From: M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2018 16:00:19 +0000 (-0800) Subject: check in X-Git-Url: http://534655.efjtl6rk.asia/source?a=commitdiff_plain;h=04755567abb867500ec7d405341d8acc3a99ba21;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git check in --- diff --git a/content/2018/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes.md b/content/2018/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes.md index 63cf3d3..70d9811 100644 --- a/content/2018/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes.md +++ b/content/2018/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes.md @@ -89,7 +89,7 @@ But _my life_ is not hate speech. If being a good person means submitting to soc I'm certainly not _trying_ to say things that will hurt people—_least_ of all people who are mostly just like me but read different books in a different order and are living out a pretty decent approximation of _my wildest fantasy_. -But if you try _not_ to say things that will hurt people, [you](https://devinhelton.com/2015/03/23/standing-up-to-offense-bullying/) [end](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/22/ot9-the-thread-pirate-roberts/#comment-160689) [up](http://lesswrong.com/lw/59i/offense_versus_harm_minimization/3y0k) conceding the entire future history of world to people on the basis of their being colonized by mind-viruses that make them the _easiest to hurt_. +But if you try _not_ to say things that will hurt people, [you](https://devinhelton.com/2015/03/23/standing-up-to-offense-bullying/) [end](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/22/ot9-the-thread-pirate-roberts/#comment-160689) [up](http://lesswrong.com/lw/59i/offense_versus_harm_minimization/3y0k) conceding the entire future history of the world to people on the basis of their being colonized by mind-viruses that make them the _easiest to hurt_. I don't want to live in that world. diff --git a/content/drafts/blegg-mode.md b/content/drafts/blegg-mode.md index 23794db..fbcd7bf 100644 --- a/content/drafts/blegg-mode.md +++ b/content/drafts/blegg-mode.md @@ -18,8 +18,8 @@ Susan rolls her eyes at you, but apparently doesn't care enough to argue about i Further investigation reveals that 85% of adapted bleggs don't glow in the dark and do contain palladium ore—both rube-typical chracteristics. Furthermore, the minority of adapted bleggs that glow and contain vanadium also seem more similar to typical bleggs in other ways: for example, by being somewhat more successfully egg-shaped and having more realistic _faux_ fur than the non-glowing, palladium-containing adapted bleggs. -As the days go on, you find yourself taking notice of adapted bleggs—now that you're aware of their existence, they're not too hard to spot (although you have no way of knowing how many sucessfully-passing adapted bleggs you're missing), and you need to take them to the sorting scanner so that you can put the palladium-containing ones in the palladium bin (formerly known as the _rube bin_). +As the days go on, you find yourself taking notice of adapted bleggs—now that you're aware of their existence, they're not too hard to spot (although you have no way of knowing how many sucessfully "passing" adapted bleggs you've missed), and you need to take them to the sorting scanner so that you can put the palladium-containing ones in the palladium bin (formerly known as the _rube bin_). You ponder what this matter has taught you about the nature of categorization. (This job is so boring that you need to think about philosophy to keep your mind occupied while you sort.) You can think of two main lessons— -First, +First, \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md b/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md index 99e7cf1..ecb0c85 100644 --- a/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md +++ b/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md @@ -48,19 +48,20 @@ This is true in a tautological sense: if you deliberately gerrymander your categ But it's not very interesting to people like rationalists—although apparently not all people who _self-identify_ as rationalists—who want to use concepts to _describe reality_. -Alexander gives an account of a woman whose ability to function at work was being disrupted by obsessive-compulsive fears of leaving her hair dryer on at home, whose problems were solved by the simple expediency of taking the hair dryer with her when leaving the house. Given that it _worked_ to resolve the woman's distress, we shouldn't care that this isn't how problems that are categorized as _obsessive-compulsive disorder_ are "supposed" to be treated, and Alexander argues that the same should go for accepting transgender identity claims: if it _works_ for resolving people's gender dysphoria, why not? +Alexander gives an account of a woman whose ability to function at work was being disrupted by obsessive-compulsive fears of leaving her hair dryer on at home, whose problems were solved by the simple expediency of taking the hair dryer with her when leaving the house. Given that it _worked_ to resolve her distress, we shouldn't care that this isn't how problems that are categorized as _obsessive-compulsive disorder_ are "supposed" to be