FtttG
User ID: 1175
I saw a tweet the other day which was pleading with big companies not to use AI art, because by doing so they're indirectly signalling cheapness: it sends the message that the company is so underresourced that they can't afford to hire graphic designers etc., and have to resort to using Stable Diffusion instead. It reminded me of this article which argued that companies spending extravagant sums on advertising campaigns is a hallmark of the confidence they have in their product or service: "we're so sure that you'll love this that we'll put our money where our mouths are to put it in front of you".
On the one hand, this argument is unassailably true. On the other hand, it strikes me as an awfully exclusive position to hold for a person who presumably considers themselves socialist or at least left-leaning. "If you didn't spend at least $100k on your ad campaign, don't even bother - we don't want broke boys here."
Years ago I had a similar debate with a musician, who pointed out that a lot of metal and punk records from the 80s and 90s have a very raw, scuzzy DIY feel because the band couldn't afford anything better. Nowadays many modern punk and metal bands are purists about recording to tape and will spend a small fortune trying to replicate that "raw", "organic" sound that records from the 80s and 90s have. But this guy pointed out that the modern inheritor of the raw 80s approach to recording your demo (at least as far as being DIY and budget-conscious goes) is to plug your guitar into a Scarlett 2i2 and program the drums with Superior Drummer.
FtttG
1yr ago
I've heard this a lot, sometimes phrased as something like "well, 'birthing person' or 'menstruator' are more precise and accurate terms than 'mother' or 'woman', because #notallwomen menstruate, and some people who menstruate don't self-identify as women".
On the one hand, yes, strictly speaking I suppose the term "menstruator" is more "precise" than "woman". On the other hand, don't bullshit me - you're not promoting the use of this term because it's more precise or accurate than the previous standard. There are plenty of factually accurate assertions which have been known to drive trans activists into violent rages and/or floods of tears. A trans woman can't complain that it's extremely dysphoria-inducing to be described as "male", or for it to be pointed out that trans women are just as likely to be violent as cis men - and then turn around and say "we're just trying to use more accurate and precise language!"
FtttG
1yr ago
A British man named Dave McConnell was arrested, charged and convicted for misgendering someone, although his conviction was overturned on appeal.
Please don't move the goalposts and say "well his conviction was overturned, you're tilting at windmills". The process may not have been the punishment in McConnell's case, but it was certainly punishing.
The number of women who have been successful police detectives is probably a bit larger - maybe it’d take two parking lots to fit all of them - but the fact remains that this is also a heavily male profession, generally utilizing classically masculine virtues.
Given that the new series of True Detective stars Jodie Foster, it's probably worth pointing out that, thirty years ago, she won her second Oscar playing an FBI agent-in-training, in a film which was both acclaimed by critics and awards bodies (still the most recent film to win the Big Five at the Oscars) and a huge commercial smash ($270m against a $19m budget). For added diversity points, at various points in the film Foster's character is assisted by a fellow agent-in-training, a black woman.
This makes the "you only hate season 4 because you can't stand to see strong female detectives" defense even harder to take seriously. No one* had a problem with a thriller revolving around a strong white female detective (and her black female partner) 30 years ago. You'll have a hard time persuading me that the average prestige TV audience member in 2024 is more misogynistic (and racist) than the average Anglophone cinemagoer in 1991. Not saying it's impossible, just saying it's a point that needs to be argued for and can't be taken for granted.
*Except feminists and trans activists.
FtttG
1yr ago
I wanted to reply to this, but I realise I'd essentially just be regurgitating Scott's 2017 post "Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning"*, so I'm just going to link it and summarize its thesis below.
It's no good saying "experts are reliable, aside from one or two blind spots". This isn't true from a reputational perspective, for the same reason that noticing a small factual error (no matter how minor or inconsequential) in a news article inevitably undermines the reader's confidence in the quality of the rest of the article: "if they got this wrong, what else did they get wrong?" But it's also no good for the simple fact that knowledge is holistic, not atomised. It's not like the facts and theories governing HBD are siloed in a separate warehouse from every other topic: they are inextricably intertwined with facts and theories in evolutionary biology, psychology, the social sciences, education, criminology etc. You might think that "the earth was created 6,000 years ago" is just a belief which can sit comfortably in your matrix of beliefs without affecting anything else, but before long you'll find yourself arguing that dinosaur skeletons were planted there by Satan or the speed of light changed over time.
So no, you can't just say to people "everything in these warehouses is 100% a-ok, but caveat emptor for those two warehouses labelled 'HBD' and 'Covid'." There's only one big warehouse and everything is touching everything else without so much as a sheet of clingfilm to prevent cross-contamination.
*Reading it six years later makes me sad: it almost scans as a preemptive apology for Scott's subsequent retreat into self-imposed intellectual incuriosity and cowardice, when his fearless willingness to step on whatever toes he pleased is what made his name in the first place.
