I seem to have accidentally caused quite a shitstorm overnight, so I want to make it extremely clear that SUPERVILLAIN STUFF IS NOT TO BE TAKEN AT FACE VALUE. IT IS A COMEDIC EXAGGERATION OF MY ACTUAL BELIEFS FOR THE SAKE OF A FICTIONAL PERSONA AIMED TO SIMULTANEOUSLY IMFORM AND AMUSE THOSE PEOPLE WHO AREN’T DISTRESSED BY SUCH THINGS. I apologize for the confusion.
So what are my actual beliefs on the matter? I do think that various interesting ways of deviating from the norm are less common presently than I’d like to see. I do not endorse exposing people to hormonal medications against their informed consent. If given the choice between two possible people, I would prioritize the one which is more different from other people unless there is substantial incompatibility in terminal values etc.
I consider this a natural consequence of a computationalist model of identity. If one runs a bit-perfect copy of me, the world gains no extra value at all. If one runs an otherwise perfect copy of me with just a few small changes, the world gains very little extra value because there is no magical limit where persons turn discrete. Thus given a fixed amount of instances of persons, value is maximized by having them be spread across as wide an area of mutually-compatible-person-space as possible. Furthermore, adding a new source of diversity not only introduces such people to the universe, but also introduces other people to such people as well, making their experiences more different from experiences previously had. Also, if diversity has value, enough diversity outweighs some quality of life, and other such concerns, further matching my moral intuitions that creating an autistic person who posts about strange things on tumblr is as okay as creating a neurotypical person, but creating a person suffering from extreme depression is less desirable than creating a less suffering person.
The expression “magical gender creatures” was a reference to a comment on Yud’s facebook post on the suspected “20% rate of women”, on the observed massive gender diversity in the region. No implications about trans people being inherently magical or whatever intended. The part about clones was intended in a more literal fashion: it would be a dramatic loss of value if people converged on the most normative pattern even if it did increase hedons. I can see how the context wasn’t optimally expressed and could be taken as judgement of the readers’ life choices and I’m sorry for not being more careful to make it clear enough in the first place so such things could’ve been avoided.
If given the choice between two possible people, I would prioritize the one which is more different from other people unless there is substantial incompatibility in terminal values etc.
If you don’t mind me poking at this a bit, a few questions:
I assume that, given the chance to save, from whatever contrived thought-experiment fate you like, either a pair of identical twins or one of the twins and a third, unrelated person, you would pick the second option. How far does this preference extend? Would your answer be any different if the twins had radically different life experiences? If the third person was different from the twins in a way you found personally unappealing, but not morally wrong? If the third person could be considered to have a lower quality of life?
That’s the region where things become complicated. On difference alone the unrelated person would be tie-breaker, assuming they also have an equally close person who would suffer from their death as much as the living twin. On the other hand identical twins are rare and thus would get priority even if they resemble each other a bit more. And it’s not very strong on this level because people are individually different from each other; the aggregate of thousands to millions of experiences is where I start considering such things relevant.
Personally unappealing shouldn’t matter as long as they don’t impose their unappealingness upon others because I prefer people to be operating on a meta-rule that we don’t discriminate on that. But if they do materially impose their values on others I get uncomfortable because on one hand the meta-rule of no discrimination on political beliefs, on the other hand the world needs more people who stick to their own business and less people who coercively restrict bodily autonomy etc.
Getting to less vague territory this suggests I should value a neo-nazi who doesn’t vote, do political advocacy, or have kids, over a moderate who similarly abstains from them, and it feels really weird but is also a bullet I’m perfectly willing to bite.
I don’t want to be the judge of people’s quality of life and whether theirs is worth living (I know mine would fairly be considered lower than that of many, but it also feels eudaimonic in a way that kind of resembles Dark Souls; I may not be in bliss as much as many others but I feel much more alive than I think I would in a more conventionally happy and easy life), so I’d go on the priors of what I know about their preferences and err on the side of equality.
