The
enforcement of conformity is so important for young children that
5-year-olds have more positive feelings toward a norm enforcer (even
though he is acting aggressively) than they do toward someone who simply
lets a norm violation go (even though he is behaving in a neutral
manner; Vaish, Herrmann, Markmann, & Tomasello, 2016).
Yet more reason to shed the evolutionary baggage ASAP.
Egalitarianism vs neutrality towards hierarchy vs hierarchy being a positive good Cosmopolitanism vs nationalism Individualism vs communitarianism Economic efficiency is good vs economic efficiency is dehumanizing Nature is a resource vs nature should be protected for its own sake vs we belong to nature Importance of tradition Importance of “order” Importance of autonomy Belief in the availability of positive-sum improvements Belief in the degree of coordination necessary to achieve/prevent positive/negative-sum changes Belief in collective responsibility Acceptability of coercion Acceptability of violence in general
On a more serious note, I always liked the three-axis chart from the online game NationStates (though the game itself has a very left-wing bias).
Okay, this chart is actually not that good. First of all, it undercounts the significance of economic freedom; and second, it truncates it into a single axis while I’d argue that a two-axis (at least) model of economy would be better.
Economic freedom is inevitably tied to personal and political freedom, as human behavior is economic behavior. There is no magical boundary between economic and personal. These are probably obvious, but I’m just making the background assumptions clear.
For example, how does sex work work in a “Scandinavian Liberal Paradise”? It supposedly has high personal freedom, but as sex work ties the personal to the economic very tightly I highly suspect that SLP wouldn’t have the Obviously Correct policy of decriminalization and non-regulation; instead it’d be likely to have a lot of licensing and regulation schemes intruding on sex workers’ bodily autonomy (if they’re at all legal in the first place).
Or drugs. If you can use drugs, but only if you buy them from Systembolaget, and they must be manufactured by licensed businesses, and they must have been approved by the state regulatory apparatus, it’s not such a high level of personal freedom.
Or in the different direction: “Corporate Police State”. Economic “freedom”? I don’t think so. Trans people can’t buy estrogen, people can’t trade anti-government material, Sex work is B&, drug users get V&.
And what exactly is “Benevolent Dictatorship”? The government rules with an iron fist, but it doesn’t actually do much? Emperor Norton? Distributed power is distributed power and jure isn’t magic.
The personal and political are tied as well, but at least the political axis makes a bit more sense; “Conservative Democracy” vs. “Tyranny by Majority” vs. “Authoritarian Democracy” are distinctions I can intuitively grasp from this model.
But “Economic Freedom” is my favorite axis (because I’m really boringly consistent on “Personal”, and “Political” is mostly “could we just please make it go away somehow”) so I want to focus more on that one, and this assumes that there’s a simple unidirectional form. In other words, a society with heavy state intervention in the economy to reduce inequality would be basically the same as a society with heavy intervention to preserve inequality. That doesn’t make much sense.
A more meaningful distinction would be to divide the economic axis by that one. Thus, we get a two-dimensional graph which could be said to roughly resemble the traditional Political Compass (which is a shitty test with shitty questions and shitty background assumptions) or the Nolan Chart (which similarly confuses two drastically different forms of economic intervention into a less-than-useful mess):
(one could add a third dimension for public goods and other utilitarianisms but that’s basically “how smart is the implementation of this particular location on the 2D grid”)
In the bottom right quadrant is non-intervention regardless of its direction. Libertarian, classical liberal, ancap, etc.
The bottom left only has intervention to seek equality; pure redistribution, regulations that try to level society, eliminating the hierarchies that would naturally result from differences between people. Anarcho-communist, liberal socialist, etc.
The top right only seeks to keep hierarchies intact and deepen them, to maintain the position of those at the top and prevent challenges to their status. Crony capitalism, slavery, feudalism, state-sponsored cartels, corporate welfare, and all forms of nonproductive rentseeking with the guns of PoliceMob.
And the top left combines both; one might cynically say that efforts towards equality help legitimize efforts towards hierarchy, and efforts to maintain hierarchy help secure elite acceptance for redistribution.
And if one were to redefine the NationStates examples to this, one could get the sorts of results I’ve located as examples on the grid.
Basic income is perhaps the biggest example of a bottom-left policy, while regular forms of welfare establish hierarchies between the eligible and ineligible, the “deserving” and “undeserving” and so on, and are more top-left instead. Closed borders and protectionism are topwards, and the rhetorical swindle that gets people to support them paints them as leftwards instead. And patents and copyrights are classic topwards examples.