FtttG
2yr ago
The figurative use of the term "cuck" is essentially just a dysphemism for calling someone a "doormat". The assumption is that men who allow their wives to have sex with other men aren't really okay with it, but go along with it due to a lack of backbone and an inability to establish boundaries for themselves. This obviously generalises (no one was fooled that "bike cuck" really didn't mind his bike getting stolen).
Accuse me of weakmanning or nutpicking or whatever if you please, but I've personally witnessed more than my fair share of trans people (or trans activists) making blatantly pseudoscientific assertions, like trans women claiming they experience something analogous to menstruation, or that there have been biologically male people who became pregnant, or that sex is a "spectrum". Likewise, the widespread and baseless assertion that biological males have no inherent advantage over biological females in sporting events (an assertion which implicitly undergirds any apology for trans women being permitted to compete in female sporting events) is a pseudoscientific claim, comparable in degree to a stepfather asserting a familial resemblance between himself and his adoptive child.
Or (even more relevant to the metaphor at hand) consider the case of the Guardian journalist who did not want to be listed as his child's mother on the child's birth cert, and brought a (thankfully unsuccessful) case to the High Court on this basis. What exactly could be more unscientific than a trans man claiming not to be the mother of the child who was conceived and gestated in his womb for nine months? Quoting Wikipedia: "McConnell announced his second pregnancy in August 2021, with plans to give birth in Sweden in order to be listed as the child's father, rather than mother, on their birth certificate."
As I said, referring to a stepfather as a father is a polite social fiction which no one objects to using in most situations. If a girl was attending a father-daughter-themed event and she had to choose between inviting the loving stepfather who's present in her life and the deadbeat glorified sperm donor who fathered her, I would have no objection to her inviting the former; in fact, I'd actively recommend it.
But there are situations in which we must defer to a child's biological father rather than their stepfather. For instance - supposing a child lapses into a coma due to an undetermined cause, which may be genetic in nature. The doctor will obviously want to take a family history to identify potentially relevant genetic factors. The stepfather's medical history is completely irrelevant here - the only medical histories which are relevant are those of the child's biological parents. If the stepfather got angry and defensive when the doctor informed him of this, and insisted that he was the child's father and hence that the doctor should take his medical history - well, I wouldn't think the doctors are the "jerks" in this situation. I also wouldn't think the stepfather necessarily had the child's best interests at heart.
FtttG
2yr ago
Clarkson is a funnyman first and a (political?) commentator a distant second. He sincerely dislikes Markle, but he's exaggerating the intensity of his antipathy for comic effect.
Donald Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared
Over the last decade, the prediction/warning/whatever I've most frequently heard about a Donald Trump presidency has been that he is a white supremacist KKK neo-Nazi with concrete plans to transform the United States into a white ethnostate (optionally also a Christian theocracy), which necessitates rounding up anyone who isn't white, cisgender, heterosexual or Christian and herding them into concentration camps. I literally don't think there was a single day in 2016 in which I didn't see or hear the "Trump = Hitler" comparison at least once. A distant second was "Trump is a Russian asset".
After four years of Trump in the Oval Office, this accusation became increasingly untenable, so his critics abruptly changed course and started accusing him of being a crypto-fascist with no respect for democratic institutions. In this regard, his critics are on much firmer ground (I've been saying for a decade that Trump has far more in common with Orbán or Berlusconi than with old Adolf), so this pivot made a lot of sense.* What doesn't make sense is that his critics are now pretending that this was the only class of accusations they'd ever been levelling at him. (The "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see" thing still gets periodically trotted out, courtesy of slow learners who haven't yet gotten the message that we're no longer at war with Eurasia.)
This is the same kind of blatant goalpost-moving and historical revisionism Scott complained about when grading his Trump predictions. Throughout the run-up to the 2016 election, all I heard was a never-ending stream of "Trump is Hitler, Trump is going to round up all the Muslims, Trump is going to kill all the Latinos, Trump is going to round up all the gays and trans people, Trump is going to turn America into Gilead". After four years of nothing even remotely like this transpiring, the people who had made these predictions just cited a bunch of other random bad shit Trump and his supporters did (e.g. January 6th) and turned around and said "see? We warned you!"
It is transparently, facially untrue that Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared. Show me the concentration camps, then we can talk. At least have the humility to acknowledge that careless accusations of genocidal ambition on Trump's part have only helped him: when facing more reasonable accusations of taking a cavalier approach to the rule of law and democratic institutions, Trump can quite reasonably defend himself by pointing out that his critics were crying wolf when they accused him of being Hitler, so why wouldn't they be crying wolf now?