This kind of ethics is really hard and very least-convenient-worldy. In practice my value for diversity mostly manifests in very enthusiastically defending people’s independence from normativities, morphological freedom, consensualism, and advocating for the awesomeness of abnormal existence, and the sort of libertarianism which is basically “don’t hurt others, and we really should make sure everyone has the basic things they need and there are no obscene hierarchies where I throw more money on what’s basically a toy than millions can afford to spend in an entire year, and we need to figure out the problem with kids, but other than that feel free to be as disgusting as you want as long as I can opt out from being subjected to it (yes, I tentatively support LGBTQ- or immigrant- or judaism- or islam-free small communities as long as they don’t begin to dominate society and the problem with innocent children born into them is sorted out)”. I don’t get distressed over the existence of people with such kinks as long as they only do it with other consenting adults and don’t form conspiracies that begin monopolizing opportunities. All I ask for return is that I get to do the same; I can even agree to credible mechanisms for ensuring my freaky transhumanism genuinely doesn’t threaten their continued existence. Diversity isn’t a one-way street and having some consensually traditional conformist people is good as long as we can mutually honor each other’s desire to not be assimilated.
I seem to have accidentally caused quite a shitstorm overnight, so I want to make it extremely clear that SUPERVILLAIN STUFF IS NOT TO BE TAKEN AT FACE VALUE. IT IS A COMEDIC EXAGGERATION OF MY ACTUAL BELIEFS FOR THE SAKE OF A FICTIONAL PERSONA AIMED TO SIMULTANEOUSLY IMFORM AND AMUSE THOSE PEOPLE WHO AREN’T DISTRESSED BY SUCH THINGS. I apologize for the confusion.
So what are my actual beliefs on the matter? I do think that various interesting ways of deviating from the norm are less common presently than I’d like to see. I do not endorse exposing people to hormonal medications against their informed consent. If given the choice between two possible people, I would prioritize the one which is more different from other people unless there is substantial incompatibility in terminal values etc.
I consider this a natural consequence of a computationalist model of identity. If one runs a bit-perfect copy of me, the world gains no extra value at all. If one runs an otherwise perfect copy of me with just a few small changes, the world gains very little extra value because there is no magical limit where persons turn discrete. Thus given a fixed amount of instances of persons, value is maximized by having them be spread across as wide an area of mutually-compatible-person-space as possible. Furthermore, adding a new source of diversity not only introduces such people to the universe, but also introduces other people to such people as well, making their experiences more different from experiences previously had. Also, if diversity has value, enough diversity outweighs some quality of life, and other such concerns, further matching my moral intuitions that creating an autistic person who posts about strange things on tumblr is as okay as creating a neurotypical person, but creating a person suffering from extreme depression is less desirable than creating a less suffering person.
The expression “magical gender creatures” was a reference to a comment on Yud’s facebook post on the suspected “20% rate of women”, on the observed massive gender diversity in the region. No implications about trans people being inherently magical or whatever intended. The part about clones was intended in a more literal fashion: it would be a dramatic loss of value if people converged on the most normative pattern even if it did increase hedons. I can see how the context wasn’t optimally expressed and could be taken as judgement of the readers’ life choices and I’m sorry for not being more careful to make it clear enough in the first place so such things could’ve been avoided.
I find diversity to be a terminal value in itself; a million weird magical gender creatures of the Bay Area are far more valuable than a million identical suburban clones with blue eyes, blonde hair and 99% perfect boring normative bodies and personalities, even if the subjective quality of life of the latter was slightly higher and they both caused the same amount of utility to outsiders.
My value as a human being is not predicated on how unique I am, fuck you very much.
In context, she was clearly talking about the creation of new people, rather than the moral worth of existing people. And it seems perfectly intuitive to me that diversity ought to be prioritized in addition to subjective quality of life: for instance, it seems true to me that having people with red hair and brown hair is superior to having only people with brown hair, and that continuing to have introverts is a good idea even though extroverts are happier.
Yes, Ozy’s interpretation is correct. I don’t want the future to be tiled with copies of the “most optimal” people and find it really creepy when some vulgar utilitarians are like “let’s eradicate all deviation because this one neurotype is the happiest”.
It doesn’t apply to already existing people, other than that I do endorse attempts to increase diversity in next generations and am strongly opposed to normativities that would aim to diminish human variance, although not enough to be willing to coerce (as reasonably understood) people to not do such things if that’s what they actually want for themselves. (Basically the same as with gender; I want to destroy the mechanisms that pressure people to conform but don’t think any specific person is wrong to do gender-normative things.)