The most important thing in this is that the axes aren’t what they are traditionally thought to be; the Political Compass is shitty because it bundles them into one single axis as a result of its creators’ biases (its economic axis is all over the place; some questions are bottom-left vs. top-right, others are top-left vs. bottom-right, some implicitly present a false dilemma between top-left and top-right, etc.), and a lot of valid complaints ensue. The most simple formulation would perhaps be: “should redistribution happen downwards, upwards, or both, or not at all?” (Although when presented this way most people would shy away from admitting the positions their policies reveal a preference for)
This is illuminating of the tensions in state intervention to the economy and also perhaps helps understand different perspectives better. The left is suspicious of “economic freedom” because they’re used to it meaning top-right (because statist politicians are usually only offering a choice between top-right and top-left), and the top-left is a really profitable place for huge numbers of people with powerful special interests. And when leftists say “not the Soviet Union” they often mean “bottom-left, not top-left”. And when the Political Compass™ sorts Kevin Carson at the “same” “economy” score as statist corporatists, this model illustrates the massive difference.
(Of course, it gets weird at the edges but works reasonably well at the centre region; and these kinds of simplified models are always only useful around the centre)
And while this seems to resemble the traditional Political Compass™, the “Social” score is nowhere near 1:1 to this. A centrist position on this model of economic axes can encompass quite an astonishing variation in moral and cultural policy, although as they aren’t quite orthogonal either it’s impossible to be politically authoritarian at the bottom right, or genuinely socially permissive at the top left.
Watchmen analogies seem to be kind of a thing in the rationalsphere, and yet for a community that I like and engage with in large part because it takes not only ideas but narratives seriously, that’s willing to consider something like Cognitive Trope Therapy, a lot of them are pretty bad. But then, Watchmen is a deconstruction of the kinds of tropes Yudkowsky based his model of therapy on. It’s a work that asks how those tropes would play out in the real world, which is, on the other hand, sort of the same thing HPMOR purported to do. The rubric of “rationalfic” as an attempt at a more serious, analytical take on the characters and rules of genre is not that much different from the kind of deconstruction Watchmen pioneered, which would explain its popularity… and also make rationalists’ inability to engage with this major antecedent rather interesting. For example…
~
Ozymandias is obviously the figure of smart, edgy utilitarian heroism for… well, Ozy, and I’ve seen him invoked as such on the Dank EA Memes Facebook group. That’s what he presents himself as, when he’s introduced to us as a zillionaire philanthropist (EA?) and deep thinker. His entire narrative arc consists in his being exposed as a straight up egomaniac: the comic is pretty unambiguous on this point, even as it’s ambiguous about the ultimate value of his actions. There’s no utilitarian value to killing all your employees in imitation of an Egyptian pharaoh you felt a wishy washy spiritual connection to on a drug trip. His goal is “conquest not of men, but of the evils which beset them” - conquest is still the defining term here, insofar as one gets the sense that he’d be down for conquest of men if it was still like, a thing civilized people did.
Rationalists reading this will no doubt remember “the Rule of Three…. that any plot which required more than three different things to happen would never work in real life”. Ozymandias’ plan requires way more than that. It requires national governments to reach a conclusion about the nature of the thing that materialized in New York at least resembling the one he intended, despite the lack of any indication as to what the fuck it even is. It requires American intelligence to get accurate information that it’s not a superweapon from the Soviets; for them to believe the information is accurate; for military top brass and politicians to believe them; for arms manufacturers and lobbyists not to smell trillions of dollars and convince the highest-level decision makers to ignore the intelligence and start building their own alien psychic bomb; for America and Russia’s co-operation to be at least partly honest in the ensuing prisoner’s dilemma - we’ve had the chance to watch for almost two years now how this plays out in real life, and while it seems to have worked (for the moment) the fact that it took that long for American and Russia to get out of each other’s hair (sort of), and during that time several international incidents that could have provoked WWIII occurred as a result of rival superpowers/proxies fighting in the same area on the same side, makes the whole gambit, to the reader in 2016, look a lot less foolproof. Maybe there’s steps he didn’t tell us about but he seems to have no idea what to do when the rest of the nonexistent invasion force just… doesn’t show up. And it requires that no hint of this vast conspiracy involving some of the most famous people and superpeople in the world, innumerable labourers, and obscene amounts of money get out to the public, which is what might be about to happen in the last panel of the entire book.
