promethea.incorporated

thetransintransgenic:

argumate:

There is a theory that decreasing lead pollution has reduced crime rates.

Is there a corresponding theory that increased levels of endocrine disruptors in the environment have reduced testosterone levels and crime rates?

If we clean up our act, will we see increased testosterone drive up crime again?

Argumate, are you suggesting that we spike municipal water systems with anti-androgens?

I am suggesting it even if Argumate isn’t.

(via thetransintransgenic)

3 months ago · tagged #shitposting · 104 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

starhalation:

angelicky:

thegestianpoet:

do you ever wonder what people say about you behind your back but like in a good way? like what are the #reviews 

new ask meme: send me these #reviews 👀

Semi related but a nice habit I’ve been trying to get into is if I talk about someone with my friend in real space in a nice way is - right then, or immediately after - go send that person a message about what I said that I liked about them. Maximize #reviews

#reviews sound like a very good idea.

(via shlevy)

3 months ago · tagged #reviews #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 423,337 notes · source: thegestianpoet · .permalink

argumate:

There is a theory that decreasing lead pollution has reduced crime rates.

Is there a corresponding theory that increased levels of endocrine disruptors in the environment have reduced testosterone levels and crime rates?

If we clean up our act, will we see increased testosterone drive up crime again?

(via argumate)

3 months ago · 104 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

Anonymous asked: Do you support Israel?

ilzolende:

socialjusticemunchkin:

ilzolende:

nuclearspaceheater:

wirehead-wannabe:

That question could be interpreted in a lot of different ways, anon. I assume this means something like “do you identify with Team Isreal in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?” Last time I looked into the issue with any degree of effort I can to the conclusion that both sides had fucked up a lot, and that determining who has the more legitimate claim to a piece of land is often a hopeless quagmire.

If it’s something like “do you support the continued existence of Israel,” then yeah, I’d rather not force people to live through a change in regime.

If you mean “should the Jewish population get to have its own ethnic state,” I lean toward yes. “But then shouldn’t Europeans and Christians get that too?” I don’t think so.

I’ve been thinking recently about how atomic communitarianism works for majority and minority populations. Consider gay bars. Nearly everyone who doesn’t just oppose homosexual behavior outright seems to think they have at least some useful function. Whether or not they should get to exclude cishets is more controversial, but most progressives lean toward yes. Opponents will obviously point out that allowing this but not allowing cishet-only bars seems unfair. Supporters reply that “the whole world is a safe space for cishets!” This last reply is true for two reasons that I think we don’t distinguish between often enough.

Firstly, our society is still rather homophobic, even if this varies in degree, so gay and trans people have an interest in being protected from that sort of thing that cishets don’t. Secondly, unless there’s some very surprising and scientifically interesting demographic shift, gay and trans people will always be in a minority, and will never make the whole world a queer-only space in the way that cishets often can even without trying. This also happens to be true of Jews, since Judaism is by and large a non-evangelistic religion.

Thinking about this some more, I think I’d be okay with letting majority groups have their own dedicated spaces as long as there a limit to how much total space they take up. I am, for example, perfectly okay with the existence of Vatican City, and I wouldn’t have a problem with them declaring themselves to be a Catholics only zone. The problem is when exclusive spaces get big enough that you can’t avoid them or they take up all of a given category. So straights-only bars would be okay with me as long as they only made up a small minority of the bars that were out there, and as long as they didn’t end up being used for business meetings to keep out gay people or whatever. This is obviously a much harder standard to reach in a small town than in a big city. I’d be much more comfortable having bakery #3757 in New York City refusing to cater for gay weddings than Joe’s Baked Goods which serves the entirety of Podunk.

I think this works as a meta-level rule, but I’m not sure how confident I can be endorsing it yet. I’d love to hear critique on it.

An interpretation of that rule could be, “you’re only allowed to defend yourself after you’re already losing.”

“New defensive measures with costs are only justified if existing ones don’t seem to work, and current ones with costs may be unjustified if they’re redundant” seems reasonable?

Like, right now there is a problem with anti-Semitism in some regions of Europe. Historically, there have been other problems with anti-Semitism in some regions of Europe. I would suggest that there are some responses that would be justified in the late 1930s that are not justified today.