I know when you said that he's showing himself to be "everything" his opponents feared, you were speaking figuratively, and you don't think that literally every criticism/accusation/whatever levelled against Donald Trump was well-founded. But I feel like there's some kind of Pareto distribution, where 80% of attacks/criticisms/warnings about Trump took the form "Trump is a genocidal white supremacist" (optionally also a Christian fundamentalist, heteronormative etc.), then "Trump is a Russian asset", then "Trump is a fascist with no respect for democratic institutions". I think honesty and humility behooves people to acknowledge that 80% of their predictions failed to come to pass. When 80% of your accusations/predictions fail to come to pass (90% if you include all the utterly baseless accusations of Russian collusion), I don't think you deserve a prognostication medal because some of the remaining 10% were accurate.
*Google Trends shows the precise point at which "Trump is going to turn America into Gilead" stopped being The Narrative, in favour of "Trump is a fascist authoritarian". The obvious objection to this interpretation of the data is that most of the searches for The Handmaid's Tale pertained to the novel's television adaptation (which, incredibly, is still running); the even more obvious rebuttal to that objection is that the only reason the television series even exists is because of hysterical scaremongering about the alleged parallels between the novel and Trump's America.
I think that neither gays nor their straight allies are aware of both sides of this- gays that it's not considered acceptable to simulate sex in public in the straight community, straight allies that the gay community doesn't care about such things or understand why anyone would.
Last year I watched the movie Cruising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruising_(film)) from 1980 (well worth a watch if you haven't seen it, it's stylish, thrilling and unpredictable). The film concerns a serial killer active in New York's gay community, so to track him down Al Pacino goes undercover, spending night after night in leather bars and inhaling poppers. The scale of the perversion he witnesses (e.g. looking on with barely concealed revulsion as a man, lying supine on a table in the middle of a club, gets fisted by another man while a captive audience watches) affects him psychologically and makes it impossible for him to perform with his girlfriend.
I was telling my brother about the movie and he said "I reckon there are a lot of very mainstream progressive types who really believe that gay men and gay couples are no different than straight men and straight couples aside from the objects of their attraction, and if they knew the kind of sexual behaviour which was seen as completely normal in the gay community, they'd be horrified."
The film was criticised as homophobic both during production and upon release, to the point that gay activists tracked down where the location shooting was taking place and blew air horns nearby so that the audio would be unusable. Watching the film, I honestly wasn't sure why it inspired such ire. I don't think it's homophobic to correctly observe (as Cruising does) that promiscuity, casual sex and chemsex are extremely normalised in the gay community. Most straight people (and lesbians) have never had sex in a bathroom stall with someone they met ten minutes earlier and whose name they don't know - but if you were a gay man and you said you'd never done that, in my experience most gay men would look at you like you'd two heads.
FtttG
1yr ago
The first time I heard about the alleged mismatch between Wikipedia's operating expenses and how much they raise every year was here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer, but I don't know how relevant it still is.
Counterpoints:
- Dr. James Cantor, one of the most prominent sex researchers in North America, believes that LGBTQ+ should include the P: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ENcjI5zX0AAIERW.jpg
- Dr Jacob Breslow was a senior figure in Mermaids, the highly influential charity for trans children in the UK, until he was outed as a pro-paedophilia advocate who has spoken in favour of paedophilia at conferences
- Peter Tatchell, one of the most famous and influential gay rights activists in the Anglosphere, supports lowering the age of consent to 14 and has waxed lyrical on more than one occasion about sexual relationships between young boys and grown men
- The usual laundry list of "trans women" arrested and/or convicted for possessing child pornography or abusing young children (e.g. https://www.bostonherald.com/2023/06/23/former-new-hampshire-state-rep-charged-with-child-pornography/, https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-news/coventry-activist-aimee-challenor-removed-20255359)
- The general refusal of LGBT activists anywhere to consider rowing back on the self-ID standard for women's prisons, despite clear, unambiguous evidence that the policy is being widely abused by convicted child rapists
You can be "amused" by this all you like. Beyond a certain point, acting as if people concerned about the pro-paedophilia contingent of LGBTQ+ activism are just tilting at windmills strikes me as gaslighting.
I know some of you may be sick of "wow, look at this cool thing AI can do, how eerie is that?" posts, but I can't help but be blown away by some of the applications of this technology.
I play in a band, and we upload our music to streaming platforms using a company called DistroKid. When you're uploading music, they strongly encourage you to submit the lyrics for the song at the same time for SEO reasons (and so that the lyrics will appear onscreen if someone shares the song on Instagram). It's a little textbox where you paste your lyrics in, then you're done.
I went to upload a song today, and found that they've added a new feature. After uploading the audio file, you can get an AI to try to transcribe the lyrics rather than typing them out manually.
It nailed it. The song is 215 words long, and the AI only made about 6 mistakes i.e. 97% accuracy. For reference, this is a noisy post-hardcore song with layers of shoegazey guitars, feedback and pounding drums. What's more, it achieved this 97% accuracy in a matter of seconds, maybe 5% of the total runtime of the song itself.