Ozymandias is supposed to be a failure whose edgy utilitarian calculations are undermined by the book’s central theme of the unpredictability and complexity of human existence. I mean, it’s right there in the name. And that brings us to…
IMO, Promethea @socialjusticemunchkin is expecting Doctor Manhattan’s behaviour here to be usual, intuitive and unproblematically representative of Doctor Manhattan as a fixed type of consciousness, when what they’re describing is precisely his arc as a character and the transformation of that consciousness. You don’t have to agree with what Moore says about Doctor Manhattan here, but the objections raised here don’t just pwn him by themselves, because he expects the reader to make them and in that divergence from the concept of Doctor Manhattan as we understand it at the very outset of the book, lies the entire depth and narrative purpose of these events. Moore is staking a particular set of claims on this storyline; he needs to tell the story to demonstrate them precisely because they are counterintuitive.
Here’s Promethea’s “so much better” response:
“In this event, nothing was technically beyond my understanding. I could see the neurons, the axons, the transmitter chemicals, down to every single quark, with perfect clarity and the inevitability was obvious. Yet there is one thing I couldn’t know: the subjective experience of having this happen. This neuron sends this signal to that one, and it outputs actions, speech, thoughts, but I was not her, and from my own position I could never truly comprehend what was going through her head in that moment. Humans are the only thing in this universe that I can’t understand, they are way too fascinating for me, doc out.”
When I read Watchmen, I assumed that was exactly what Moore meant here. I’ll admit that was a kind of interpretive leap of faith I have a tendency to make at least with authors I like: that the literal, statistical unlikeliness of the events in question would sway Doctor Manhattan is every bit as absurd as Promethea observed, to the point that it ceases to be a question of making “a move that vaguely seems like a move AlphaGo might make” so much as making a move that would not even fool an amateur. It violates not even the “underlying logic” but the visible logic of Doctor Manhattan’s superintelligence as set out at the beginning of the book. As Sherlock Holmes says, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. Assuming even a baseline of formal coherence for Doctor Manhattan as a character, a literal reading of this passage is impossible. Furthermore, it wouldn’t be narratively satisfying. It wouldn’t indicate anything having changed in how he applies his superintelligence, how he relates through it to others and the world, as a character, albeit a super-one.
Doctor Manhattan doesn’t say the mere fact of Sally Jupiter having a child with the Comedian is so improbable it made him reassess his opinion of humans: it’s just the catalyst to a longer reflection:
“….in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter, until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged.”
That “you” means precisely “the subjective experience of having [you] happen”. None of that makes any sense except in relation to subjectivity. Obviously, the chances of a sperm reaching an egg are hella good; that’s why that whole system evolved, its redundancies being a plus. In relation to what does the specificity of one sperm against the other even become a meaningful thing to calculate? I mean, Laurie calls Promethea’s exact point here when she says by this standard anyone’s birth could be a “thermodynamic miracle”; but not just people, literally anything happening could be if you jiggle the parameters of what you’re calculating for enough, which would bring us right back around to where we started if subjectivity were not introduced. Experience is introduced in a relation of its own, to a totality - “Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive” is almost Hegelian. Subjectivity is so overdetermined it can’t be thought without dragging in, and simultaneously negating, everything else; operations which, expressed mathematically, soon surpass the astronomical. This may or may not be true but it’s an expression of Promethea’s headcanon more than their strawman.
So what do the circumstances of Laurie’s birth - or any of the events of the story - have to do with this realization? Promethea seems to have forgotten another crucial point in their reading of this passage - Doctor Manhattan already knew who Laurie’s real father was. He more or less brings it to her attention: “I think you’re avoiding something”. When her reaction to this information differs from his, throwing her entire security of self and sense of meaning out of whack while he had long since logically deduced the insignificance of human life from a broad analysis in which this tiny fact meant next to nothing, it does the opposite for him as he is forced to confront precisely why it means so much to her: that her mother (her fragile genetic link to the totality of humanity as a species) “loved a man she had every reason to hate”: a subjective state unimaginable from another state of subjectivity, a gap that cannot be bridged by any higher plane of analysis.
So, I basically agree with the explanation proposed here. But my point is that Moore wrote it badly. The “Assuming even a baseline of formal coherence for Doctor Manhattan as a character, a literal reading of this passage is impossible. Furthermore, it wouldn’t be narratively satisfying. It wouldn’t indicate anything having changed in how he applies his superintelligence, how he relates through it to others and the world, as a character, albeit a super-one.” is precisely what I’m talking about. “Thermodynamic miracle” is a cargo-cult AlphaGo move, but I’m pretty sure that someone with Moore’s writing skills and my “emulate such a mind” skills combined would be able to output a far better string literal to refer to the mindstate object.
“…events with odds so astronomical they’re effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.”
It’s a credit to Moore’s skills as a writer that he’s mostly managed to keep the illusion up except for the part about “thermodynamic miracles” which is even more unsatisfying as it reveals that he’s been basically bluffing his way through. Bluffing well, but still bluffing.
