do we think the “freedom to change your body” is assured, and will
not become “actually, you have to change your body in this specific
way”?
YES YES YES YES YES
As a trans woman, witnessing the rise of the “low T” industry has been fascinating – and more than a little frustrating. The complex that’s emerged here is seemingly designed to ensure that as many men as possible will be on prescription testosterone. A man might feel tired, and he happens to see a commercial about how this could be “low T”. He’ll go to a site like IsItLowT.com, and a quiz that might be no more accurate than a coin flip will tell him to see his doctor. And he’ll make an appointment at his local “low T clinic”, where even normal ranges aren’t considered high enough. Before you know it, we’ve got a billion-dollar market on our hands.
But many trans people require treatment involving sex hormones as well. As Dr. Abraham Morgentaler writes, “It could be said that testosterone is what makes men, men. It gives them their characteristic deep voices, large muscles, and facial and body hair, distinguishing them from women.” So it’s no surprise that trans men would often want more testosterone, and trans women would often want to get rid of theirs and replace it with estrogen.
Yet our experiences of engaging with the medical system could not be more different from that of cis men seeking treatment for low T. A spokesman for AbbVie described campaigns like IsItLowT.com as “disease state awareness initiatives”. But there are no major marketing initiatives raising awareness of transition treatments, or running commercials suggesting that if you’re tired and depressed, you might be transgender. None of these businesses are promoting websites about gender dysphoria, or offering unhelpful quizzes that tell a significant fraction of cis people to talk to their doctor about transitioning. And there are no multi-state chains of clinics focusing exclusively on transition treatments – let alone telling cis people that even if they’re healthy, transitioning can make them feel even better.
There is no overbroad promotion of trans medications – because most of the time, we don’t even have access to the basics. Medical transition is recognized as effective and necessary by the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Unlike “low T”, transitioning isn’t the subject of any real medical controversy. But if you haven’t yet realized you’re trans, you’re not going to learn about it from a commercial break during Monday Night Football.
[http://genderanalysis.net/2014/09/low-t-a-tale-of-two-hormones-gender-analysis-01/](Low T: A Tale of Two Hormones)
Any technology will be co-opted by normativity unless people actively pump against entropy.
Every tool of our liberation will turn into yet another prison if we don’t constantly work to liberate ourselves.
The system will always find a creative way to fuck you over because it is just so slightly biased against even acknowledging that someone like you might ever exist.
Right now, we are already having impressive ways to seize control of our bodies, and those ways are hypocritically regulated to reinforce, not undermine, the oppressive structures that surround us.
(this is also one of the reasons why I find the ideas of a state-run queer/feminist/anti-tradition social engineering conspiracy utterly laughable; you haven’t seen but a tiny fraction of the diversity we could have if human creativity was genuinely unleashed from its shackles!)
@socialjusticemunchkin, you were recently talking about a libertarian approach to human genetic engineering, perhaps you would be interested in the dialogue conducted by @davidsevera under way at veracities.online on this very subject.
Given the number of libertarians and libertarian-leaning folk in these parts I am curious how the precautionary side of the debate will be received and whether anyone is willing to jump in and play devil’s advocate!
I sorta would want to argue about this, but my issues are about possible negative consequences rather than certainties.
In truth, I don’t think it should be categorically forbidden, but think some caution is in order. One big issue is that the argument here is over a hypothetical we’re still a not at with consequences that won’t become apparent for a while. Honestly, the thing I would most want is for people not to oversell it.
Precautiones is all about the precautionary principle, after all! :)
There are some possible tragedy of the commons effects, as with existing issues like sex-selective abortion, which is just an extreme case of parents exercising choice over the genetics of their children.
(Also accidentally causing human extinction when parents universally choose mutations which boost IQ by ten points but also turn out to cause sterility, oops).
Yeah, one the big ones is: “We still don’t really understand the genome or the mind very well, please don’t accidentally make an entire generation of psychopaths“
It’s definitely too soon to know anything for certain. I think it’s interesting if not necessarily too useful at the moment to think through the potential pitfalls and probable dynamics as sort of a roadmap.