A few years ago I used a voice transcription service called Happy Scribe, which achieved comparable levels of accuracy - but only for plain speech recorded in a quiet environment with no background ambiance. If you record speech without a directional mic in an environment with a lot of background noise (e.g. a café), Happy Scribe was pretty much useless and I had to transcribe everything the old-fashioned way.
But now AI can transcribe words near-perfectly from lyrics with a musical accompaniment? That's insanity. I can't imagine how anyone will be able to find work as a transcriber for any major language a year from now.
This might be a bit rambling so bear with me.
My mum once said to me that she'd read somewhere that attractive people tend to be conservative, the theory being that attractive people tend to be treated well by society as it currently is: thus, it's not in their self-interest for society to change dramatically.
People often use "conservative" and "right-wing" interchangeably (likewise "progressive" and "left-wing"), but that's not quite the phenomenon I'm describing here. I rather mean that people who are generally satisfied with their lives will not see it in their own self-interest to radically change society from the ground up, and hence will tend not to endorse policies which promise to do that. By contrast, people who are generally dissatisfied with their lives will feel that they have nothing to lose by radically changing society. What kinds of people are dissatisfied with their own lives? Per my first example, physically unattractive people; but also (non-exhaustive list) people with poor social skills, people who can't hold down a steady job, mentally ill people and, per the OP, neurotic people.
"So you're saying that the only reason people are communists is because they're ugly, friendless, unemployable and crazy?" Well, yes and no. It's not hard to find examples of people meeting that exact description, and I won't pretend I'm completely innocent of this mean-spirited tendency to sneer. There was some recent discussion here about "bio-Leninism" which, as far as I understand it, basically boils down to this.
But it's not a phenomenon unique to far-leftists. There's a subreddit called r/beholdthemasterrace, which catalogues examples of white supremacists/white nationalists etc. who are obese, lanky, out of shape or generally unattractive. This is, to my mind, a perfectly legitimate rhetorical technique: "these guys think they're superior to others by dint of their ethnicity, but look how weak, frail and ugly they are!" But people are making a category error when they describe white supremacists as "conservative". To "conserve" means to keep things the way they are. Anyone who endorses transforming the US into an ethnostate cannot be a "conservative" when the US isn't an ethnostate. Rather, American white supremacists are reactionaries: the changes they propose making to American society are just as sweeping, radical and fundamental as any of those proposed by Marxists.
Hollywood actors talk a big game about being progressive, but it's mostly of a surface level which will have little impact upon them personally ("yay feminism", "yay LGBTQ+", "yay defund the police [I live in a gated community and am accompanied by one or more huge bodyguards everywhere I go]"). You will be hard-pressed to find an example of a wealthy, attractive, popular and charismatic person endorsing or trying to bring about truly radical changes to the society in which they personally live. Even AOC's alleged radicalism is mostly for show.
I guess probably this boils down to horseshoe theory: people who are generally satisfied with their lives (low neuroticism, good social skills, physically attractive, no trouble holding down a steady job etc.) will tend to be boring centrists (in deed, if not in word) who correctly intuit that it's not in their self-interest to radically change the society in which they live. People who are generally dissatisfied with their lives will be far more keen to make huge changes to society, and will be drawn to any movement which promises to do that, regardless of whether it skews right or left. Historic discussions of the horseshoe effect and mass political movements have made hay of the observable fact that neo-Nazi skinheads and antifa recruited from the same demographic: football hooligans (angry, disaffected young men spoiling for a fight); or that it isn't difficult to find historical examples of large groups of angry, disaffected young men jumping ship from a far-left party to a far-right one (or vice versa).
How does this tie in to the original post? Highly neurotic (also physically unattractive, mentally ill etc.) people throughout history will always be drawn to movements which promise to radically change society, but in most of the West, the far-right movements are so heavily stigmatised/suppressed that most neurotic people never encounter them (except in a "look how evil and lame these people are" sneerclub context; see the aforementioned /r/beholdthemasterrace). If you're dissatisfied with your life, you spend far too much time on a social media platform (as most dissatisfied people do these days), and that platform has a policy of banning swastikas on sight - but, crucially, not hammers and sickles - you will be drawn to a far-left policy platform by default: it's the only game in town. (The rare low-life-satisfaction person who ends up endorsing a far-right policy platform will tend to be someone who encountered it in person, unmediated by social media censors.) Even if the high-life-satisfaction centrist liberals in your social circle don't actually endorse far-left ideas, they will probably react with a great deal more tolerance and forbearance if you start ranting about evil capitalists and the cisheteropatriarchy than if you start ranting about die Juden or 13/52. Low-life-satisfaction far-leftists are generally treated by centrist liberals with passive tolerance at best* and amused condescension at worst; low-life-satisfaction far-rightists are (quite understandably) ostracized and shunned by centrist liberals. If you live in a liberal society and are generally dissatisfied with your life, it's much easier to get away with being a far-leftist than a far-rightist.