Furthermore, it seems that he’s overreaching, trying to make Manhattan unnecessarily alien, because the correct version is closer to human and there’s basically no reason to do something that makes less sense to him (because “thermodynamic miracles” are bad physics) and Laurie (because a more human-focused approach would be obviously easier to understand). It’s a Spock-type mistake.
Now, one could attempt a saving throw by appealing to the observable phenomenon that a certain type of mind (reporting in myself, among others) reverts to a more mechanical-sounding speech under emotional duress etc. because that’s the native language of that mind, but then there’s the problem that “thermodynamic miracles” is really really unsatisfying as an example of such. It’s not plausible; I can’t see someone who knows their physics that well making such an error.
What I can see is someone trying to emulate such a mind and mistakenly thinking it would output such a thing, because their own understanding of the things behind the statement is un-solid enough to think it would be credible. Which is exactly the thing that ties to my deeper argument; that bridging human mindstates and subjectivities is not trivial, that one risks pretty embarrassing failures if one ignores this and just assumes that different minds must be comprehensible from within the framework of thinking oneself is used to, and that the reviewed book is falling prey to said phenomenon really really hard.
i don’t think straight people will ever truly understand why many of us gay people LOVE being gay and why we would not change ourselves for the world. even the most progressive straight people, deep down, they pity us. they think we’d probably rather be straight if we could. “progressive” people always make the argument that “being gay isn’t a choice, because who would ever choose to be gay??” guess what: i didn’t choose to be gay, buti would. they’ll never understand that once we’re able to accept ourselves and find a safe community, being gay feels amazing. i love being a woman who loves women. and it’s only because of them that i’ve ever had to even think about questioning that.
*blinks* You mean the argument I dislike is disproportionately spread by straight people? That… does make as much sense as it being our own favored argument.
Queer people generally believe it’s okay to be queer and everyone else should be okay with it because… people just want equal treatment. We support it with verbal arguments, but it’s not our true reason, for all that some of us seem to believe it. But the straight people don’t accept it automatically and if they do they need an argument to convince people who don’t. This is complicated by people who think they’re straight being allies who know no one chooses to be gay, turning out to not be straight.
Also naturalistic fallacy or one of its relatives, sigh.
it gets even weirder when this moves down to trans people. being trans does not feel amazing. i hate it. but i would still choose being a trans woman over being a cis man.
perhaps this is connected to my wireheading aversion. i still don’t understand it. trans friends, please let me know whether you would take a pill that relieves all gender dysphoria from your asab permanently, or continue as you are.
I would definitely not take a pill making me a cis man.
No. No no nope not ever never. At least being trans would have to become way more uncomfortable for me to even consider taking the magical cis pill that would wipe away all of that. Cis man/cis woman I don’t care. Still way waaay nope all the way. The only thing I could imagine accepting is adding so many qualifiers on top of “cis woman” that I basically end up with “this exact kind of transfeminine enbie, except afab” which is totally cheating by any spirit of the rules.
My morph is modded and customized, I don’t want to switch it for a stock OEM model.
If you make me a different gender you make me a different person. I would very much prefer not to be killed and replaced with another person, even if they are happier.
I mean I get why people would want to be gay but why on earth would you want to be trans. It’s the worst. Instead of being unhappy that you can’t be X gender, you could not be unhappy. Not being unhappy is good. Like, maybe you can make the case that it’s better for you to be a cis woman than a cis man but I don’t get what could possibly be better about being a trans woman in particular. Queer cred can’t be worth THAT much.
No. Unless “cis enbie” means “I get to have all the cool bodymodding actually bodymodded instead of being boringly born with it” which once again wraps right back to transfeminine enbie.
No matter how much the world hates me for it, or how much harder it has made things, or how much ridicule I have to endure, I know that when I really needed to, I was able to draw a line that I wouldn’t allow the outside world to cross, I was able to assert that ultimately I am myself and make my own decisions, and there are some things I’m just not going to give up or sacrifice.
…
‘They’ do everything in their power to deprive us of the ability to define our genders for ourselves, and to make our own decisions about our bodies. I can certainly say that although abortion is perhaps one of the feminist issues that has the least direct impact on my own personal life, the concept of being in possession and determination of your own body, and how disgusting it is to see people try to take that away from you, is something I know very intimately.
But the thing is, at this point, it would be really difficult for anyone to ever take this away from me. And with every step forward one makes in transition, it becomes more and more difficult for anyone to ever undo your decision. It claims your body as definitively your body. It’s no longer the body that just happened to be assigned to you, it is the body you chose.