I’d imagine that, at least at first (and possibly for quite a long time?), any alterations to the genome would be made by selecting from within preexisting natural variation. Most personality traits are influenced by countless genes, so it’s not likely that we’d hit upon some weird combination of alleles that led to psychopathy, but there’s no guarantee of what might happen if we push the distribution of a given trait dramatically in one direction. Certainly I’d hope we have an understanding of how various pathologies arise well before making any major changes on a large scale, and I’d hope the research moves fairly slowly.
Libertes all the way.
My anarcho-utopian side says that letting children pursue grievances against their parents (instead of treating them as almost property like now) would be a far better solution than having men with guns kidnap or ransom people who try to do different things than what the mob wants them to do.
My cynical pragmatist side says: “Hello, convicted fucking criminal speaking; if the PoliceMob ransomed me forestradiol, how in hell would I trust them not to fuck up regulating genetic engineering just as horribly?” They can pry CRISPR from my cold, metallic upload hands once I can just sudo straight to my root account, but until then I will not surrender one inch of bodily autonomy.
Yes, there will be terrible consequences if we let parents CRISPR their kids freely, but the only way to reduce the obvious consequences would be to sweep them under the rug and turn them into even more terrible but just less-visible consequences with an FDA of genetic engineering. Sure, kids won’t have two heads, but neither will they have very useful augmentations. I’m not expecting anyone to start shooting bees or lightning from their fingertips so this is kind of a no-brainer.
Seriously, the things the system does to trans people or drug users are very illuminating of how it “wants” to treat all unpopular self-modifications and exercisings of bodily autonomy: with brutal repression and giving in only as little as it can. I won’t make its job one bit easier by consenting to such things instead of resisting all the way. I trust a free society to do better than the state, because the bar is set so low I’d need the help of an oil company to reach it (snark intended).
Or alternatively I could bring in an ultra-cynical third view: “obstructiones” (or something like that).
It would aim to stall the government and legitimate insurers’ involvement in genetic engineering as much as possible so that the statist-controlled parts of society don’t fuck everyone over with it, while not allowing the tech to be banned entirely but just shifted underground and limited to people who have an interest and an opportunity in using it.
For example, right now people who want to obtain modafinil can buy it from India for relatively non-obscene prices, or get a prescription from some cooperative doctor, but the system doesn’t make people use modafinil routinely or try to eradicate it altogether.
The obvious downside would be the increase in inequality when only tech-savvy early adopters can CRISPR their kids, but if one has optimistic agorist tendencies or a very bleak view of humanity as a whole it is at least one possible option.
In fact, I’d expect that this is basically what precautiones would degenerate into in reality unless the enforcers want to get really super-oppressive (which I do think is a possibility though, because the mob gets really riled over this); biohackers currently implant magnets etc. without “proper” medical supervision and it hasn’t exactly stopped us (okay, not having easy access to anaesthetics stopped me from getting a finger magnet because I’m a wimp, but the person I live with does have one) from doing such things, and when technology becomes cheaper and more easily available, the underground would survive if it isn’t treated in an outright eradicatory way.
@socialjusticemunchkin, you were recently talking about a libertarian approach to human genetic engineering, perhaps you would be interested in the dialogue conducted by @davidsevera under way at veracities.online on this very subject.
Given the number of libertarians and libertarian-leaning folk in these parts I am curious how the precautionary side of the debate will be received and whether anyone is willing to jump in and play devil’s advocate!
I sorta would want to argue about this, but my issues are about possible negative consequences rather than certainties.
In truth, I don’t think it should be categorically forbidden, but think some caution is in order. One big issue is that the argument here is over a hypothetical we’re still a not at with consequences that won’t become apparent for a while. Honestly, the thing I would most want is for people not to oversell it.
Precautiones is all about the precautionary principle, after all! :)
There are some possible tragedy of the commons effects, as with existing issues like sex-selective abortion, which is just an extreme case of parents exercising choice over the genetics of their children.
(Also accidentally causing human extinction when parents universally choose mutations which boost IQ by ten points but also turn out to cause sterility, oops).
Yeah, one the big ones is: “We still don’t really understand the genome or the mind very well, please don’t accidentally make an entire generation of psychopaths“
It’s definitely too soon to know anything for certain. I think it’s interesting if not necessarily too useful at the moment to think through the potential pitfalls and probable dynamics as sort of a roadmap.