Before anyone takes offense and bites my head off, please accept my mealy-mouthed concession that this is a tendency rather than a law: one may occasionally encounter a high-life-satisfaction person who nonetheless really thinks that changing society from the ground up is the right thing to do, or vice versa. My point is that such people are the exception rather than the rule.
*It's a similar dynamic to how vegetarians interact with vegans: they aren't committed enough to actually adopt the other person's worldview, but feel sort of guilty about it and end up cowed into silence.
I don't think your comparison of gender dysphoria to intense romantic infatuation is quite as illuminating as you seem to think it is.
We've all had the experience of being romantically infatuated with another person. Probably almost all of us have felt "lovesick" at one point or another, in the sense of being romantically attracted to someone who's unavailable, or being attracted to someone but being too afraid to tell them how we feel for fear of rejection, or telling someone how we feel and finding out that it's unreciprocated, or getting dumped by someone we're still very much in love with. Short of bereavement, romantic rejection is one of the most unpleasant, destabilising and humiliating emotional states that the average person is likely to find themselves in, and I would never dream of making fun of someone who's having a tough time because they got rejected by their crush or broken up with (one of the reasons "Radicalizing the Romanceless" really resonated with me). (Of all the toxic, antisocial behaviours that social media aids and abets, there are few worse than that trend when a guy texts a girl to tell her he really likes her, and she immediately screenshots the conversation and sends it to her group chat with the caption "OMG CAN YOU IMAGINE 😂😂😂".)
But some people's intense romantic fixations can lead them to behave in extremely unhealthy ways which violate the boundaries of the object of their affection: repeatedly texting them, calling them or buying them gifts when they've made it perfectly clear they aren't interested; following them; bothering them in public places; sending them hateful messages; and (much more rarely, of course) physically intimidating or assaulting the object of their affection, or their current romantic partner. We call such a person a "stalker", and much of the aforementioned behaviour is actually illegal (however difficult it is to enforce), and rightfully so. As sympathetic as I might be towards someone whose affections aren't reciprocated and is feeling sad about it, my sympathy ends when they engage in unacceptable behaviour like this.
Likewise with gender dysphoria. Obviously I have no idea what gender dysphoria feels like, having never experienced it personally. But I can certainly relate to the experience of hating how your body looks in the mirror (both directly and indirectly, as I've had multiple friends who suffered from severe anorexia). I've been depressed for lengthy periods of time, and sincerely wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Much as I'd never make fun of someone who's sad because they love someone who doesn't feel the same way, I'd never make fun of someone whose gender dysphoria is causing them intense emotional distress. I am sincerely sympathetic.
But some people's gender dysphoria can lead them to behave in extremely unhealthy or toxic ways: emotionally manipulating lesbians into having sex with you by accusing them of bigotry if they don't; getting lesbian speed dating events cancelled; suing women who refuse to wax your male genitalia; sending rape and death threats to a female victim of sexual assault who expressed discomfort about using a bathroom alongside trans women; physically assaulting a gender-critical woman in her sixties; shooting up a primary school and so on. As sympathetic as I might be towards someone suffering from gender dysphoria, my sympathy vanishes the instant they engage in behaviour like this.
So I think I'm actually being perfectly consistent, per the terms of your analogy.
I'm open to correction on this and fully admit I may be falling victim to confirmation bias or the availability heuristic, but my impression from this community is that, when trans issues come up, it's usually not so much people complaining about the former (i.e. "this person has gender dysphoria, gross, what a disgusting fetishist") and more people complaining about the latter (i.e. "this person is suffering from gender dysphoria, which is leading them to engage in behaviours which would be grossly unacceptable if carried out by anyone"). And I admit there's a bit of Chinese-robbering going on, wherein people highlight bad behaviour by self-identified trans people which obviously bears no causal relationship to their gender dysphoria as a means of casting aspersions on the whole group, which I'm not cool with for the same reason I'm not cool with any use of the Chinese robber fallacy.
FtttG
1yr ago
the sheer weirdness of the idea that being a revolutionary is congruent with following public health theater
Freddie deBoer referred to the strange phenomenon of self-professed anarchists protesting in favour of mask mandates as "definitional collapse". See also all the stick that Rage Against the Machine got for requiring proof of vaccination to attend their shows. "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" indeed.
FtttG
1yr ago
An alternative punishment could be requiring a two page essay on rule-following as a costly signal of contrition and to promote salience of infraction, after some ban period.
If I really valued participating in a particular online community, I would eat a six-month ban, no problem. But I will absolutely stop participating in online communities if further participation is made conditional on grovelling to the jannies like this. There's a specific online community which I went on practically every day for the best part of a decade, and when they asked me to jump through this particular hoop I said fuck you, I'm out. I suspect I'm pretty close to the norm for the kind of person who participates in male-dominated online communities.
FtttG
1yr ago
PM Jim Hacker: Don't tell me about the press — I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Times is read by people who actually do run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who own the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country, and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.
Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read the Sun?
Bernard Woolley: Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits.
