socialjusticemunchkin:
so this is what getting strawmanned by a High-Status Ingroup Person feels like
there goes my productivity for the rest of the week
I was even using the goddamn content warnings
and what happened to the idea that the truthfulness of even uncomfortable ideas may be dispassionately evaluated? or does it not apply when the uncomfortable idea is ~triggering~ to a High-Status Ingroup Person? but wouldn’t that mean that we’re censoring the possible truth of “sometimes nastiness may be the most effective way of achieving some goals, even when accounting for side effects” for the sake of ~political correctness~?
if this is some kind of a deliberately ironic slytherin trick to punish me for expressing ideas one finds possibly indirectly harmful, then I must congratulate on the cleverness; but if it isn’t, I’d like to note that claiming that I’m a threat to people’s physical safety is nasty and exactly the same thing High-Status Ingrop Person was supposedly against when I said it might’ve been utilitarianly positive in the Bailey affair
@jbeshir said: I think they’re inclined to read the worst into such things, having had bad experiences that make it important to them that a repeat experience/the same experience happening to others is clearly and solidly rejected. I think you’re okay and still a pretty high status ingroup person yourself.
I mean…yes, I definitely do get where they’re coming from, and I would be lying if I claimed that a part of my reaction wasn’t about “ohfuckohfuckohfuck I’ve miscommunicated and triggered or at least severely upset someone who doesn’t deserve such things”. But there’s a certain irony in how this mirrors the way this stuff works “out there”; people don’t communicate optimally, others react to it, the reactions further cross yet another barrier of communication registers and sans active pumping against entropy shit escalates. And thus people can end up being effectively nasty even without active intent to be so.
If I wanted, I totally could spin this into something extremely destructive and evil, but instead I’m going to assume absence of adversarial activity and try to be constructive and effective instead; there’s a reason I’m a munchkin, not a warrior.
It’s a matter of morality (albeit not such a strong test of morality itself as I’m surrounded by people who would totally see through deliberate escalation and very justifiably scorn me very hard as a consequence; and there’s something awesome in knowing that the ingroup is capable of sustaining such norms to a reasonable degree which gives me faith in humanity in general) because I care more about doing right than about being perceived as being right.
When I fuck up in communication, I want to fix it, not double down on it and conclude that others are evil and wrong and trying to censor ideas they don’t like and I’m a flawless saint of purity and justice and impartiality. PR and image are tools, not terminal values.
I suppose this kind of “treat the rest of the world as constant and yourself as the only variable” is uniquely slytherin secondary but it also makes a gigantic amount of sense and it explains why the bias method outputs slytherin secondary to me because I honestly can’t imagine how any other approach would be right. “Don’t whine at the uncaring void, figure out how the void works and hack it to output the results you want.”
And I suppose this illustrates one principle I consider really important. I don’t fault @slatestarscratchpad for reacting the way he did, because I know the reasons why (and even if I didn’t, I could try to guess that there probably is something behind it, which is my default assumption that I try to always maintain). And I don’t fault myself for being shaken at the reaction and reacting. And the instant I can collect myself I set out and fix what went wrong because that’s the right thing to do. And that’s the thing Bailey fucked up epically in.
If I continued things the way I see Bailey as having continued, doubling down on the thing that upsets people very badly, and writing a shitty book about it and portraying Scott and others in a very negative light and misrepresenting everything to push a terrible narrative, people would yell at me and be nasty to me and they would be totally right to do so. But instead I’m going to be a positive example, to show that there’s a better way of dealing with such things and that Bailey indeed screwed up horribly and failed at his duties. (I won’t lie and claim that the way I can spin this to “I’m like Bailey and you’re like James and I hope you sympathize with her position a bit more now, or at least understand why she did what she did” isn’t incredibly convenient and amusing.)
I find it really hard to believe Bailey didn’t have a situation where he could’ve noticed the effects of his claims and checked that maybe there is something substantial to people’s objections; if he really never noticed such a moment, perhaps he should’ve been studying ants instead of heavily marginalized humans who are hurt in many ways by the people around them, because the latter warrants a degree of sensitivity he and others of his kind seem constitutionally incapable of displaying.
And I guess that’s what my core argument is: Bailey didn’t treat people as people, and in doing so lost some of his own being-treated-as-person protections as well. And that’s the mistake I’m very much intending to avoid. And it has nothing to do with the scientific side of the ideas themselves, but instead everything to do with how they are handled.