I’d imagine that, at least at first (and possibly for quite a long time?), any alterations to the genome would be made by selecting from within preexisting natural variation. Most personality traits are influenced by countless genes, so it’s not likely that we’d hit upon some weird combination of alleles that led to psychopathy, but there’s no guarantee of what might happen if we push the distribution of a given trait dramatically in one direction. Certainly I’d hope we have an understanding of how various pathologies arise well before making any major changes on a large scale, and I’d hope the research moves fairly slowly.
Libertes all the way.
My anarcho-utopian side says that letting children pursue grievances against their parents (instead of treating them as almost property like now) would be a far better solution than having men with guns kidnap or ransom people who try to do different things than what the mob wants them to do.
My cynical pragmatist side says: “Hello, convicted fucking criminal speaking; if the PoliceMob ransomed me forestradiol, how in hell would I trust them not to fuck up regulating genetic engineering just as horribly?” They can pry CRISPR from my cold, metallic upload hands once I can just sudo straight to my root account, but until then I will not surrender one inch of bodily autonomy.
Yes, there will be terrible consequences if we let parents CRISPR their kids freely, but the only way to reduce the obvious consequences would be to sweep them under the rug and turn them into even more terrible but just less-visible consequences with an FDA of genetic engineering. Sure, kids won’t have two heads, but neither will they have very useful augmentations. I’m not expecting anyone to start shooting bees or lightning from their fingertips so this is kind of a no-brainer.
Seriously, the things the system does to trans people or drug users are very illuminating of how it “wants” to treat all unpopular self-modifications and exercisings of bodily autonomy: with brutal repression and giving in only as little as it can. I won’t make its job one bit easier by consenting to such things instead of resisting all the way. I trust a free society to do better than the state, because the bar is set so low I’d need the help of an oil company to reach it (snark intended).
People in the comments of the latest SSC are already pointing out that he seems to be understating the possible dangers of coordinated “meanness”*, but more worrisome to me is the flip side: if coordination is the minimum bar, then you should never be assertive or contrary unless you can convince a big enough** group that you’re in the right. Sure, argue all you want*** for your beliefs, but until you’ve won don’t you dare act on it, that would be unsafe and unstable!
A slave who escapes to freedom, a gay couple holding hands in an intensely homophobic community, a doctor in, say, Massachusetts refusing to perform an abortion, a vegetarian declining meat served to them, etc. can all be in violation of this coordination rule. How do we decide which are OK to do? At some point, you have to get below the meta level and actually evaluate the moral object level situation at hand. It’s true that people have made horrible choices based on their object level moral beliefs****, but hiding behind abstraction and symmetry isn’t actually a viable option much of the time.
* Accepting the mean/nice dichotomy as somehow important in morality is another issue here
** And who decides what “big enough” is here?
*** If you’re lucky enough to live in a society with free speech norms… otherwise, I guess you’re limited to private agitation among people who you’re confident won’t be hurt by your arguments?
**** It’s also true that people have made horrible choices based on their meta level moral beliefs, so.
If only we had a very easy heuristic for deciding when something is an actual violation of important rules and when something is just people wanting to be assholes to unpopular people… something like “auto-determination” or “bodily self-nomy” or something like that…
Everybody that reblogs this by May 10th will get a traditionally drawn character based on what I think you look like after scrolling through your blog
I think he will have stopped because of how many fucking people xD
nope, im doing everybody that reblogs this! the only thing its doing is making it take a bit longer. i could easily put out 20 or 30 of them in a day, maybe even more if im feeling productive (i draw a lot in my spare time), so really, its just giving me more practice, which is good. im not stopping because of the numbers!
i doubt the person posting this will be able to get to 36k people bc that’s like a multi-year project but ill draw a character based on anyone who reblogs this from me
I am quite interested in how I appear in the headcanon of someone with such peculiarly different sensibilities.
On the other hand, we should feel mostly safe around people who agree that meanness, in the unfortunate cases where it’s necessary, must be coordinated. There is no threat at all from pro-coordination skinheads except in the vanishingly unlikely possibility they legally win control of the government and take over.
I admit that this safety is still only relative. It hinges on the skinheads’ inability to convert 51% of the population. But until the Messiah comes to enforce the moral law directly, safety has to hinge on something. The question is whether it should hinge on the ability of the truth to triumph in the marketplace of ideas in the long-term across an entire society, or whether it should hinge on the fact that you can beat me up with a baseball bat right now.
