InfoTeddy
9mo ago
(reposting because new thread)
Is Twitter finally dead yet?
Usually, I'd be the last person to ask such a provocative question. I used to be one of the people who rolled their eyes or otherwise ignored sensationalized media stories surrounding Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, stories which have plagued the news cycle for the better part of almost a year now. It felt like you couldn't go a day or two without an article on the most mundane of things that were only remarkable because of Musk, like him going to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
But I have to - reluctantly - admit, maybe all the media's negative hype had a point.
The latest decision Musk has made is to rebrand Twitter to "X". The URL X.com will automatically redirect Twitter. Twitter is changing its logo from the iconic blue bird into a white "X". Apparently a tweet should now just be called an "X".
The obvious question is: Why? Musk's answer seems to be that he wants to change Twitter into some sort of "super-app" where one can do everything on it, similar to the WeChat app in China. This only raises further questions, like why people couldn't just use other apps, or why it had to be done in this why, or why they couldn't even just go the Meta approach where the company is renamed X (in fact, it's already been "X Corp." for a while) but Twitter gets to still be named Twitter and keep the blue bird logo.
The one thing that everyone in the Musk-Twitter discourse seems to agree on is that Twitter has significant value in its brand. Now, it might not even have that. Who really wants to talk about "'X'-ing on X" when it's far more idiosyncratic to say "tweeting on Twitter", which people have done for the better part of the decade?
But to answer my own question: No, I think it's the wrong approach to look at each change as potentially an outright Twitter-killer. I think the bigger picture should be looked at, and that in the long run, the demise of Twitter will be a death by a thousand paper cuts, where each change isn't quite so negative to kill it entirely, but it keeps Twitter on a downwards and downwards trend. And there's already been several paper cuts - fleeing advertisers, ratelimits, restricted guest browsing, etc.
InfoTeddy
10mo ago
I've never understood how people who are, essentially, less than 0.01% of the population have gained a comparatively much higher proportion when it comes to their representation in the popular conscience. Trans rights activists don't like the 0.01% argument, which is fine - but then they turn around and use it themselves by saying that a people that is 0.01% of the population is harmless. Which, besides being not how things work in any capacity, is having it both ways.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
The War on Kiwi Farms: The Kiwis Fight Back
I'm sure everyone here knows of the controversial site Kiwi Farms, which has been endlessly accused of facilitating online harassment, and endlessly deplatformed. The site's defense has always been that it doesn't do that, the content is completely legal in the United States, and it's just a neutral observer, and with very limited exceptions (namely protecting Chris Chan until 2021, and interfering with zoosadists), I've found that to largely be the case. But I always wondered if this attitude left them vulnerable to just being attacked endlessly like this. Like, if bad actors know that this site won't actually fight back in any way, wouldn't you expect that they would just relentlessly attack it, since they're more-or-less free to do it?
Well, recently, they've actually started doing it. They're using the tactics that have been most effective in deplatforming them, and turning it on others. Namely, filing abuse complaints with upstreams and accusing sites of violating their AUP (which stands for Acceptable Use Policy). Their first target, thematically enough for an anti-trans site, is DIY HRT, as in HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) that isn't dispensed directly from a licensed pharmacy, often homemade and imported in to the country from shady international sources.
DIY HRT sites exist in a very legal gray area, because they more-or-less undeniably facilitate the sale of unlicensed pharmaceuticals. There have been credible reports of the drugs being manufactured in really unsafe and unclean conditions, leading to issues like clearly visible human hair in a vial that's meant to be injected into your bloodstream. Furthermore, the demographic they serve raises child welfare concerns - children are the demographic most likely to be unable to access legal HRT and/or want to keep their HRT on the down low from others - and some of the marketing/labeling on the items is quite blatant (in one case, text reads "Keep away from parents" and the image is of a childlike figure). Naturally, these are the reasons Kiwi Farms uses to file abuse complaints with upstreams. And they're doing it quite openly - there's a public thread on the site where they coordinate and give information on filing abuse complaints. So has it worked?