…
When I used to look at myself naked I always felt heartbroken, defeated, hopeless and deeply sad. Now I can look at myself and feel proud of who I am and what I’ve made of myself. Proud of having claimed this little collection of flesh and muscle and bones and blood and stuff as my own to be what I want it to be, proud to have defined it rather than letting it define me.
And ultimately I know that nobody else but me is ultimately in possession of it, or the identity I use it to express. If they were, my body would not be what it is.
People who either don’t know or don’t care about the scientific consensus have often claimed that our bodies are normal and healthy, so being trans isn’t something that should be treated physically. But what if we could be more than just normal? Why should we settle for what’s supposed to be good enough, when we have the option to become something even better? Others may see this as choosing to reject what’s “normal”, and in doing so, relegating ourselves to being abnormal. But I don’t see this as a choice between normal and abnormal. I see it as a choice between average, and awesome.
…
Some people might look at my patchwork self of hormone pills and mix-and-match anatomy, and call it monstrous, freakish, an abomination. You know what I call this?
Upgrades.
Since the dawn of humanity, there have been certain features of our existence that were considered fundamental, unchangeable, and definitive of what it means to be human. For almost all of history, it was an unavoidable fact that those who were born a certain sex would remain that sex. Sure, living as another gender had sometimes been feasible in a social sense. But bodily? That was simply impossible – until it wasn’t. Now, that assumption has been pulled out from under us, and some people aren’t happy about that. They want us to go away. They want to be able to go on assuming that every woman they see is a cis woman, regardless of what the reality may be. They want us to deny ourselves this life-affirming treatment for the sake of some empty platitudes about “nature”.
…
Even just a few hundred years ago, this would have been unimaginable. Now, I have the ability to choose this for myself, for no reason other than that this is what I want out of my life. I once called this “a taste of apotheosis”, and that’s exactly what it is. We stand at the frontier of transhumanism, where what was once dismissed as mere futuristic fantasy is now realized in the present via technology. I saw myself growing up into a man, and I did what I had to do to wrench my destiny away from the blind whims of biology. Some people might call this “defying nature”. But that’s not a problem – it’s exactly the point. That option was there for me when I needed it, and I’m not letting it pass by. If they really think that’s an abomination, then I’ll be their abomination. I’ll be their monster. And I’ll know that it was worth it.
And then I also must add that my gender isn’t separable from my general transhumanism, so one would basically have to propose being cis-posthuman (which, frankly, starts to be a deal I’d actually take) as I simply. just. don’t. get. why estrogen would be different from ritalin would be different from provigil, or why orchidectomy would be different from direct neural interfaces would be different from anti-aging. One doesn’t get to call one set of things qualitatively different for me from the other in any justifiable way that doesn’t rely on “one is considered weirder than the other”.
And the bad feeling from not having feature X in my morph is pretty identical now that the most serious parts of firmware incompatibility are sorted out. To me, there is no “gender”; only bodymodding to be more me.
i don’t think straight people will ever truly understand why many of us gay people LOVE being gay and why we would not change ourselves for the world. even the most progressive straight people, deep down, they pity us. they think we’d probably rather be straight if we could. “progressive” people always make the argument that “being gay isn’t a choice, because who would ever choose to be gay??” guess what: i didn’t choose to be gay, buti would. they’ll never understand that once we’re able to accept ourselves and find a safe community, being gay feels amazing. i love being a woman who loves women. and it’s only because of them that i’ve ever had to even think about questioning that.
*blinks* You mean the argument I dislike is disproportionately spread by straight people? That… does make as much sense as it being our own favored argument.
Queer people generally believe it’s okay to be queer and everyone else should be okay with it because… people just want equal treatment. We support it with verbal arguments, but it’s not our true reason, for all that some of us seem to believe it. But the straight people don’t accept it automatically and if they do they need an argument to convince people who don’t. This is complicated by people who think they’re straight being allies who know no one chooses to be gay, turning out to not be straight.
Also naturalistic fallacy or one of its relatives, sigh.
it gets even weirder when this moves down to trans people. being trans does not feel amazing. i hate it. but i would still choose being a trans woman over being a cis man.
perhaps this is connected to my wireheading aversion. i still don’t understand it. trans friends, please let me know whether you would take a pill that relieves all gender dysphoria from your asab permanently, or continue as you are.
I would definitely not take a pill making me a cis man.
No. No no nope not ever never. At least being trans would have to become way more uncomfortable for me to even consider taking the magical cis pill that would wipe away all of that. Cis man/cis woman I don’t care. Still way waaay nope all the way. The only thing I could imagine accepting is adding so many qualifiers on top of “cis woman” that I basically end up with “this exact kind of transfeminine enbie, except afab” which is totally cheating by any spirit of the rules.