FtttG
2yr ago
One thing you never hear about is what the actual women athletes have to say about this.
Because they're justifiably terrified of being ostracised and/or losing their livelihoods.
Tennessee-based player Jennifer Castro, who competes in the [disc golf] Amateur Masters Women 40+ category, says that “I personally know of women who refuse to sign up for events if a transgender is playing, not because we hate them but because we feel we have zero chance, so what is the point of wasting our money on registration fees?”
In late August, Castro became so exasperated by the [Professional Disc Golf Association]’s permissive stance that she mounted a sort of sting operation, presenting herself anonymously to the organization as a transgender woman seeking to compete in a female category. After Castro’s inquiry was routed to the PDGA’s medical committee, outgoing board member (and five-time Women’s Open World Champion) Elaine King wrote back with the following advice:
If you meet the criteria to play in gender-based divisions then you can register with the PDGA as “F” or “female.” You are under no obligation to discuss your personal information with anyone. No one may challenge your eligibility to play in a female division unless they can provide evidence that you may not meet the requirements. Note that a player’s appearance is NOT a basis for any challenge … Some transgender women have voluntarily elected to provide proof of their eligibility to the Medical Committee in confidence. In doing so, any potential question about their eligibility to play in that division could be quickly settled. However this is purely voluntary and not required.
In the days since, Castro has gone on a very public Facebook campaign, citing King’s message as evidence that, except in cases where a player who’s already listed as male seeks to change status to female, “transgenders don’t need to submit anything upfront. [The PDGA] is just taking their word that they meet the criteria medically.”
At a recent Nashville tournament, Castro reports, her sponsor, a small local company called Momentary Bliss discs, politely suggested that she take a less “hostile” approach with her anti-PGDA commentary. Castro refused, and the partnership was ended.
According to one source I spoke with, several board members are sympathetic with the complaints of women who want male bodies excluded from protected female categories. But they also feel reluctant to act unless their stance is publicly supported by a critical mass of high-profile players. For their part, on the other hand, many top players reportedly don’t feel they can provide that public support until the board signals clearly that plain talk about male and female biology won’t be denounced as transphobic.
It’s a collective-action problem, in other words. According to Jane and Mary, about 80 percent of the women on tour oppose the inclusion of male-bodied players in female divisions (a figure that’s admittedly impossible for me to confirm). But no one in this majority group wants to be among the first to come forward, for fear of being labelled a bigot—thereby allowing the other 20 percent to hold sway.
FtttG
2yr ago
This sort of reminds me of an article I read on Cracked years ago. It argued that male writers are terrified of writing a female character with meaningful flaws for fear of being accused of sexism or misogyny. So instead, they write female characters who are perfect in every way that matters. The end result is that the male characters are fully fleshed-out rounded characters (whom the audience actually likes and cares about, because they seem like real people), while the female characters are one-dimensional Mary Sues who can do no wrong (whom the audience despises, because perfect people are boring).
FtttG
2yr ago
Seconded. I believe that gender dysphoria is a real medical condition, but also that some people may misidentify as transgender either out of honest confusion about their gender identity, or maliciously in bad faith.
A society in which self-ID is the legal standard has collapsed that distinction, and sees no difference between a trans person who has suffered gender dysphoria since childhood and who has been taking hormones for years vs. a person who gave no outward indication of suffering from gender dysphoria, only "realised" they were transgender immediately after being convicted of a crime, and who has no taken no steps to make themselves more closely resemble a member of the opposite sex.
Now you have to accept the bad actors as members of your own group. You made this bed, now you have to lie in it.
POSIWID, deepities and scissor statements
A response to Scott Alexander, with whom I largely agree
Last week, Scott Alexander published an article called “Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does” followed by “Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID” today. I recommend reading both first, but if you’d rather not I will attempt to summarise Scott’s thesis under the “POSIWID” section.
If you know what POSIWID, deepities and scissor statements mean, feel free to skip down to “POSIWID is a deepity” (spoiler alert for the meat of my argument), in which I offer my own analysis of the phrase.
POSIWID
POSIWID is an acronym standing for “The purpose of a system is what it does”, coined by the management consultant Stafford Beer. As near as I understand it, Beer was hired by companies to audit their existing business processes and suggest improvements. When he pointed out that a given business process or system was producing undesirable results, the C-suite executives would sometimes defend the process by pointing to the desirable purpose the system was intended to accomplish. Beer would retort “the purpose of a system is what it does”: in other words, regardless of what purpose the system was intended to accomplish, the executives must take ownership of what the system is actually doing and what results it is actually producing.