This really makes me want to scream “check your privilege” because as a trans person I can’t feel the safety of only skinheads being interested in coordinating meanness against me. For fuck’s sake I’m a convicted criminal already just for trying to exercise my bodily autonomy in ways that the rest of the population has shown itself extremely interested in coordinating meanness against.
If they can ban unprescribed estradiol the system has way too much power and needs to be destroyed immediately. Okay, not quite, but it really needs to RIGHT FUCKING NOW MAKE IT STOP.
People should not be able and/or allowed to coordinate meanness against other people simply exercising their bodily autonomy except in really specific cases like anti-vaxers (who willfully expose others to clear harm so the principle of “it’s okay if you don’t harm anyone else” still holds!).
I usually try not to be the kind of rationalist who is like “my superior powers of deduction have determined after five minutes of study that all world experts are wrong about this issue”.
But my superior powers of deduction have determined after five minutes of study that all the media sources and Bitcoin experts reporting that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto are wrong, and I’m willing to put like 90% probability on that.
Isn’t this the exact same guy who was almost-proven to be a fraud like in December or something? The one who wanted to make up some money to evade tax authorities, who used algorithms not invented in 2009 for something supposedly from 2009 etc.?
Ugh I just…as much as I loved the video of Lin-Manuel and Emma Watson sorting Hamilton characters into Hogwarts Houses, I was hoping that we had maybe gotten to the point where we can stop automatically casting the protagonist in Gryffindor without any further discussion because seriously. Hamilton is a Slytherin.
Hamilton’s defining characteristic is his ambition, his burning desire to make a name for himself and to leave a legacy. It’s what motivates just about every decision he makes. That’s not a Gryffindor quality (I mean, I’m not saying that Gryffindors can’t be ambitious, any more than Slytherins can’t be brave – it’s just a much more defining characteristic of Slytherins [”And power-hungry Slytherin loved those of great ambition”]). From the beginning, Hamilton is obsessed with making a name for himself and while that allows him to make some choices that seem brave or noble on their surface, they’re all with the goal of rising above his station (consider: anything in the Revolutionary War; the Reynolds Pamphlet; even his death).
In many ways, Burr, who I also consider a Slytherin, and Hamilton represent both ends of Slytherin spectrum – both would use any means to achieve their ends, though their means are quite opposite. And for both of them, ambition and pride is their downfall, though again, in different and contrasting ways.
And in the Harry Potter universe, it becomes clearer that Hamilton would be a Slytherin. Imagine little eleven-year-old bastard orphan (son of a whore and a Scotsman…) Hamilton rolling up to Hogwarts with no name, just the burning need to make a name for himself. And when he puts the Sorting Hat on his head and tells him, “A nice thirst to prove yourself…You could be great, and Slytherin will help you on your way to greatness”, how could Hamilton say anything but yes?
(And of course, imagine little Hamilton running up to the Slytherin prefect Aaron Burr, when first-years aren’t supposed to just talk to prefects, to ask him in that piping voice, “Pardon me, are you Aaron Burr, sir?”)
(And then also imagine Burr and Hamilton many years later, facing each other, wands raised, both prepared to do whatever it took – Hamilton aiming his wand at the sky, Burr firing the curse that would kill Hamilton and break him, in the end.)
I’d go on, including more from Hamilton’s actual life instead of just the show, but instead I’ll stop here and say TLDR - #yourfavoritesareslytherin2k16
what defines us as one American people is our dedication to common ideals – rather than similarities of origin or creed
can someone explain to me the difference between “dedication to common ideals” and “similarities of creed”
(context: history of loyalty day here, other holidays that are today here and here and here)
I wonder what odds you could get betting with someone in the 1950s that one day the slaves fleeing on the Underground Railroad and the lunch-counter sit-ins in Greensboro would be cited as examples by a President proclaiming “Loyalty Day”.
This, plus your indoctrinating your schoolchildren to salute and pledge allegiance to the flag every morning, is what makes other nations go “the hell?”
Why do I get the feeling having a “Loyalty Day” on 1st May was something to declare “We aren’t Communists!” Oh, and I see by the Wikipedia article that yes, indeed, so it was. Something that should have been along the lines of National Corn on the Cob Day and allowed to sink into decent obscurity after the 50s/60s still warrants a presidential address (because who wants to be the first president not to recognise National Loyalty Day, that’s like blowing your nose on the Constitution).