(Also, something like this seems like a possible solution to the issue of adjusted life-years devaluing people with disabilities; if a discontinuity between now and possibilities is allowed, I could count losing my legs for 30 years as a loss of X preference-adjusted-life-years and thus a thing to prevent, but a paraplegic person’s life-year would still be treated as just as valuable as mine. The naive formulation probably breaks somewhere but it seems like something like that would catch the intuition that groups X and Y should be treated as equally valuable even if it’s also worthy to prevent members of group X from becoming members of group Y if they don’t want to.)
multiheaded1793 asked: Concept: don't celebrate the birth of more trans women, because most are being born into countries that are really fucking bad for them, and, despite all your bravado, you currently can't do jack shit to change things for the better.
a human in e.g. pakistan or indonesia being born AMAB and trans instead of AMAB and cis is nothing to celebrate, it’s a condemnation to suffering and terror.
That’s true.
Because my previous posting hadn’t made it clear enough: births of trans women are to be celebrated in utopian bubbles, which are an outlier. The rest of the world is shitty and trans women should not be born into shitty places. In fact, trans women should be taken out from shitty places and into utopian bubbles.
However, the claim that I’m unable to do anything about it is exaggerated. I just bought 20 bednets and statistically speaking 0.1 of those is going to a trans woman. She may not have a utopian bubble, but she will have 0.1 bednets which is better than zero bednets.
In addition, those bednets will increase the material prosperity of the people who receive them, and evidence suggests that material prosperity is linked to places not being completely shitty to trans women.
Furthermore, the reduced infant mortality will hasten a demographic transition ultimately reducing the number of trans woman births in shitty places, even if nothing else of it truly helps.
Also, this community has a proven track record of removing trans women from shitty environments into less shitty ones.
gymnosperm asked: What's the plastics/finasteride thing? Is it about anti-androgens leaching out of plastic and into food/water, or is my brain making things up?
Many common forms of plastics contain xenoestrogens which fuck people’s endocrine systems up. Like:
I have done Literally 0 Research, but that seems to be the rumor I hear, yes.
some plants (like the cereals and the legumes) are using estrogenic substances possibly as part of their natural defence against herbivore animals by controlling their male fertility.
Some of the effects are actually bad, but EDCs have been suspected of also being partially implicated in the recent increases in the number of transgender people, which is a very good thing. One compound, DES (which was not solely an environmental xenoestrogen but was specifically given to pregnant people) seems to possibly have made children extra-likely to be trans or intersex, and thus it wouldn’t be too far-fetched that other similarly acting compounds might do the same.
Finasteride a drug that’s used to treat androgenic baldness, prostate issues and cancer. Trans women, or people who are even suspecting that they might be trans women, are commonly advised (at least in the finnish underground HRT scene) to use it to prevent hair loss because the benefits can be dramatic while the harms are usually insignificant.
Insignificant for trans women, that is. Pregnant people aren’t supposed to eat finasteride. In fact, people who might be pregnant aren’t supposed to eat finasteride. In fact, people who might be pregnant aren’t even supposed to touch finasteride. Because finasteride inhibits DHT metabolism it could have similar effects to 5-alpha-reductase deficiency which is known to be a very reliable way of producing trans men (or, to be more accurate: people who would, in our conceptualization, be men who were assigned female at birth). It’s classified as a birth defect and finasteride is pregnancy class X because doctors are no-fun-allowed spoilsports having such a condition in a western society with tight-assed conformists fucking up everyone’s shit insufficient awareness of intersex people and gender diversity, and where the status of medical technology to alleviate relevant problems is YGM, is not likely to be as fun as not having such a condition.
Now the obvious conclusion for any aspiring supervillains is that finasteride is potent enough to risk fucking fetal endocrine systems up on a statistical level if pregnant people even touch it, and that there are a lot of potential routes to administer it to pregnant people as a part of a privately-run human diversification program (the exact details shall be left as an exercise to the reader because I want some barriers to entry in my field thank you very much), and thus anyone interested in diversifying human sexual dimorphism towards polymorphism would be well-advised to investigate universal finasteride supplementation as a possible high-impact intervention.
Of course, there would be some resistance, because people are unreasonably concerned about their precious bodily fluids understandably wary about being administered substances that cause “birth defects” without their consent, and finasteride is not quite as obviously useful as lithium in the drinking water, but at least it’s most likely to be less bad than lead so whoever would do such a magnificent terrible thing would still be less evil than the people responsible for the clusterfuck at Flint. (Note to self: Copenhagen interpretation of ethics makes attempting to provide finasteride-supplemented-water as a free (as in beer) alternative to lead-supplemented-water an extremely predictable PR disaster and gets your ass in trouble with both Captain Planet and Captain Cistem simultaneously. Don’t waste more time thinking about that one.)