2 weeks ago · tagged #discourse cw #meanness cw · 19 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink
so this is what getting strawmanned by a High-Status Ingroup Person feels like
there goes my productivity for the rest of the week
I was even using the goddamn content warnings
and what happened to the idea that the truthfulness of even uncomfortable ideas may be dispassionately evaluated? or does it not apply when the uncomfortable idea is ~triggering~ to a High-Status Ingroup Person? but wouldn’t that mean that we’re censoring the possible truth of “sometimes nastiness may be the most effective way of achieving some goals, even when accounting for side effects” for the sake of ~political correctness~?
if this is some kind of a deliberately ironic slytherin trick to punish me for expressing ideas one finds possibly indirectly harmful, then I must congratulate on the cleverness; but if it isn’t, I’d like to note that claiming that I’m a threat to people’s physical safety is nasty and exactly the same thing High-Status Ingrop Person was supposedly against when I said it might’ve been utilitarianly positive in the Bailey affair
2 weeks ago · tagged #discourse cw #uncharitable cw #meanness cw · 19 notes · .permalink
And the Bailey affair continues…
Fucking huge extra disclaimer for those incredibly dense people who haven’t picked up on it yet:
I don’t harass people. Not even Bailey. In fact, I think the correct choice for people in such situations is to not harass people; even if some political tit-for-tatting were warranted (most of the time it even isn’t), other people are already doing enough of it (most likely way too much).
But I sometimes don’t condemn people who do, because actively condemning is a choice as well. Rationalists are the discourse equivalent of peacekeepers, and knowing when to intervene, how, and which side benefits from it, is relevant. I won’t waste time and effort rushing to the principled defense of Bailey (although I’d possibly rush to a principled defense of people whose actions are less over the line), as people are doing enough of it already.
@slatestarscratchpad reblogged a previous post of mine with the following commentary:
“Digusting pervert” is your term, not Bailey’s. Bailey said that a phenomenon *has a basis in sexuality*. If you think anybody who does something for sexual reasons is a disgusting pervert, that’s your problem and not his.
And when the public hears “has a basis in sexuality” they will think “disgusting perverts”. Partially because they already think trans women are disgusting perverts to begin with. I find this absurd coming from the person who literally wrote “The Virtue of Silence”. And from the person who wanted people to shut up about NrxaB for PR concerns.
Your idea that he is calling anybody a liar is equally unfounded. One of the most basic ideas of psychology and psychiatry is that people don’t necessarily know their own minds. Sometimes this can become very complicated. For example, some people have pseudoseizures - seizures which are not caused by epilepsy, which occur at moments when they need to get out of a situation quickly, and which are what most people would consider “fake” - but most neurologists believe this is not conscious dissembling but the subconscious mind responding to stress in the best way it knows how.
A lot of science involves attributing behavior to people who might not approve of those attributions. For example, many people claim that homophobes are secretly gay. The evidence for this is currently mixed. I assume some homophobes are angry about this - should they be able to harass, doxx, and try to fire the scientists who think this? Some people use Implicit Association Tests to show that lots of people who don’t think they’re racist are actually racist; these tests have recently been found to be sketchy. Should all the scientists who supported them be killed? Or should we just turn their lives into a living hell? Why even have psychology at this point?
Bailey’s book is not virtuous science. It’s politics. It’s a deliberate attempt to push an idea to the mainstream, not via the usual procedures which have institutional restraints on them, but by specifically routing around those restraints.
I’ll just quote the book a bit:
Heterosexual men who want to be women are not naturally
feminine; there is no sense in which they have women’s souls. What
they do have is fascinating, but even they have rarely discussed it openly.
One cannot understand transsexualism without studying transsexuals’
sexuality. Transsexuals lead remarkable sex lives. Those who
love men become women to attract them. Those who love women
become the women they love. Although transsexuals are cultural hot
commodities right now, writers have been either too shallow or too
squeamish to give transsexual sexuality the attention it deserves. No
longer.
Most people—even those who have never met a transsexual—
know the standard story of men who want to be women: “Since I can
remember, I have always felt as if I were a member of the other sex. I
have felt like a freak with this body and detest my penis. I must get sex
reassignment surgery (a “sex change operation”) in order to match my
external body with my internal mind.” But the truth is much more
interesting than the standard story
Two different types of men change
their sex. To anyone who examines them closely, they are quite dissimilar,
in their histories, their motivations, their degree of femininity,
their demographics, and even the way they look.
To anyone who has seen members of both types and who has
learned to ask the right kinds of questions, it is easy to tell them apart.