My morph is modded and customized, I don’t want to switch it for a stock OEM model.
If you make me a different gender you make me a different person. I would very much prefer not to be killed and replaced with another person, even if they are happier.
I mean I get why people would want to be gay but why on earth would you want to be trans. It’s the worst. Instead of being unhappy that you can’t be X gender, you could not be unhappy. Not being unhappy is good. Like, maybe you can make the case that it’s better for you to be a cis woman than a cis man but I don’t get what could possibly be better about being a trans woman in particular. Queer cred can’t be worth THAT much.
No. Unless “cis enbie” means “I get to have all the cool bodymodding actually bodymodded instead of being boringly born with it” which once again wraps right back to transfeminine enbie.
No matter how much the world hates me for it, or how much harder it has made things, or how much ridicule I have to endure, I know that when I really needed to, I was able to draw a line that I wouldn’t allow the outside world to cross, I was able to assert that ultimately I am myself and make my own decisions, and there are some things I’m just not going to give up or sacrifice.
…
‘They’ do everything in their power to deprive us of the ability to define our genders for ourselves, and to make our own decisions about our bodies. I can certainly say that although abortion is perhaps one of the feminist issues that has the least direct impact on my own personal life, the concept of being in possession and determination of your own body, and how disgusting it is to see people try to take that away from you, is something I know very intimately.
But the thing is, at this point, it would be really difficult for anyone to ever take this away from me. And with every step forward one makes in transition, it becomes more and more difficult for anyone to ever undo your decision. It claims your body as definitively your body. It’s no longer the body that just happened to be assigned to you, it is the body you chose.
…
When I used to look at myself naked I always felt heartbroken, defeated, hopeless and deeply sad. Now I can look at myself and feel proud of who I am and what I’ve made of myself. Proud of having claimed this little collection of flesh and muscle and bones and blood and stuff as my own to be what I want it to be, proud to have defined it rather than letting it define me.
And ultimately I know that nobody else but me is ultimately in possession of it, or the identity I use it to express. If they were, my body would not be what it is.
People who either don’t know or don’t care about the scientific consensus have often claimed that our bodies are normal and healthy, so being trans isn’t something that should be treated physically. But what if we could be more than just normal? Why should we settle for what’s supposed to be good enough, when we have the option to become something even better? Others may see this as choosing to reject what’s “normal”, and in doing so, relegating ourselves to being abnormal. But I don’t see this as a choice between normal and abnormal. I see it as a choice between average, and awesome.
…
Some people might look at my patchwork self of hormone pills and mix-and-match anatomy, and call it monstrous, freakish, an abomination. You know what I call this?
Upgrades.
Since the dawn of humanity, there have been certain features of our existence that were considered fundamental, unchangeable, and definitive of what it means to be human. For almost all of history, it was an unavoidable fact that those who were born a certain sex would remain that sex. Sure, living as another gender had sometimes been feasible in a social sense. But bodily? That was simply impossible – until it wasn’t. Now, that assumption has been pulled out from under us, and some people aren’t happy about that. They want us to go away. They want to be able to go on assuming that every woman they see is a cis woman, regardless of what the reality may be. They want us to deny ourselves this life-affirming treatment for the sake of some empty platitudes about “nature”.
…
Even just a few hundred years ago, this would have been unimaginable. Now, I have the ability to choose this for myself, for no reason other than that this is what I want out of my life. I once called this “a taste of apotheosis”, and that’s exactly what it is. We stand at the frontier of transhumanism, where what was once dismissed as mere futuristic fantasy is now realized in the present via technology. I saw myself growing up into a man, and I did what I had to do to wrench my destiny away from the blind whims of biology. Some people might call this “defying nature”. But that’s not a problem – it’s exactly the point. That option was there for me when I needed it, and I’m not letting it pass by. If they really think that’s an abomination, then I’ll be their abomination. I’ll be their monster. And I’ll know that it was worth it.
I think effective social justice would focus much more than conventional social justice on
1) cause prioritization: there are lots of oppressive power structures and lots of people impacted by them. It seems like the kinds of oppression that get the most attention are going to be those that impact relatively privileged people (because they’re best at discussing in social justice terms the ways that they’ve been harmed, they have access to SJ discourse and SJ spaces, etcetera). See in particular the underdiscussion of class and education privilege in SJ communities. But it’s not as simple as ‘which oppressive system does the most harm’ because of:
2) tractability: A big effective altruist principle is that you don’t tackle the problem that kills the most people, you tackle the problem where you can take strides most rapidly. That often means looking at underserved groups and understudied problems. Heart disease kills tons of people, but it’s not a good EA cause because it mostly affects older Western adults and as a result already has lots of money being thrown at it. Schistosomiasis mostly affects poor children in Asia, Africa and South America, so there’s not much money being spent on it.