Also, if Denmark wants to let in everyone who formally converts to Evangelical Lutheranism (specifically, whichever kind Den Danske Folkekirke practices) and signs some agreement to pay the church tax [1] and maybe even show up a certain amount, that would probably not be that bad? (It, uh, also wouldn’t be very good for nationalism whatnot, though, because I’m pretty sure lots of existing Christians in countries that are worse than Denmark would be happy to convert to a slightly different sect if that meant they could live in Denmark. This is the natural consequence of having Christianity be the majority religion.)

And I’d be essentially fine with being banned from entering Vatican City, but I doubt sedevacantist groups would be.

Also, if you want to defend cisgender heterosexuality, isn’t there kind of an issue with plastics going on? IDK, it’s not my priority, but I thought there was. And if you’re looking to defend the institution of marriage, again, I doubt straight-only bars will help as much as other measures. You might want to do a comparison study on the effects of legalizing covenant marriage, although there’s an obvious confounder in that states with the sort of people who want to legalize covenant marriage are the ones in which it is legal.

[1] What do Denmark and the historic Ottoman Empire have in common? Christians have to pay a special tax in both regions, although I’m sure Denmark would say this isn’t about pressuring people to deconvert.

First rule of the plastics thing club is you don’t speak of the plastics thing to people who might be interested in stopping it. Dumping finasteride into the water supply is only suitable as a backup plan.

Also, Finland also has a special tax for christians. Not supposed to make them deconvert, but revealed preferences and all (but we could use a lot of deconversion because the state still gives a shit about what the church says and that’s not okay). Another thing it has in common with the Ottoman Empire is that one can construct an argument for either them being the legal heir of the Roman Empire (along with at least Russia and possibly kind of Austria as well but that one is stretching it).

I’m in favor of “being nice to gay and trans and so on people and letting them do stuff” (I’m a girl dating a trans girl, I maaaaay kind of sort of definitely be biased here), but I don’t see the continued high rate of those traits as a terminal value. (Not that I’m criticizing you if you do! It’s at least as good a terminal value as a continued noticeable autism rate! But it’s not mine.) Depending on how much emotional distress is inherently part of dysphoria versus how much is a societal issue, less of that might even be good? IDK.

Assume postgender transhumanist morphological freedom utopia. People’s bodies and minds will be modified to match their preferences very easily, as soon as they express such preferences. (Technologically this isn’t *that* far off even today for rich first-worlders; puberty blockers, SARMs, SERMs, and regular HRT exist; surgeries and stem cell treatments are getting better all the time etc.; if only the goddamn government and the goddamn cisgender-cishumanist dominated society got out of the fucking way)

Thus, people’s phenotypes will be what they want them to be. Studies show that trans people who have access to puberty blockers and supportive environments are perfectly well-adjusted compared to the cisgender population, so the inevitable level of suffering from dysphoria in a properly managed environment is very low.

On the other hand, trans correlates with autism, it correlates with intelligence, it correlates with transhumanism, it correlates with all the awesome ingroupy stuff and neural diversity. If there is a shared cause, such as biologically androgynous brains being more trans and more awesome, increased transness increases the awesomeness of society as well as phenotypical diversity. If there isn’t, increased transness only increases phenotypical diversity.

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.

Thus I think that Yudkowsky’s guesstimate of a 20% transgender base rate is very good news. Ideally I’d like to see about 30% of the population “transitioning” in the sense of doing some “cross-gender” body-modding, and maybe 5-10% going “all the way”, to achieve sufficient diversity. Just like I think the current autism rate in the general population is too low for optimal society. Or in other words: the Bay Area except that hormone-modifying drugs, exotic surgeries and novel social roles are just as normal and easily available as botox is in Hollywood (or so I’ve heard).

3 months ago · 43 notes · source: wirehead-wannabe · .permalink

nonternary:

as a twitchy ambiguously-badbrains Silicon Valley nerd, I don’t really know what to make of the whole radical-belief-that-people-are-women thing we’re all apparently doing this week

It’s the transgenderence explosion. A chain reaction. The right was right. The growth curves are exponential. I wanna be in the FOOM where it happens. People are solving the gender gap in a very Silicon Valley transhumanist way. “Be the change you want to see in the world” and all that. Besides, being enbie is always an option, no need to stay within the binary.