treated, and Alexander argues that the same should go for accepting transgender identity claims: if it _works_ for resolving people's gender dysphoria, why not? -The problem is that there are _significant disanalogies_ between leaving a hair dryer in the front seat of one's car, and agreeing that gender should be defined on the basis of self-identity. Most significantly: the former has no appreciable effects on anyone but the person themselves; the latter affects _everyone who wants to use language to categorize humans by sex_. The words _man_ and _woman_ [are top-20 nouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English#Nouns)! People need those nouns to describe their experiences! +The problem is that there are _significant disanalogies_ between leaving a hair dryer in the front seat of one's car, and collectively agreeing that gender should be defined on the basis of self-identity. Most significantly: the former has no appreciable effects on anyone but the person themselves; the latter affects _everyone who wants to use language to categorize humans by sex_. The words _man_ and _woman_ [are top-20 nouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English#Nouns)! People need those nouns to describe their experiences! -Though it might be only a small cost to be socially required to say _woman_ and _she_ to refer to someone whom one would otherwise be inclined to call a _man_—and to let them in to any corresponding sex-segregated spaces, _&c._—that cost needs to be aggregated across everyone subject to it, like so many dust specks in their eyes. Imagine if the patient in the hair dryer story were obsessed with the fear not just that _she_ might accidentally leave her hair dryer plugged in unattended, but that that _someone_ might do so, and that it would burn down the whole city. In this slightly modified scenario, insisting that everyone in the city put their hair dryers in the front seat of their cars doesn't look like an appealing solution. +Even if it's only a small cost to be socially required to say _woman_ and _she_ to refer to someone whom one would otherwise be inclined to call a _man_—and to let them in to any corresponding sex-segregated spaces, _&c._—that cost needs to be aggregated across everyone subject to it, like so many dust specks in their eyes. Imagine if the patient in the hair dryer story were obsessed with the fear not just that _she_ might accidentally leave her hair dryer plugged in unattended, but that that _someone_ might do so, and that it would burn down the whole city. In this slightly modified scenario, insisting that everyone in the city put their hair dryers in the front seat of their cars doesn't look like an appealing solution. It's important to stress that this should _not_ be taken to mean that transgender identities should necessarily be rejected! (Bad arguments can be made for true propositions just as easily as false ones.) As Alexander briefly alludes to late in the post ("I could relate this [...] to the various heavily researched apparent biological correlates of transgender"), a _non_-question-begging argument for accepting trans people as their target gender would appeal to the ways in which this is really is a natural categorization. The pre-verbal, subconscious, [System 1](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dual_process_theory&oldid=820860981#Systems) process by which we notice someone's features (breasts, facial hair, voice, facial structure, gendered clothing or grooming cues, any number of [subtle differences in motor behaviors](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/) that your perceptual system can pick up on without you being consciously aware of them, _&c._), mentally categorize them as a _woman_ or a _man_, and use that category to guide our interactions with them, isn't subject to conscious control—but, for most purposes in day-to-day public life, it's also not _directly_ focused on genitalia or chromosomes. -So a natal female who _presents_ to the world as a man, and whom other people _model_ as a man on a System 1 level with no apparent incongruities, might very sensibly be said to _literally_ be a man in the sense of social gender (not in the sense of "biologically male adult human"), because that's the mental category that people are actually using, and therefore, the social class that they actually function as a member of. Essentially, this is the argument that offers a photograph of a passing trans person, and says, "C'mon, do you _really_ want to call [this person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_Angel_Headshot.jpg) a woman? Really?" +So a natal female who presents to the world as a man, and whom other people _model_ as a man on a System 1 level with no apparent incongruities, might be said to be a man in the sense of social gender (though not in the sense of "biologically male adult human"), because that's the mental category that people are actually using for him, and therefore, the social class that he actually functions as a member of. Essentially, this is the argument that offers a photograph of a passing trans person, and says, "C'mon, do you _really_ want to call [this person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_Angel_Headshot.jpg) a