The most interesting reason why
most people do not realize that there are two types of transsexuals is
that members of one type sometimes misrepresent themselves as members
of the other. I will get more specific later, but for now, it is enough
to say that they are often silent about their true motivation and instead
tell stories about themselves that are misleading and, in important respects,
false.
The two types of transsexuals who begin life as males are called
homosexual and autogynephilic. Once understood, these names are appropriate.
Succinctly put, homosexual male-to-female transsexuals are
extremely feminine gay men, and autogynephilic transsexuals are men
erotically obsessed with the image of themselves as women.
Although some elements
of Cher’s story are very common to this kind of transsexual
(especially the erotic cross-dressing), others (such as the wearing of
fake vaginas) are unique to her. At least I have never met other transsexuals
who admitted to this. Nevertheless, I think that Cher is a wonderful
example of the second kind of transsexualism, less because she is
representative than because she openly and floridly exemplifies the
essential feature of this type, which is autogynephilia
In my experience, most laypeople are happy to accept the “I’m a
woman in a man’s body” narrative, and don’t really want to know
about autogynephilia—even though the preferred narrative is misleading
and it is impossible to understand nonhomosexual transsexualism
without autogynephilia. When I have tried to educate
journalists who have called me as an expert on transsexualism, they
have reacted uncomfortably. One said: “We just can’t put that into a
family newspaper.” Perhaps not, but then they can’t print the truth.
There is one more reason why many autogynephiles provide misleading
information about themselves that is different than outright
lying. It has to do with obsession. Something about autogynephilia
creates a need not only to enact a feminine self, but also to actually
believe in her
True acceptance of the transgendered requires that we truly understand
who they are.
According to this narrative,
transsexuals want to change their sex because their sense of self
disagrees with their bodies, not because they have any unusual sexual
preferences that depend on a sex change. While the first part of this
explanation sometimes may be true, the latter is not. It should be clear
by now that the “gender, not sex” part of the transsexual narrative is
false for autogynephiles
I have devised a set of rules that should work even for the novice
(though admittedly, I have not tested them). Start at zero. Ask each
question, and if the answer is “Yes,” add the number (+1 or -1) next to
the question. If the sum gets to +3, stop; the transsexual you’re talking
to is autogynephilic. If the sum gets to -3, she is homosexual.
This isn’t science. This is politics. This is condescending bullshit from someone who thinks he’s “helping” and, thanks to his high status in society, can get away with it without regard for the consequences he’s causing. And the scientific parts are bad and certainly do not warrant such a confident presentation in the form of a confused amateur ethnography. Even when accounting for the fact that this was written 10 years ago. For example, did nobody think to check cis women for autogynephilia too, to check on whether they’re actually picking up just regular common female sexuality instead of some “paraphilia”? Or maybe consider the fact that trans women exist outside gay bars and support groups, and that the ones found in those might not be representative of the whole population?
Even if I disregard all this “women are men” stuff and focus on the object-level claims instead of shibboleths, this has “bullshit alert” scrawled all over it. When you claim people are obsessed with something, that they are lying to themselves and everyone else, that they sort really neatly into two categories, etc. you better have some really solid evidence and most importantly you need to show that you understand the alternative claims and are actually able to rule them out with sufficient confidence. And when you sort neatly, it introduces another level of irresponsibility because this stuff seldom works that way so you need to overcome an extra amount of prior skepticism. TMWWBQ did not demonstrate any of this.
Those people are getting away with terrible science because of the differential positions of trans people vs. academicians. It’s brutal, cynical status psychology. (Of course, Bailey isn’t thinking that he’s consciously doing a hack job, he just doesn’t feel the need to test his theories properly because there was no pressure to be scrupulous when dealing with trans people because people got away with all kinds of unbelievable bullshit.)
Many people claim that homophobes are secretly gay. And it’s one thing to do science and write something like “I observed a correlation with homophobic attitudes and signs of arousal from homoerotic material” and a completely different thing to write a book titled ‘The Man Who Hates His Sexuality: Why All People Who Dislike Homosexuals Are Secretly Gay’. Current evidence doesn’t warrant writing the latter, and if someone did it and it became really popular and widely accepted I’d consider it a big problem in the world and would express my disapproval in suitable contexts and be very understanding of why some people would react with nastiness. If you engage in outright memetic warfare, don’t complain if memetic warfare engages you.
I think Bailey’s theories are likely false, but science is full of false theories. The whole point of science is that we expect there to be dozens of false theories for every correct one, and the correct one will eventually win out. If everybody who proposes a false theory gets harassed, science can’t progress - and I’m sure that your harassers will be *super diligent* in making sure they only firebomb the homes of scientists whose theory is *genuinely false*.