Every time I read anything written by an American declaring how conformist Japanese culture is, I go “Pot. meet kettle”
Maybe to avoid seeming overly concerned about Loyalty we should have a holiday for all six Moral Foundations?
May 1 can stay Loyalty Day. July 4 is basically already Liberty Day.
Presidents’ Day can become Authority Day. And Martin Luther King Day would make a good Fairness Day.
Not sure when Care Day and Sanctity Day should be.
Thanksgiving and Christmas, perhaps?
may 1 for loyalty (to fellow workers), sanctity (of the blood of the workers spilt in the struggle), authority (for
If we start playing this game, I say NO to dark moral foundations.
Sanctity is the enemy of Care.
Loyalty is the enemy of Fairness.
Authority is the enemy of Liberty.
These evil counterparts don’t deserve holidays.
This is why we privatize the holidays and let people celebrate whatever they want whenever they want.
I for one will be celebrating the Dawn of Saint Madoka, the celebration of transhumanist loophole exploitation, on the first of May.
But on the other hand these “technolibertarians” don’t actually seem to be that libertarian. In fact, I get very strong “these are the exact same people who built the nordic eugenics programs” vibes from them. The same naive “I can run people’s lives for them” progressivist elitist attitude, which in business simply either results in a product that solves someone’s problems, or bankrupty, but which in government has historically had the failure mode of forcibly sterilizing about 1% of the population. They don’t seem to reject the idea of running other people’s lives for them, but rather simply to think that they could do a better job at it.
There is a very serious difference though: They do not impose this on you from the barrel of a gun which is very unlike most eugenics programs.
It is becoming harder and harder to have a social life without giving
Zuckerberg
acces to your private data, but at least he isn’t hiring people to show up at your house with uniforms and truncheons because you decided to stay away from him.
Is there a potential problem? Absolutely! Power, a lot of power, is concentrating into a very small area. If they ever decide that they should use the power of the state to impose on you, it will be easy for them. So far, they haven’t.
Yes, this is currently true. But the mindset seems to be the same, and refraining from such violence doesn’t seem to be the product of principles but rather of opportunity and situation, and that is why the idea of those people taking over the government is frightening. Not as frightening as the idea of Actual Democracy where the bottom 50% in informedness actually have 50% of all power, but frightening nonetheless. It might be better than what we have now, but it would be staggeringly sub-optimal with some very bad failure modes that only the less-inherently-coercive nature of business is keeping in check.
If those people ever start doing a significant amount of democratic politics, I’d expect such failure modes to emerge relatively quickly. The desire to use the state to optimize others, and the ideology of interconnectedness that legitimizes intrusions into people’s personal autonomy are there, and have the potential to turn really ugly and oppressive if combined with bias and lack of hard-to-transmit information about other people’s situations (which the STEM class is displaying in staggering abundance).
And politics happens outside the state as well. Facebook may be well within their rights to require “real names”, but this has massive knock-on effects in outing people and exposing them to stalkers and abusers etc. and may result in someone else showing up at one’s house with the means, motive and opportunity to do violence. And Facebook may be allowed to set their own policies, but banning nudity while allowing violence and hate speech is not apolitical. It’s not even a Grand Principled Stand for freedom of expression; it’s simply a rather cynical acquiescence to certain norms over others, with certain outcomes instead of some different ones.
The desire to optimize without thoroughly understanding shows very well in the real name policy. So many not!white-upper-middle-class-men have expressed that such policies have certain predictable results, due to which it has recently been made less stringent which imo shows that the entire situation could have been avoided if Facebook had been a bit less activist about things it didn’t know enough of, right away instead of having to be told it with a backlash and a lot of innocent people getting hurt. Just because I don’t want to make things worse by having PoliceMob be able to get involved in this doesn’t mean that I consider such private policies to be above scrutiny and criticism.
my biggest pet peeve wiht the english language is that you don’t have sin/sina
in swedish if u have two people who use the same pronoun u can always tell whos doing what bc its like ‘han tog sin väska’ (he took his[own] bag) and ‘han tog hans väska’ would be that he took the other persons bag
but in english its like if u have 2 ppl w/ the same pronoun:
“she took her bag” whose bag????WHose BAG was it her OWN bag or the other her’s bag??????????????