3 months ago · tagged #where did all these brainclones suddenly appear from #shitposting · 72 notes · source: nonternary · .permalink

unknought:

Seriously, although I doubt that EY’s estimate of 20% holds for the general population, the clustering effects and “trans contagion” make me pretty convinced that the frequently quoted “0.3% of the population is trans” is way, way too low, at least if by “trans” we mean “would come out as trans under the right circumstances, and not regret it”.

At my rural Midwestern public high school, my graduating class of 70 people contained 3 who have since come out as trans, that I’m aware of. This doesn’t have the same kind of selection effects that Yudkowsky’s social circle does; a priori, I think there’s no reason to expect my graduating class to have more trans people than any other population in the country. And none of the three of us were related, so genetic explanations for clustering can be discounted.

If we take my graduating class as an experiment testing the null hypothesis "at most 0.3% of people are trans" we can reject the null hypothesis with p < 0.002. I know, I know that’s not how real science works, but… still.

0.3% has already been shown to be excessively low; the current lower bound is roughly 0.7% and predictaby increasing over time:

“based on two population-based surveys, one of 1,832 Flemish persons and one of 2,472 sexual minority individuals in Flanders. In the general population, gender ambivalence was present in 2.2 % of [AMAB]* and 1.9 % of [AFAB]** participants, whereas gender incongruence was found in 0.7 % of [AMAB] and 0.6 % of [AFAB participants]. In sexual minority individuals, the prevalence of gender ambivalence and gender incongruence was 1.8 and 0.9 % in [AMAB] and 4.1 and 2.1 % in [AFAB participants], respectively. With a current Flemish population of about 6 million, our results indicate a total of between 17,150 and 17,665 gender incongruent [AMAB people] and between 14,473 and 15,221 gender incongruent [AFAB people] in Flanders.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25588709

3 months ago · 7 notes · source: unknought · .permalink

binghsien:

Another political myth I’d love to put to bed: That European politicians are somehow _way more leftist_ than US politicians.

The answer is, as always, it depends on the issue.

On the issue of provision of social services to citizens? Yeah, Western Europe is way to the left of Elizabeth Warren.

In the issue of immigration and immigrant’s rights? Europe is well to the right of Donald Trump.

Free Speech? We’re well to the left of not just Europe, but the whole globe.

Freedom of Religion? Good lord most European States include tithes in your taxes. Europe passes minaret bans and hijab bans and burns down synagogues.

Women’s rights? Really varies country by country.

So. It depends on the issue. A lot.

(via wirehead-wannabe)

3 months ago · tagged #this goddamn continent #bitching about the country of birth #nothing to add but tags #i really like how simply categorizing this signals my opinion #very effectively · 907 notes · source: binghsien · .permalink

Those Two Tribes

In Rationalist Diaspora pretty much everyone is familiar with the concepts of “Red Tribe” and “Blue Tribe”, and probably at least some of the counterarguments as well, such as “there are more than two kinds of people”. Such criticisms are obviously true, but what’s interesting is the way there seems to kind of actually be two kinds of people, or more accurately, a spectrum which replicates surprisingly consistently in various places and on which most people are positioned somewhere in between but a certain polarization with its archetypes nonetheless appears.

For example, I’m a very Blue person, with moderately Blue parents, born into a thoroughly Red shithole in the Bible Belt of Finland. I was immediately able to recognize this meta-level pattern despite the object-level manifestations differing quite a lot. Around here they are called “Red-Green” and “Blue-White”; I’ll just use “U” and “R” from now on.

Tribe R is relatively uniform, so much that it makes sense to call it a tribe. They yearn for the mythical “yhtenäiskulttuuri” (homogeneity culture) of before-tribe-U-ruined-it. They are white; working class, lower middle class, or petty bourgeois; and more likely men. They vote for the Fascist Party, the Redneck Party, or the Christian Theocrats. They love national symbolism.