In a social space, we make assumptions about other people that, when wrong, limit our capacity to get what we want out of it. This is me outlining some assumptions I (and, I assume, others) tend to make here on tumblr that don’t apply to me and exhorting whoever feels like it to point out what doesn’t apply to them. Here we go:
When I discover a new person on tumblr with great content, I’m tempted to like all the things that I like as I archive binge. But I feel like the other person might find me creepy or get annoyed by the barrage of notifications if I do that, so my standards for what gets liked increase steeply as I read to avoid those problems. But when other people notice my blog for the first time, like a handful of posts, and then stop, I think, “Go on, you can like more if you want! I won’t think you’re creepy! I love feeling validated! Like all the things!”
If I’m reading through someone’s blog and find a post I want to reblog with a response or even just like, if it’s more than a few days old I assume that proceeding will make the poster think I’m stalkerish or that I’ll annoy them with old news. But if someone were to like or reblog one of my older posts I would probably appreciate it and not think of the person as stalkerish. The ratio between decent posts and embarrassing posts gets worse the further back you go, as does the overall quality, but there are a few gems back there IMO.
If someone posts about struggling with something and I empathize with them about it, I’m tempted to like the post. But I don’t want to give the impression that I’m saying, “I love it when you suffer!” so I usually don’t. But if someone likes one of my depressed whining posts, unless I have some good reason to believe they are hostile towards me, I always interpret that as an expression of empathy/sympathy.
I often feel like posting lots of depressed whining posts but I hold back because I assume that they are kinda annoying to people. However, I like it when other people make whiny posts about their problems because it makes me feel less alone. Yes, the fact that other people are suffering in addition to me makes me more sad, but your problems won’t go away just because you avoid posting about them. I’d prefer engaging the “we’re all in this together” instinct over suffering in silence.
Sometimes I consider messaging someone out of the blue in an attempt to start a conversation or friendship. I don’t, because what if they have too many humans in their life already (maybe it would be a useful cultural norm to put social saturation in our blurbs next to the preferred pronouns and such) and what if I’m so average I’m boring and what if I’m not knowledgeable enough about the things they’re interested in so we don’t have anything to talk about? I don’t have too many humans in my life. And if a boring person who wasn’t knowledgeable about the things I’m interested in messaged me out of the blue I probably wouldn’t think badly of them.
all of these things apply to me too.
applicable to me
saaaaame
First rule of applicability club: you do talk about applicability club so other potential members know it exists.
we think of gribbly gods from Deep Time as residents of the undersea trenches because our sensory organs aren’t adapted to it and the limbs are different there but actually continental crust is generally much older than oceanic crust, So
above, there is a place where the water is very thin, so thin that it can’t be used to move through; your body has to pull itself along as it’s pulled by gravitational forces. the thinness of the water is very much like the spaces between the stars, and your body would push out against it until you burst. the ground, which everything hugs, is older there - aeons older
it is bathed in energy emitted from the decay of “fires” (do not ask) sent out from unimaginable distances - all that lives there lives off the putrescence of distant holocausts
Basically, microwaves operate at 2.45 GHz because that’s the most efficient wavelength for heating food. A small band from about 2.4 - 2.5 GHz was carved out and set aside for “idk, microwaves and shit,” and ended up being just about the only convenient spectrum left available for unlicensed devices to operate on by the time WiFi was invented.
TL;DR WiFi has an obnoxious noisy roommate because all the fancy licensed transmitters got the quiet rooms first.
Since this seems to be a thing, here’s how a promethea acquired a social life:
> Be born to the shittiest R-tribe shithole that ever R’d > feelsbadenbie.png
Depression +1 Self-esteem -1
> Be too good for school > In other words, have your childhood completely wasted on trivial bullshit because nothing is a worthy challenge > Not even being the best in [redacted] even though you thought you totally sucked in it; others simply sucked even more
Achievement unlocked: Less incompetent than everyone else Cynicism +1
> First experience with pornography: /d/ and /u/ on 4chan > sm0lethea gets extremely unrealistic expectations about future sexual parters, such as “they might be really pretty lesbians, some of whom have penises”
Lesbianity +1
> Finish school one year younger than most, thus being too young for some [redacted] awesome stuff. Finland: not even once.