“he ate his donuts” were the donuts his own???? did he fucking eat someone elses donuts??? YIU DONT KNOW bc english is a bullshit language
also known as, the gay fanfiction dilemma
I’ve been cursing myself for starting a fanfic with two male main characters; this would make my writing SO much easier.
Have you considered: Just use our words?
Adam and Steve meet in a coffee shop, both put down their bags and, ugh, Steve is wearing exactly the tie Adam told him to get rid of.
Adam took sin bag, and his as well, leaving Steve sitting alone and bagless with a terrible tie.
NOTICE HOW English doesn’t have a different word you can confuse it for, because the pre-existing English word “sin” doesn’t fit into the sentence at that spot.
This is an excellent suggestion. In fact, the entire English language shoud be hacked to work better with pronouns. Discard gender because it only results in silly infinite lookup tables of custom pronous, and instead fix (at least) the following:
Inclusive local we two; I, thou (we!both)
Inclusive local we many; I, thou, others here (we!here)
Inclusive global we; I, thou, others not here (we!all)
Exclusive local we: I, others here (we!us)
Exclusive global we: I, others not here (we!myside)
Singular you: thou (thou)
Plural local you: thou, others here (you!here)
Plural global you: thou, others not here (you!yourside)
Possession referring-to-self: their own (sin)
Possession referring-to-other: someone else’s (ses, because universal Finnish genderless “it” (in English se would be se(h)/ses/sem) is the Objectively Superior third-person pronoun)
For example:
Let me tell (thou) a secret.
Now (we!both) know the secret.
Adam and Steve also know the secret, (we!all) know sem.
Steve also has a secret of (sin) own. Adam is here and tells (we!both) (ses) secret.
Adam tells (sin) secret as well.
Steve doesn’t know Adam’s secret; only (we!here) know sem.
(thou) weren’t aware of (we!myside)’s secrets before, but now (we!us) have told them.
(you!here) have heard my secret now; if (thou) wish (thou) may tell sem to the rest of (you!yourside) rationalist tumblrers.
Probably hedonic utilitarianism tbh. I would say suicide rights but there seem to be quite a few closet supporters. Or are you sending this in the hopes of getting a more provocative answer?
Okay, lately I’ve been becoming more and more suspicious about the techno-libertarianism/utopianism that seems to be increasingly popular in silicon valley and among the STEM culture more broadly, including the corners of the internet I frequent.
There seems to be a very anti-democratic strain to this sort of thinking. Like, the motivation seems to be to develop technology in such an unrestricted and unregulated way as to get around those annoying things like democracy, politics, and culture, in order to create broad based, systemic, and, in their eyes, positive changes to society.
Let our Virtuous Intelligent STEM Heroes break free of the shackles of democracy and government and politics and culture so they can go forth and lead us into a new and Better age with their genetic engineering, AI, big data (and cough constant surveillance cough), private foundations, and so on.
And this trend makes me nervous and suspicious. I don’t think STEM people are any more virtuous, wise, or knowledgeable about ethics as anybody else, but I feel like a lot of technolibertarians/utopians think they are, probably based on some very one-dimensional idea of what intelligence is whereby if you are smart enough to do math well you are obviously smarter at ethics and politics too. I worry that really it’s just one very-self-confident group that is already very powerful, in its technology and its wealth, advocating much more power for itself so that it can impose its (not obviously correct or better than all other) value system on the masses through the technology it creates without any oversight or checks.
It’s actually kinda authoritarian, albeit in a non-standard way, despite being couched in the language of libertarianism.
I agree the cluster you’re talking about isn’t perfect, but - have you talked to actual normal people? They already have too much power, and we’re lucky they don’t have more. Given their authoritarianism, puritanism, status quo bias, sacred values, pathological egalitarianism, etc, routing around these kinds of people is good.
To a first approximation, you’ll get closer to the truth in ethics by adopting a negative “skeptical” strategy towards other people’s moral claims than by making your own positive theories. And at least the technolibertarian cluster is decent at that.
As for it being authoritarian, that’s the same kind of conservative relativism that Eastern European national conservatives (e.g. Putinists) talk about when they complain about the West forcing homosexual equality down their throats. Rejecting other people’s (in this case, the masses’) imposition of power is libertarian and not at all authoritarian, and that’s what’s happening here.
I’m not exactly a central example but I felt like this post was talking about me, so it probably is.