Tribe U is better described as a vague coalition of everything that isn’t tribe R. They range from communists to civilized conservatives; precariat to bankers. Disproportionately women. The Green Party is the central example but the Party Formerly Known As The Communist Party, the Swedish Party, the Social Bureaucratic Party, and the Crony Capitalist Party are tribe U as well; support for gay marriage is pretty much exactly the dividing line. They tend to be vaguely embarrassed by national symbolism.

R treats the military as a matter of identity, and enthusiastically supports conscription. They are either militaristic neutral or pro-Russia. U treats the military pacifistically or pragmatically; they support disarmament or NATO.

R opposes the EU on principle; sovereign countries’ rights is a big deal, borders should’ve been closed to foreigners and immigrants even before the arrival of a few thousand brown people made it widely popular, and getting back the old national currency is important. U is pro-EU, or “pro-the-ideas-of-EU-but-not-the-implementation”. Borders should be more open, and immigration easier. Refugees shouldn’t be turned away even if they aren’t eligible for protection.

R is mercantilist; U believes in either free trade, or fair trade which is effectively an extension of foreign aid.

R believes in authority, discipline, obedience, conformity, and tradition. R thinks the problem with today’s kids is their relative inexperience of physical abuse. R wants criminals to be punished severely. U is against all that. U errs on the side of giving people a second chance, and their control of the criminal justice system has so far kept it absurdly lenient in Finland (the one thing I can actually be proud of in this country!). R wants to legislate conformity; U wants to legislate tolerance.

R is xenophobic, U is neophilic. R is fundamental attribution error, U is typical mind fallacy. R thinks people are inherently what they are, while U is prone to blank-slatism.

R is nazism, U is stalinism. R is genocide, U is eugenics. R calls you slurs, U is extremely politically correct while buying a house as far away from you as possible because of “property values”. When an islamist terrorist attack happens, R is very eager to deport all Muslims while U apologizes for causing it (if you’ve seen the “bad Monty Python sketch” post about a European liberal frustrating an islamist by being like “no no no it’s all our fault" it’s exactly how U operates and I’m U enough to be like “yes, I can see why it would appear funny when presented this way but I can’t see why one should not do it").

U correlates with wealth, and U wants to share the wealth. R thinks U’s wealth should be used locally within the country because people should take care of their own kind first. U thinks refugees are more of its own kind than R-tribers. R complains of poor people living on the taxpayer’s money while themselves subsisting on massive regional and agricultural subsidies, paid by U cities.

R feels threatened by their enemy U which wants to destroy their way of life. U treats tribe R as a public memetic health problem to be solved, and wants to eradicate it like hookworm infections. U thinks the only reason people are R is a bad environment, lack of education, poverty, etc. and R should be cured by removing the cause.

R is characterized by a frightened hostility, while U is characterized by a smug superiority. U thinks U is obviously the right way of being, and can whip out a lot of ~science~ and ~statistics~ to support ideas like “children should not be physically abused”. R can only say “fuck you” because it knows it can’t beat U in its own game. U is higher-IQ but also often reluctant to concede that IQ means anything.

False consciousness is a very U idea. When U leftists are sympathetic towards poor Rs, they still show a fundamental disrespect towards R values by explaining that R is only racist because they are downtrodden by global capitalism, and without global capitalism they would turn into the proper multiculturalist U-leftists they should be, and that’s the most U thing ever. An informed adult willingly not being U is simply impossible.

Something seems to be going on, and it’s far deeper than soy latte vs. NASCAR. Some of it is obviously class, but there is still quite a lot that isn’t. It’s definitely not left vs. right because both tribes have their own internal left-right distinctions. “Openness to experience”, aka liberalism, is a big factor; but why would liberalism cause a “we know better than you” attitude. I’m slightly actually confused.

3 months ago · 21 notes · .permalink

Anonymous asked: Do you support Israel?

ilzolende:

nuclearspaceheater:

wirehead-wannabe:

That question could be interpreted in a lot of different ways, anon. I assume this means something like “do you identify with Team Isreal in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?” Last time I looked into the issue with any degree of effort I can to the conclusion that both sides had fucked up a lot, and that determining who has the more legitimate claim to a piece of land is often a hopeless quagmire.

If it’s something like “do you support the continued existence of Israel,” then yeah, I’d rather not force people to live through a change in regime.