Similarly, in social justice, some problems seem much more tractable than others. Abortion is an incredibly important problem, but a very intractable one - we’ve been fighting for fifty years and the landscape has barely changed. Gay rights affects fewer people but turned out to be way more tractable - we’ve achieved a mass shift in public opinion. Which causes are tractable and which aren’t, and how does this affect where we ought to spend our energy? I don’t know, but I’d be really excited for some people to start researching/thinking/writing about this.
3) healthy community norms: when you’re trying to change the world, it’s worth explicitly building a community you expect to be strong enough to handle the blowback, support and protect its own members, and learn from and correct its own mistakes. Effective altruism tries to do this by talking about what has worked for us in building successful communities, practicing good discourse habits and by rewarding and circulating good criticisms of effective altruism. Some ways in which we fail to do this, I think, are by expecting very high standards of argumentation from critics, by getting tied up in nonproductive discussions, and by politicizing some disagreements.
I think effective social justice would need drastically different community norms from standard social justice. It would need to find the balance between welcoming people who disagree with it on some points while also being a space whose members don’t feel like their right to exist is questioned. It would need to figure out how to exclude the toxic and abusive people who thrive in tumblr social justice while not ostracizing anyone who makes a mistake. It would need to manage lots and lots of competing access needs. The best way to do this would be to start small, with communities aspiring to being kinder, intellectually careful, effective spaces, and to report back frequently on what challenges we’ve encountered and how we’ve reasoned about them and how we expect to learn and improve.
4) checking whether what you’re doing works: A while ago, when the protests were happening in Baltimore, several of my friends posted that they felt helpless and were wondering ‘what works?’ I didn’t have anything to tell them. Because the thing is, we don’t really know. Do TV ads change minds? Does door-to-door canvassing? Does confronting your bigoted friends and relatives? Sharing information on Facebook? Donating directly to people in need? We don’t know. All of these things are good, but if you’re poor or have limited free time and want to do the thing that matters most, we have no idea where you can make your voice heard the loudest.
Effective altruists are currently conducting a mass double-blind randomized trial on the effect of Facebook ads on changing peoples’ behavior and beliefs. I want to see effective social justice doing the same thing. I want to be able to say, “the best thing you can do if you live in the U.S. is show up in your Senator’s office” or “we expect that if you share this on your Facebook feed, ten more people will read this article and people who read this article express, a month later, 5% more support for anti-discrimination laws”.
Wait, there are other reasons to be angry? I thought these were basically the only reasons to actually ever get angry and not just irritated…
(of course, the trivial partial explanation is that men do often feel powerless thus angry but don’t recognize it and assign it on something else instead, because the culturally dominant narrative of masculinity is a prison and acknowledging that one feels powerless is approximately one of the biggest no-nos for it)
Other people intentionally trying to provoke you into anger can be quite angering. Not their actions, but their decision to take those actions.
Immediate impression: The screenshot quote from the article is full of it.
The paper isn’t trying to show that women’s anger is different from the anger of men, it is trying to show that, unlikel cultural myths of irrationality, women’s anger is equally as rational as the anger of men.
Secondary impressions:
Synopsis:
Tired: “Like most humans, women (who are human) get angry about injustice” man what else is new.
Wired: “Women get angrier about injustice than men do” Wait what? I am learning new things in this sentence. Unfortunately this sentence is not supported by the paper.
Thesis:
All non-STEM subjects should be banned until they promise to reach STEM rigor.
Supporting Evidence:
I don’t blame the author of the paper, I’m sure she’s writing to the standard expected of her, but by God the paper is poorly arranged from a usability standpoint. A good paper starts with a synopsis that, once read, makes the rest of the paper irrelevant unless you’re looking into the methodology of the researchers or feel a need for an extra-detailed view.
Here’s the synopsis from the paper:
Themes of powerlessness, power, and paradox predominate in this
reflection on more than 15 years of research on women’s anger.
Studies conducted in the United States, France, and Turkey are
highlighted. These studies have negated several myths while illuminating
the general rationality of women’s anger: It is squarely
grounded in interpersonal interactions in which people deny women
power or resources, treat them unjustly, or behave irresponsibly toward
them. The offenders are not strangers; rather they are their
closest intimates. But few women learned healthy anger expression
while growing up. Anger is a confusing and distressing emotion for
women, intermingled with hurt and pain. Its complexity requires
greater attention by researchers, with regard to health-promoting
interventions and to cultural differences, because anger in nonWestern
cultures has seldom been explored.