And if you think anybody who attributes a phenomenon to something you don’t like deserves to be hurt and harassed, I think you’ve excluded yourself from the category of people who can discuss things maturely, and that any community that cares about epistemic integrity needs to exclude you for their own safety - not just the safety of their truth-orientation, but for the physical safety of their members. I think this is a super super super basic rule and I am surprised we cannot manage it.
I think there’s a significant confusion here. First of all, I’m not advocating firebombing anyone (Except the publishers of ‘The Nihilist’s Cookbook’ because when the entire human race is on the line I don’t give a shit. So people better not publish amateur-accessible guides to creating apocalyptic bioweapons.). And I’m not advocating that anyone should personally engage in this kind of activism on the margin, because what the world needs is less of it, not more. All I’m saying is that in a sufficiently shitty situation a thing that would otherwise be really shitty might be the least shitty option available, and that I cannot say with confidence that the world would’ve been a better place if Bailey hadn’t been reacted to with nastiness.
Obviously we’d all be better off in a world without nastiness.
And refraining from nastiness even when nastiness seems like a good idea is pragmatically a pretty good universal heuristic.
But in this utterly broken world there may be specific situations where some group engaging in nastiness would result in better outcomes than them abstaining from nastiness, even when accounting for the allure of the dark side. It would be highly suspicious that there would never ever be such a case, because nastiness is most closest analogous to violence and there are cases where violence is obviously the best answer.
And to continue the analogy, just because I recognize that violence is sometimes the least worst option doesn’t mean that in practice anyone would need to fear for their safety near me, because it’s effectively impossible that such a situation would actually arise in civil interaction between people who treat each other like people (self-defense being the most obvious candidate, which doesn’t have a clear equivalent on the nastiness side because nastiness is a lot more difficult to precisely define; but if you write a mean misrepresenting book about my ingroup, I’m going to write a mean misrepresenting book review about it).
But I can easily see ways by which nastiness could be used to improve the world. For example, if there was a sufficiently coordinated source of nastiness that could reliably retaliate against those who initiate nastiness without excessive bias in favor of specific sides, it might act to reduce the total nastiness. If doxxers got doxxed, if death-threaters got threatened, harassers harassed etc., we’d probably see less doxxing, threats and harassment. (In practice this is difficult because the smart ones always do it anon)
And when one looks at responses such as this one, the comparison to firebombing is even more baffling. Is James being nasty? Yes, absolutely. Is it an unwarranted level of nastiness? I can’t say so. It illuminates the way people experienced Bailey’s book, and some of the objections that didn’t get to academia because we don’t have access to academia. Such neat typologies are incredibly prone to confirmation bias. Bailey’s sample was ridiculously biased. Blanchard’s institution is notorious for abusiveness. Garbage in, garbage out, and in a better world TMWWBQ would’ve been dismissed as the trivial hack job it was, based on shitty interpretation of shitty data, but we don’t live in that better world and the book is a representative of a wider incredibly shitty trend where cis academicians talk over trans people, erasing all the inconvenient ones in pursuit of their pet theories, and systematically get away with it. And we pay the price, sometimes with our lives.
There’s a massive institutional failure here, and I can’t say that flawless politeness would necessarily be the best option. It would be nice if it was, but there’s a certain suspicious convenience to that idea. I have seen way too much of the phenomenon where polite objections get dismissed and ignored, and only anger gets people to notice that maybe there’s a problem (people are clockwork, and respond to emotional appeals differently than to abstract arguments, news at eleven), to believe that complete politeness by everyone would always be the best way to achieve things. (And once the angry ones have stretched the overton window, the polite ones suddenly appear reasonable and make compromises and everyone credits the polite ones when in reality it’s the nature of the “good cop, bad cop” game which got stuff done. Yes, I’m cynical, but my background is that of a politician, not an academician, and I find it a mistake to assume that the rules of academical ingroup civility would automatically be the most effective ones everywhere. Just like it would be a mistake to assume the rules of effective politics would be conductive for effective truthseeking. But effective truthseeking doesn’t happen in the arena and style TMWWBQ was made for and in.)
Against that backdrop, I can’t consider a nasty article to be a massive sin.
(And to make it clear, writing nasty articles and trying to get someone discredited is the type of nastiness I’m talking about, not doxxing or threats, because there’s a chance that this might’ve been missed by the illusion of transparency. (This is going to be really embarrassing if it all ends up having been about that one.))