If you mean “should the Jewish population get to have its own ethnic state,” I lean toward yes. “But then shouldn’t Europeans and Christians get that too?” I don’t think so.

I’ve been thinking recently about how atomic communitarianism works for majority and minority populations. Consider gay bars. Nearly everyone who doesn’t just oppose homosexual behavior outright seems to think they have at least some useful function. Whether or not they should get to exclude cishets is more controversial, but most progressives lean toward yes. Opponents will obviously point out that allowing this but not allowing cishet-only bars seems unfair. Supporters reply that “the whole world is a safe space for cishets!” This last reply is true for two reasons that I think we don’t distinguish between often enough.

Firstly, our society is still rather homophobic, even if this varies in degree, so gay and trans people have an interest in being protected from that sort of thing that cishets don’t. Secondly, unless there’s some very surprising and scientifically interesting demographic shift, gay and trans people will always be in a minority, and will never make the whole world a queer-only space in the way that cishets often can even without trying. This also happens to be true of Jews, since Judaism is by and large a non-evangelistic religion.

Thinking about this some more, I think I’d be okay with letting majority groups have their own dedicated spaces as long as there a limit to how much total space they take up. I am, for example, perfectly okay with the existence of Vatican City, and I wouldn’t have a problem with them declaring themselves to be a Catholics only zone. The problem is when exclusive spaces get big enough that you can’t avoid them or they take up all of a given category. So straights-only bars would be okay with me as long as they only made up a small minority of the bars that were out there, and as long as they didn’t end up being used for business meetings to keep out gay people or whatever. This is obviously a much harder standard to reach in a small town than in a big city. I’d be much more comfortable having bakery #3757 in New York City refusing to cater for gay weddings than Joe’s Baked Goods which serves the entirety of Podunk.

I think this works as a meta-level rule, but I’m not sure how confident I can be endorsing it yet. I’d love to hear critique on it.

An interpretation of that rule could be, “you’re only allowed to defend yourself after you’re already losing.”

“New defensive measures with costs are only justified if existing ones don’t seem to work, and current ones with costs may be unjustified if they’re redundant” seems reasonable?

Like, right now there is a problem with anti-Semitism in some regions of Europe. Historically, there have been other problems with anti-Semitism in some regions of Europe. I would suggest that there are some responses that would be justified in the late 1930s that are not justified today.

Also, if Denmark wants to let in everyone who formally converts to Evangelical Lutheranism (specifically, whichever kind Den Danske Folkekirke practices) and signs some agreement to pay the church tax [1] and maybe even show up a certain amount, that would probably not be that bad? (It, uh, also wouldn’t be very good for nationalism whatnot, though, because I’m pretty sure lots of existing Christians in countries that are worse than Denmark would be happy to convert to a slightly different sect if that meant they could live in Denmark. This is the natural consequence of having Christianity be the majority religion.)

And I’d be essentially fine with being banned from entering Vatican City, but I doubt sedevacantist groups would be.

Also, if you want to defend cisgender heterosexuality, isn’t there kind of an issue with plastics going on? IDK, it’s not my priority, but I thought there was. And if you’re looking to defend the institution of marriage, again, I doubt straight-only bars will help as much as other measures. You might want to do a comparison study on the effects of legalizing covenant marriage, although there’s an obvious confounder in that states with the sort of people who want to legalize covenant marriage are the ones in which it is legal.

[1] What do Denmark and the historic Ottoman Empire have in common? Christians have to pay a special tax in both regions, although I’m sure Denmark would say this isn’t about pressuring people to deconvert.

First rule of the plastics thing club is you don’t speak of the plastics thing to people who might be interested in stopping it. Dumping finasteride into the water supply is only suitable as a backup plan.

Also, Finland also has a special tax for christians. Not supposed to make them deconvert, but revealed preferences and all (but we could use a lot of deconversion because the state still gives a shit about what the church says and that’s not okay). Another thing it has in common with the Ottoman Empire is that one can construct an argument for either them being the legal heir of the Roman Empire (along with at least Russia and possibly kind of Austria as well but that one is stretching it).

3 months ago · tagged #support your local supervillain #nordic country hatedom ingroup #finland is swastika country · 43 notes · source: wirehead-wannabe · .permalink