Scott’s recent posts concerned his disagreement with how the phrase is often used in political discussions, such as by progressives who assert that the real purpose of police services is to oppress, imprison and murder black people (and stopping crime is just an incidental positive externality); or conversely, by conservatives who assert that the real purpose of non-profits designed to combat homelessness is actually to exacerbate homelessness: if homelessness were to end, they’d be out of a job! Scott argues that this framing is needlessly hostile, cynical and paranoid; instead, it is more productive to model organisations as having goals that they are trying to accomplish in earnest, but pursuing these goals sometimes incurs undesirable but unavoidable side effects (e.g. carbon emissions, medical mistakes); or the organisation is prevented from accomplishing their goals to their full extent due to factors outside of their control (e.g. budgetary limitations, competing organisations).
Deepities
“Deepity” is a term coined by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, referring to phrases which have the unique property wherein they convey two meanings at once: one meaning is true, but trivial, while the other meaning is false, but would be profound if it was true. The dual meaning allows the deficiencies in one to be shored up by the strengths of the other (and vice versa) which makes them invaluable as rhetorical devices: when the listener notices that the former meaning is trivial, they are reassured by the fact that the latter meaning is profound, and when one notices that the latter meaning is false, one is reassured by the fact that the former meaning is true. The concept is best illustrated by examples, all of which are taken from Coleman Hughes’s excellent article on the concept:
- Everything happens for a reason: It is trivially true that “everything happens for a reason”, in the banal sense that every event has an immediate preceding cause (if I get struck by a car, the underlying cause is that I failed to look both ways before crossing the street). However, the clear implication of “everything happens for a reason” is that every event has a deeper, spiritual purpose in God/Allah/Jehovah/Xenu/the universe’s plan - which is obviously nonsense, but would be profound and insightful if it was true.
- No human being is illegal: It is trivially true that human beings cannot be “illegal”, because legality or lack thereof is a property of actions (theft, murder, fraud), not individuals. “But the second reading of this deepity asserts something extremely controversial: everyone should be able to go anywhere on Earth with no legal or procedural barriers; every border should be fully permeable; strangers should be able to occupy your property—after all, no human being is illegal, and strangers are still human beings when they’re on your property. Needless to say, even advocates of open borders would not endorse this view in full. But if the view were ethically correct, then it would have profound implications for property law, the existence of nation-states, and the very concept of personal space.”
Scissor statements
Scott Alexander wrote a wonderful short story called “Sort by Controversial”, which concerns a tech startup whose employees inadvertently develop a piece of software that generates what the team calls “scissor statements”: statements (and later, events) which are maximally controversial, in the sense that one half of a particular community would enthusiastically endorse them and the other half would vociferously deny them. “Scissor statements”, it is explained, can tear communities apart merely in the fact of being spoken or having taken place: to one half of a community they seem so obviously true/good as to be hardly even worth stating, to the other half so obviously false/wrong as to be hardly even worth rebutting.
Examples from the original story:
- A prospective conservative Supreme Court justice is accused of having raped someone in high school
- A Muslim organisation wants to construct a mosque in close proximity to the Ground Zero memorial in Manhattan
- A bakery refuses to cater for a gay wedding
- An American football player refuses to stand for the national anthem before football games, instead getting down on one knee in protest of police violence against black Americans
To the canonical examples from the short story, I might add “A black gay actor is the victim of a racist, homophobic hate crime perpetrated by two Donald Trump supporters, and is later accused of having staged the attack to further his career”.
“POSIWID” is a deepity
“The purpose of a system is what it does” seems very reminiscent of my first example of a deepity, “everything happens for a reason”. Much as every event obviously has an immediate proximate cause, it is obviously true that a system should only be meaningfully assessed on the basis of its actual outputs. If a particular business process is meant to boost profits by 10%, but consistently fails to achieve that goal, the process must be assessed first and foremost on the basis of the latter fact, not the former. All of this is straightforward and uncontroversial: indeed, true but trivial.1
But the secondary meaning imparted by the phrase implies something far more profound and controversial: that the designers of a given system are fully cognizant of all of its outputs (positive and negative); that all of said outputs were fully intended and desired by the designers; that if the designers are made aware of a negative output thereof and refuse to immediately change it, the only reasonable interpretation is that this negative output is affirmatively sought by the deisgners; and that this is equally true regardless of to what resolution the phrase is applied (whether looking at an individual business process within a company, the company itself, an entire industry, an entire country, or a multi-national economic structure). This interpretation seems to me just as obviously wrong as the secondary meaning of “everything happens for a reason”, in which there is an underlying cosmic purpose to every event, no matter how small or terrible.
Per his second article, Scott seems to recognise this:
When people insist on the confusing and inappropriately-strong version, I start to suspect that the confusingness is a feature, letting them smuggle in connotations that people would otherwise correctly challenge.
Certain people in the comments of Scott’s first article argued that the phrase was meaningful in its original context as used by Stafford Beer, but has been misused by political commentators who misunderstood it as implying its second meaning, to which Scott had a witty rejoinder:
Thanks to everyone who chimed in with criticism of my recent POSIWID post. If I understand you all correctly, you think that Stafford Beer had good intentions when he invented the phrase, and that's more important than how it gets misused in real life. Enlightening!