Cynicism +1
> Go to university at 17 because you didn’t have the opportunity to finish school several years earlier than most > A surprise ADHD and anxiety disorder appears
Depression +1 Self-esteem -1
> Find LessWrong back when the sequences were still fresh > Be so jelly > Nonetheless manage to win free utility by realizing you’re not a man while still young, androgynous and neotenic > Can pinpoint the exact location of “The 12 Virtues of Rationality” which made you basically be like “okay I know where this is heading so I might as well go there straight away”
Lesbianity +1
> Doctors gonna doctor > In other words, bullshit gatekeepers > Get your own meds illegally
Cynicism +1 Depression -1 Will to Power +1
> Customs steals your meds
You have acquired the following item: Criminal Record Achievement unlocked: Fight da power Edginess +1
> Yell at doctors until they give you meds > It’s not very effective > Buy meds on the street
Edginess +1
> Get a private doctor who only cares about money to give you meds
Cynicism +1
> Find a person, who due to her lack of known tumblr presence shall be simply called E, on the internets > She’s in America, neither has money to fly across the pond > Agree to have cuddles when either has money and opportunity
Lesbianity +1
> Go change your name > The state be like “lol nope” > Forge some documents to change your name > The state be like “okay then”
Cynicism +1
> Go change your legal gender and have your gonads cut off > State-sanctioned monopoly clinic is like “lol nope, not ryal wymyn ynough” > (Previously on state-sanctioned monopoly clinic: “of course you can tell the truth, it won’t hurt you”)
Depression +1 Cynicism +1
> Yell at people online
Edginess +1 You have acquired the following item: Fan Club
> Wait, what’s that, how did this happen > Yell at some other people
Will to Power +1 You have acquired the following item: Political Following Depression -1 Self-esteem +1
> Wait, what’s that, how did this happen > Find yelling at people less interesting now, read from its downsides on SSC
Edginess -1 Achievement unlocked: update on evidence
> Go back to state-sanctioned monopoly clinic, yell at them and threaten to sue them, and the state, and everyone > Suddenly extremely cooperative > Get a lot of scaremongering about how nobody will let disgusting enbies change gender or be operated even if they have the mandatory doctors’ letters > Find out nobody outside the GIC gives a shit or even knows the difference between F64.0 and F64.8 and they were just bullshitting you as always
Cynicism +1
> Get random message on the internet > It’s E, she has money and opportunity and is coming for the cuddles now > No contact in over 2 years > No activity in my account in over 2 years > She’s nuts > Her coworkers think she’s nuts > She thinks she’s nuts > There’s a pretty strong consensus on that > She’s a quantum physicist, a rocket scientist and a silicon valley programmer > I’m a NEET > nopressure.png
use Fan Club use Political Following use Criminal Record
> Somehow she’s impressed by my stories > Wait, what’s that, how did this happen
Self-esteem +1
> Read stuff on SSC > “But as a proud black transgender triracial inverse bisexual anti-monogamite…” > There apparently is someone like that, lemme check them out this sounds entertaining > Wow
You have acquired the following items: GWWC Pledge; Basic Comprehension of Yiddish; Knowledge of Your Obvious Nemesis; No Regrets
> E comes to visit > Proves to be an actually existing person
Lesbianity +1
> On the second morning we’re discussing importing me to SF > Programmers make how much money over there
You have acquired the following item: Future Prospects
> SF is also the place where all the cool people live > They are actually existing persons > I am going to be where the cool people are > There is only one rational way to respond to this situation > nopressure.png > Stories are currency, right? I’ll just bargain for popularity because they seem to be worth something
use Knowledge of Your Obvious Nemesis use Political Following use GWWC Pledge You have acquired the following items: Tumblr Account; 2 Party Invitations You have gained the following superpower: Assertiveness and Confidence Self-esteem +1
> justasplanned.png > Go to SF > Meet the people > #it me everywhere
You have acquired the following items: Social Life; Place That Feels Like Home; Immigrant Status You have gained the following superpower: Programming Skills You have lost the following attributes: Depression Self-esteem +1
> Return to Finland > Illfare state bullshit everywhere > Desperate to get back to SF ASAP because everything is better there
Will to Power +1 You have leveled up the following superpower: Programming Skills