Looking at the DIY HRT wiki, they list several DIY HRT sites that have been taken down by complaints, so certainly looks like it has. It's gotten to the point that I had to look through an archive of the DIY HRT wiki, because I couldn't connect to the live site. The irony is that, just like Kiwi Farms themselves, the sites haven't actually been taken down for good - they just hop to another web host, domain registrar, email provider, and they're back in business. And the biggest irony of all is that the DIY HRT camp don't have any recourse for this. On their subreddit, one person asks "What is stopping doing the same to KF?" and the answer is "It has been done to KF already." What are they going to do exactly, attempt to take down a site that has spent years hardening itself against being taken down? One is reminded of the Chinese parable where the penalty for being late is death. They can't be more mean to Kiwi Farms, because trans activists have already spent years being as maximally mean as possible to Kiwi Farms, kicking them out of almost every single web host and domain registrar in the world, and all that has resulted in is a horde of people pissed off that their site is being taken down by trans activism, now radicalized against the trans movement. They've been put in a situation where they can either lose, or lose but also take down others with them, and in that respect I don't blame them for finally, finally, starting to fight back.
InfoTeddy
9mo ago
It really does strike me that Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Aella et al are putting on the kid gloves tight when it comes to the proposals of transgenderism.
Take Scott, for example, responding to the 4chan post about trans-Napoleonism. He basically says "just let him wear the silly bicorne hat" and points to "Emperor" Norton of San Francisco as a happy-go-lucky story of just going along with what a trans-emperor says because it's easier. But he doesn't ever adequately address the hardball arguments - a Napoleon-gender that demands absolute power over the French Empire and its satellites in Europe (as the 4chan post said), and a Norton that demands the head of President Rutherford B. Hayes (as you, Zack M. Davis, point out). As far as I can tell, Scott's response to people pointing out the demands for a French Empire and Hayes's head - although he doesn't explicitly state this - is "lol, that just doesn't happen".
This is a very troubling dismissal, because there are a lot of Rutherfords in transgenderism. The reason why people point out President Rutherford Hayes and demands for a French Empire is because transgenderism affects others - it has externalities - and attempting to cure someone's distress by agreeing to their false map of reality is not a cost-free action and is not something with no meaningful consequences to other people (hence, the story about putting the hair dryer in the passenger seat is simply irrelevant). In other words, "just be nice" is a really bad argument.
For example, the inclusion of trans athletes in women's sports, or the inclusion of trans people in women's bathrooms, or the inclusion of trans people in women's prisons. Everyone seems to agree that it would be a very bad thing if a trans-Napoleon today gained control over the countries that used to make up the former French Empire, or if Norton was given the head of Rutherford B. Hayes, so they just... dismiss those and say it could never happen. They say they would never demand Rutherford's head and that it's absurd to even consider the possibility that Rutherford might be decapitated to fulfill the desires of an Emperor Norton.
And then when those externalities do happen, and a male-born trans person wins against a female athlete (inherently, unfairly), or a trans person assaults a woman in the bathroom, or a trans prisoner impregnates a woman, those objections are at best handwaved away and dismissed as outliers or discredited, or at worst labeled "transphobic" and censored.
In my opinion, the refusal to honestly engage with these arguments reflects poorly on the leaders - or otherwise influential figures - of the rationalist community. To put it lightly, it's unbelievable how they make a simple mistake - that their own foundational writings (the Sequences) warned about - and how they have failed to correct their own mistake (at least, they haven't corrected it yet, although I'm not optimistic about their chances of doing so).
It's quite curious how rationalist (or rationalist-adjacent) figures will go through the trouble of creating a pseudonym, but then make basic mistakes in opsec that will link them back, thus rendering the whole effort pointless.
The article claims that he reused email addresses, which is a really serious basic mistake. Not only does doing this assume that every website the email address is used on will never suffer a data breach or some other exploit that leaks users' email addresses, it also risks "crossing the streams" where you absentmindedly start doing things meant for one pseudonym on another. And it's really easy to avoid this mistake, too. Just create a new email account.