2 weeks ago · tagged #discourse cw #nastiness cw · 12 notes · .permalink
Submitted: (I’m defaulting submissions to anon unless you specifically ask me otherwise)
As an a.m.a.b. person with a lot of complicated gender feels who is cis but somewhat plausibly might not have been if I had been braver and read different books in a different order, I see the autogynephilia/erotic-location-target-error idea as a fundamentally plausible proposed mechanism that does an excellent job of explaining my experiences, and I’m really grateful that people like Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence have written about it as a thing that exists, even if the stronger two-type theory of MtF transsexualism in general is surely false. I understand that people with serious dysphoria rather than my vague, un-acted-upon wishes have very good reasons to not want to draw excess attention to my existence (and the existence of people like me but brave enough to do more about it) because the cis will abuse the knowledge to deny them their rights. But is the vitriol at someone writing a popular-level book that discusses the hypothesis really necessary? Can’t we agree to some sort of truce?—I’ll respect your right to speculate about the etiology of your self-identity, if you respect mine (and Anne Lawrence’s)?
I don’t have a beef with people who think AGP exists, my beef is with people who claim the two-type theory is anything other than thorough bullshit. The problem with BBL is the way they try to coerce millions of people into their own typologies. Anne Lawrence certainly knows herself better than I do, but Anne Lawrence has zero right to claim she knows me better than I do, unless she has some pretty damn bulletproof evidence (spoiler: she doesn’t).
The sides in this war aren’t “AGP don’t real” vs. “AGP sometimes real”, the sides are “treating people as people” vs. “erasing inconvenient people”. BBL fall squarely in the latter one, (as do some shitty trans activists, such as truscum, HBS etc.) and I think the truce you’re talking of looks like exactly the very thing I’m trying to advocate: treat people as people, don’t erase their experiences with some simplistic typology.
And if one were to assume that such a truce was in force, TMWWBQ would be an act of aggression against its terms. It doesn’t say “this is a thing which sometimes exists”, it says “millions of people are lying when they say they aren’t this”. (And those who erase the experiences of AGPs are similarly in violation of the terms, and should also be scorned.)
2 weeks ago · tagged #discourse cw #submission · 3 notes · .permalink
I’m trying to dodge the asexuality discourse that seems to be starting elsewhere by vagueblogging about it here and hoping the links dont get linked too strongly into it. But there are two things that really really bug me about it.
1. “Asexuals aren’t oppressed”
what the fuck happened to intersectionality and the idea that you can’t simply discern people’s position in the hierarchies of bullshit and bias just by “summing” their individual positions and the idea that the hierarchies modulate each other so strongly that they sometimes even invert and all that complexity which the very word itself originally was about? oh yeah, people who don’t rtfm but instead rush into action too eagerly
but anyway, evidence; from now on, anyone claiming that asexuals aren’t marginalized in at least some ways relative to otherwise comparable normative heterosexuals needs to have a damn good explanation for this data
2. “If you aren’t marginalized, you are an oppressor who benefits from oppression”
what the fuck there are very few people who benefit from this bullshit system absolutely and not just positionally; it’s like the idea that I as a western person benefit from closed borders, well fuck no, my position in the hierarchy of “where one was born at” is better than the position of most people, but if there was no hierarchy even I would be better off
the idea that the world can easily be turned into a zero-sum game of “us” vs. “them” is certainly tribally appealing and easy but it’s not true, it’s not kind, and it’s not necessary. I’m usually averse to arguments like “you aren’t helping your cause” because oftentimes people actually just need to vent and shit and aren’t 100% focused on doing the Optimally Effective Social Justice Advocacy™, but goddamnit this is my cause and people who do this thing are hurting me and my cause and my equality and my people by giving pro-marginalization people free ammunition
like, which one do you think would actually be more likely to make people interested in solving the problem? “There are no win-win gains, you must lose a fuckload of a huge lot” vs. “you know, even you’d win if we did this thing, even though we aren’t really focused on you but instead on the people who are worse off”?
it’s like fucking primitivists; if you force me to choose between ecocidal extermination instincts or social darwinism, yeah I’m on team grey. if you force me to choose between transhumanism and a ridiculous ~sustainability~ “””utopia””” where tech is rationed and people die happily at 80 ~for the environment~ and no progress can ever happen because ~infinite growth is impossible on a limited planet~, you shouldn’t be too surprised if I’d rather try techno-utopianism instead
1 month ago · tagged #sj cw #rant cw #discourse cw · 13 notes · .permalink