woman?" -Well, no. But the point is that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully-socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of gender, _not_ a redefinition of top-20 nouns by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. It works _because_ and _to the extent that_ transitioning actually works. To the extent that this fails to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—for example, insofar as physical transition _isn't_ always effective, or insofar as people _do_ have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by hormones and surgery—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened. +Well, no. But the point is that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of gender, _not_ a redefinition of top-20 nouns by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. It works _because_ and _to the extent that_ transitioning actually works. To the extent that this fails to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—for example, insofar as physical transition _isn't_ always effective, or insofar as people _do_ have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by hormones and surgery—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened. ----- +Another factor affecting the degree to which trans people form a more natural category with their identified gender than their natal physiological sex is the nature of transgenderedness itself. If gender dysphoria is caused by a brain-restricted intersex condition, such that trans people's psychology is much more typical of the other physiological sex—that is, if the "woman trapped in a man's body" trope is basically accurate—that would tend to weigh in favor of accepting transgender identity claims: trans women would be "coming from the same place" as cis women in a very literal psychological sense, despite their natal physiology. On the other hand, \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/notes/categories-notes.md b/notes/categories-notes.md index 7a308cf..5f22f96 100644 --- a/notes/categories-notes.md +++ b/notes/categories-notes.md @@ -162,3 +162,7 @@ blue, egg-shaped | furry, flexible | glows, contains vanadium red, cube-shaped | smooth, hard | unglowing, contains palladium link John Salvatier on "Reality has a surprising amount of detail": http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail + +from my SEXNET message— + +At least, not yet. The current situation in (progressive enclaves of) Western countries, where the need to respect everyone's self-identified gender identity is held sacrosanct, doesn't seem sustainable to me. With decreased gatekeeping and increased acceptance, you don't only get more AGPs transitioning who wouldn't have in the previous cultural regime; we should also expect transitioners on the margin to be less "suitable" (passable) with respect to traditional gatekeeper standards. That's how you end up with scenarios like that recounted by Prof. Bailey's correspondent in the "bad trans behavior" thread: if there are only a very few AGP trans women who are (out of necessity) trying very hard to pass, the impact on the social order is minimal. But as you start to have a nontrivial population of natal males attempting to live as women who are simultaneously identifiable (usually or often not passing as natal females) and noticeably not drawn from the same distribution of psychological traits as natal females, and you inject too many of them into social spaces and roles that developed around the psychology of natal females, that's going to change the dynamics of those spaces in ways that the incumbent women might not be happy with. diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt index 2c3f41e..69e7d55 100644 --- a/notes/notes.txt +++ b/notes/notes.txt @@ -419,3 +419,7 @@ https://theestablishment.co/japanese-cartoon-porn-helped-me-understand-my-trans- AAP: https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/7s8twd/do_trans_natal_males_fetishize_teenage_girlhood/dt3ea2n/ the conjunction of anti-transphobia and anti-Islamophobia is very strange + +https://voices.avoiceformen.com/j4mb/2018/01/15/terrified-patient-treated-like-transphobic-bigot/ —this is a compelling fiction prompt! Sad that a male author like me would be needed to fill in the "evolutionary radfem" niche—have the protagonist be hyperaware of the Rotherdam betrayal + +Zucker et al. study that's one of the sources of "majority desist" claims ("Demographics, behavior problems, and psychosexual characteristics of adolescents with gender identity disorder or transvestic fetishism") https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22390530 diff --git a/notes/tech_tasks.txt b/notes/tech_tasks.txt index debebc7..94b9176 100644 --- a/notes/tech_tasks.txt +++ b/notes/tech_tasks.txt @@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ replacement scan of "There's a word for it" notebook pages bigger click-target pagination links restrict "fiction" to "longform" (not dialogues) (I made the opposite call at some point, and I think I want to reverse it) What's going on with caching behavior?? +404 page?? glitchiness in "Editorial Process" link to archives page archives group posts by month