“POSIWID” is a scissor statement
Scott seems to have been legitimately taken aback by what a fervent response his first article inspired, with a lot of commenters enthusiastically agreeing with it and many others insisting that he’d missed the point entirely. He admits to being confused by the latter group:
Why are people defending this inane statement so hard? This reminds me of the old atheism-religion debates, where some atheist would bring up an awkwardly-phrased Bible statement, and the religious people would contort themselves to say that nooooooo, it’s totally true that the world was created in seven days, as long as you define day to mean “any time period of an indeterminate length”. But at least their motives make sense to me; lots of other things depend on whether Bible verses are true or false. POSIWID was first coined in 2001. Why should people contort themselves to defend this extremely poorly-phrased thing?
In a forum in which I saw Scott’s article being discussed2, the same pattern was visible: a significant number of people enthusiastically agreeing with him, and a second group accusing him of engaging in an elaborate trolling effort, or wasting time on a pedantic argument about semantics instead of acknowledging the penetrating insight the phrase contains. This suggests to me that “the purpose of a system is what it does” is a scissor statement: a maximally-controversial phrase which one half of a community finds so obviously true as to be hardly worth mentioning, while the other half dismisses it out of hand, and finds it baffling as to how anyone could think it was true for even a moment.
Perhaps many deepities are also scissor statements?
Deepities, as discussed above, have two meanings: one which is true but trivial, the other which is false, but which would be profound if it was true. Scissor statements, meanwhile, are maximally-controversial statements which tear communities apart because half of the community finds them so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning, while the other half dismisses them as obviously false.
Thus in both cases we see a bifurcation in how a statement is interpreted. Perhaps this is not a coincidence?3
For some number of people looking at a Necker cube (the first figure in the illustration below), they will initially interpret the ambiguous shape according to the second figure; for others, the third figure (both of which are equally valid interpretations of the shape). With some effort, we can force ourselves to see the alternative interpretation, but whichever one first jumps out at us feels like the “correct” one. I don’t have any studies backing this up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that the split of these two groups is roughly fifty-fifty: in other words, if the configuration of cubes was something we cared about, Necker cubes would make for a perfect scissor statement.
Illustrations in original post
Perhaps deepities work in the same way? Maybe if you looked at a group of people encountering the phrase “everything happens for a reason” for the first time, for roughly half of them, the true-but-trivial meaning would jump out at them instantly, and they would completely overlook the false-but-profound meaning; whereas for the other half, they’d immediately notice the false-but-profound meaning and overlook the true-but-trivial meaning. (Or perhaps the first group would only notice the true-but-trivial meaning, while the second group would notice the false-but-profound meaning in addition to the true-but-trivial one.)
Before long, the two groups are talking past each other: the first group cannot understand why the second group is getting so worked up about an observation which, while true, strikes them as trite and unremarkable; and the second group cannot understand why the first group is ignoring the (allegedly) penetrating insight and instead making glib dismissals like “if I get struck by a car, the underlying cause is that I failed to look both ways before crossing the street”. The first group thinks the second group are intellectual lightweights for getting so bent out of shape about such a trite observation; the second group feels condescended to by the first, and thinks the first group are overly literal-minded pedants who are missing the wood for the trees. Hence, a classic scissor statement: merely in the act of being spoken, it generates outrage and tears communities asunder.
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1 Admittedly, we might perhaps benefit from reading the phrase backwards: perhaps at the time of its coining, the idea that a business process should be judged primarily (or solely) on the basis of its actual outputs (as opposed to its creator’s intentions for it) was a legitimately novel insight, and only seems trite and obvious to us now because we’ve fully internalised it. Hard to say.
2 I'm sure you know the forum I mean.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the likelihood of any individual child being intersex or knowing an intersex child is vanishingly small (e.g. Klinefelter syndrome only affects 223 out of every 100,000 male babies, and often isn't even obvious until the subject starts puberty). This isn't like myopia, which affects nearly a quarter of the population. Even if I received credible assurance that the four-year-olds in question would only be taught about intersex conditions in a strictly medical context and would not receive any education about queer theory, gender ideology or pseudoscientific nonsense about "sex assigned at birth" - I would still question the utility of teaching four-year-olds about extremely rare medical conditions which affect such a tiny proportion of the population. Of course no hypothetical child suffering from motor neurone disease should be ashamed of themselves or face bullying because of their condition, but teach a class of four-year-olds about motor neurone disease, and no matter how many caveats you include about how rare it is (never mind statistics, these children don't understand addition yet), we both know what would happen: the dumber half of the class wouldn't know what you were talking about, while the smarter half would go home in floods of tears and have nightmares for weeks afterwards about being paralysed and dying young.
I
suspectknow that the only reason that children are being taught about intersex conditions at all is the same reason these conditions have been brought up 99% of the time they've been raised by anyone since the turn of the century: as a means of smuggling in gender ideology by the back door.More options
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