Having read that synopsis, have you learned anything? I haven’t.
If I’d been asked questions without reading the synopsis, those are all the answers I would have given .
Most damning: Almost (but not entirely) the entire paper could be re-written with the word “human” substituted for “woman.” The paper is, ostensibly, about Women’s Anger but women are, typically, human. Compare a paper about “women’s hands” that spent time talking about the fact that there are five fingers on women’s hands. Hardly revelatory.
Conclusion:
Is “Women’s anger” a worthwhile research subject? Probably. Did this paper teach me anything yes, but not nearly as much as it could by actually doing some comparisons. The thesis is rejected.
Now I am angry at other people’s irresponsibility, but I suppose strict evaluations of such claims are a public good while shitty interpretations are a private special interest efficiently lobbyed for…
Wait, there are other reasons to be angry? I thought these were basically the only reasons to actually ever get angry and not just irritated…
(of course, the trivial partial explanation is that men do often feel powerless thus angry but don’t recognize it and assign it on something else instead, because the culturally dominant narrative of masculinity is a prison and acknowledging that one feels powerless is approximately one of the biggest no-nos for it)
Other people intentionally trying to provoke you into anger can be quite angering. Not their actions, but their decision to take those actions.
"Frankly, I don’t see why we should subsidize sexless men that women don’t like. If you’re that much of a loser and you’re going to try to hold the world hostage with threats of violence if you can’t get a date, we should probably execute you or at least do everything possible to make sure you can’t reproduce."
To be fair, I very much doubt that billions of men would ever wind up involuntarily celibate.
On the other hand, this seems… incredibly unsympathetic to involuntarily celibate people? I do not think it is kind to refer to involuntarily celibate people as “losers” or “men that women don’t like” (IME, most involuntarily celibate people’s problem has nothing to do with attractiveness and is mostly the product of shyness). Threats of violence do not lead to the death penalty in any civilized country. While some involuntarily celibate people are obnoxious, it’s important to note that long-term loneliness fucks people up. Humans are social animals; a fulfilling social life– which the obnoxious involuntarily celibate people do not have– is a basic need as much as food. They deserve our sympathy, not our condemnation. The whole thing smacks of hurting people because they’re weak and I don’t like it.
Endorsed. Also, OP? Literally every expression of Objectivism like this makes people like it less. Whether it’s poor people as in your usual schtick, lonely people as perhaps less expected, etc. Notice the parallels. Maybe, just maybe there are better responses then smugly going, “None of my business la la la”.
Of course, there is a perfectly consistent position that just because we shouldn’t oppress poly people doesn’t mean that it’s not a tragedy that a lot of people end up incel.
For example, homelessness. I don’t think there is anything wrong in using the lowest necessary amount of force to evict a homeless person who tries to nonconsensually place themselves as one’s roommate, or that a homeless person shouting “someone who doesn’t want to be my roommate become my roommate anyway or I will do violence to innocent people aka. anyone except me” deserves a roommate (if anything, I’d bump them down on the waiting list really hard), or that we should scorn people who have five roommates but don’t take a single homeless person to live with them; but I do think that we should try to minimize homelessness in ways that don’t coerce people to be roommates with people they don’t want to be roommates with, such as by replacing bullshit welfare with UBI, reducing artificial limits on the housing supply that render housing inaffordable, etc.
An autonomy-respecting response would be “no, you don’t get to institute monogamy; if you want people to have partners, figure out a way to make them attractive to partners so you don’t need to coerce anyone to be their partners as people would partner with them voluntarily”.
If the PUA and redpill movements were fixed into “a social skills, self-respect, and better ability to satisfy one’s preferences for shy men movement” without the “women are shitty people, scorn dem” part, it would be a very good development. If mainstream feminists stopped ignoring the fact that there are a lot of “incels” who aren’t the shitty people they think of when they hear “incel”, it would be a very good development. If we managed to break down the expectations of hegemonic masculinity that render men who fail at them insecure, low-self-esteemed, and unattractive, it would be a very good development. Breaking down ableism, classism, heterosexism, and other unjust social biases and normativities; and decriminalizing sex work so that people who only want sex don’t need to hoard the relationship opportunities so much, etc. would be very good developments.
Of course, such ways of addressing the issue require thinking while coercive ways (such as “let’s just scorn non-monogamous people” or “let’s just scorn involuntarily celibate people because it’s not like "policy debates shouldn’t appear one-sided” is a Thing in the diaspora or anything" because most coercion is not state coercion) are easy; just take away other peoples’ choice until you get the result you want. And that’s why I have way more respect for someone trying to figure out a clever way to fix social problems with voluntary action, than for the person advocating a coercive solution.