Democracy has a very anti-me attitude so I don’t see why I should have anything but an anti-democratic attitude, when said anti-democraticness simply consists of “don’t impose your values on me no matter how much you think you know better than I do”. Because when people call for democracy on topics such as genetic engineering, I hear “let’s have the mob vote on promethea’s body”. I’m usually correct in hearing that.
But on the other hand these “technolibertarians” don’t actually seem to be that libertarian. In fact, I get very strong “these are the exact same people who built the nordic eugenics programs” vibes from them. The same naive “I can run people’s lives for them” progressivist elitist attitude, which in business simply either results in a product that solves someone’s problems, or bankrupty, but which in government has historically had the failure mode of forcibly sterilizing about 1% of the population. They don’t seem to reject the idea of running other people’s lives for them, but rather simply to think that they could do a better job at it.
Sure, they are better than the mob, but these technoprogressives seem to be other-optimizing way too hard and trying to replace democratic coercion with economic-cultural coercion which is not that much of an improvement.
The culture is good at solving white upper-middle-class men’s problems, and other people’s problems as far as they resemble white upper-middle-class men’s problems, but they are worse in solving even white upper-middle-class women’s problems, in a way that would have been perfectly predictable if they had had a healthy dose of austrian economics as a background assumption. The anti-democraticness of “I don’t consent to being paternalized by the mob” is not the anti-democraticness of “people should be paternalized by my culture and company, not the mob”.
May 1st reserved for outdoor fucking, for historical reasons and because we have a song about it
May 4th, the actual anniversary of the Haymarket Massacre, is worker’s day
Victims of Communism Day can be the second or the third as they prefer
Okay so 30.4. || 4/30 is Walpurgisnacht, then it’s fucking day, then it’s victims of utopian experiment day and then it’s erased-from-history day (because nobody remembers the anarchists! Haymarket was about anarchists, not about tankie pieces of shit!). Sounds like things gone full Meguca. Not that I’m complaining.
Besides, victims’ day needs to be 7.11. || 11/7 because statist communists were the ones who caused them. There was never any anarchist regime killing people en masse because there was never any anarchist regime because authoritarians always fuck with other people’s experiments.
Okay, no solarized for the background. Using it on tumblr made me realize that simply switching the background to #222 is enough to improve it substantially. Mission accomplished, I guess?
and yet I can see the desperate flaw. Better than H.G. Wells, sure– they see the methods by which things are to be done, by which incentives are to be arranged…
but not well enough. Liberals plan incentives. God laughs. And many people can believe in their own destiny.
As far as open borders are concerned, I would expect a tremendous revival of ethnic nationalism on a small scale, perhaps even non-geographic nations and a Fifty-Thousand-Mile-Rhine as in Diamond Age, and after a few generations, the system ossifying around whoever migrated the most early on and excluding others, similar to the cynical perspective on labor unions today.
I’m inflicting Solarized upon you (because it’s inflicted upon me as well (because all my attempts to change it just put me in a hell of .vimrc and .Xresources and .config/i3/config and so on when nothing is satisfactory)).
If you wish to change this state of affairs, I’m incentivizing anyone to give me a different color scheme for my terminal that still accomplishes the same goals of moderate brightness contrast and adequate hue contrast. Black/purple/orange/neongreenish are good colors for such a color scheme.
Also, if askbox issues still persist, please inform.
A lot fewer trans women than recent memes suggest. Also half of us are depressed.
Big parts of the pdf don’t have any data at all, and seem to have something to do with write-ins.
Also support for HBD is significantly higher than I would have predicted. Wow.
3.5% of AMABs are trans women, and an unspecified amount are enbie trans women (this is why our gender categorization system sucks); I think the statistics are compatible with 5-10% of AMABs being “basically women” and even the 20% is not outlandish if cis by default is as big as it seems to be (roughly doubling those numbers, so the 5-10% turns to 10-20%) and some people are still closeted to surveys.
Other observations:
wow I was way up there in basilisk anxiety percentile back when it was fresh
I knew black people were less likely but I didn’t expect that my throwaway joke would be almost literally correct
our ASAB issues seem to be getting better over time?
apart from libertarians-without-prefixes, the right is basically a rounding error/lizardman effect
in fact if I have to live in a democracy, I want it to be populated entirely by diaspora members
but I’d still prefer diaspora+tumblr members, probably; will need the data on that