There's a couple other rationalist figures I have in mind that have had poor opsec, but it's probably best to not name them or go into detail (unless people here are really curious about opsec and want to learn more). Although, all the information I would post is public anyway.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
My immediate objection is to the lopsided gender ratios that this would produce. As seen in China, lopsided gender ratios are not good demographics to have for a country.
InfoTeddy
10mo ago
Never. But I wanted to be a bit less anecdotal and a bit more charitable in my top-level comment.
InfoTeddy
10mo ago
Agreed. I'm always skeptical of people, like Aella, who focus endlessly on what the data is and trying to interpret grand conclusions from statistics, bigger conclusions than one should. There's a reason "lies, damned lies, and statistics" is a saying.
For example, police statistically pull over and ticket more black people. Does this mean that police are racist? No, it just means that black people commit more traffic offenses. Indeed, black people statistically commit more crime in general. (Noticing this is only racist if you come up with racist explanations for this. There's perfectly innocuous explanations you could argue like black people being historically disadvantaged, being in poverty, etc.) People will argue that speed cameras are better because they can't be biased, and then once speed cameras are implemented, will allege that cameras are racist somehow just because they, statistically, ticket more black people.
Most people don't think in terms of data and statistics, and quite frankly, it's not really the best policy to implement something from "well this number is lower" or "this line is going up and to the right". So what if Meghan Murphy is wrong, and, for the sake of argument, a lot of people in the sex industry have a positive view of it (as proven by statistics)? It does not necessarily follow that the sex industry is ethical or positive for society as a whole.
(Silly Aella surveys are unhelpful and probably worse than nothing.)
Just so we're on the same page, there's already articles defending Aella's surveys as things you can draw big conclusions from, rather than things that only apply to Aella's audience.
InfoTeddy
9mo ago
It's preposterous, and a sign of the times, that one needs to be well-versed in opsec in order to freely speak their mind.
Maybe it's a sign of the times, but this isn't anything unique to the internet. The Federalist Papers were published under pseudonyms.
Arguably, it's a sign of the times that a significant many on the internet aren't practicing opsec. When the internet first started, people were just screen names in ephemeral chat rooms. Now, they use their real names, with real photos of themselves, leaving behind permanent posts on social media sites describing everything in detail for the entire world to see.
The highest degree of opsec is to simply never share your thoughts, never post anything online, ever.
Technically true, but that's like saying the highest degree of transport safety is to never drive or get in a car, ever.
(And before the urbanists go "this but unironically", might I point out that bikes, trains, trams, and planes still have accidents too, so the technically-true highest degree would also avoid those.)
Both modes of living are fundamentally dishonest, misrepresentative, and, indeed, miserable.
I don't see how this follows. There's nothing fundamentally dishonest or misrepresentative about adopting a pseudonym. It also doesn't have to be miserable. 90% of opsec is shutting up, and that could get many people by for many years. You would only have to do the remaining 10% if you're really paranoid.
Freedom of expression without fear of cancellation and censure is required for one to affirm their identity. Anything else is robbing one of their ability to authentically express their identity and who they are.
I don't find much value in having my identity affirmed or expressed.
InfoTeddy
9mo ago
Sure. Obviously, a lot of the externalities with transgenderism go away if you have a social norm to actually be nice, including not using transgenderism for bad results.
But I understood Scott (and others) to be talking about trans people in wider society. I would have less of an issue with them if they clarified that they were only talking about trans people in the context of the rationalist community.
Or if they drew a line in the sand and said, no, actually, it's not acceptable to give Norton the head of Rutherford B. Hayes, and we need policies on emperor-identified people to ensure that doesn't happen.
InfoTeddy
9mo ago
Exactly. By this same standard, we might as well replace a power substation with a playground because the power substation is ugly.
Being beautiful is not (usually) one of the main aims of infrastructure projects.
Here in Europe, populists like Geert Wilders were often warning about how too many moslem immigrants would threaten liberal values but they've been supplanted by a newer generation of populists that appear to increasingly take a page out of America's right-wing playbook by uniting with moslems against the LGBT crowd.
I can think of no better term to encapsulate this phenomenon than the paradox of tolerance. Anyone who knows even a little bit about Islam can tell you that moslems aren't exactly friendly with gays, i.e. they are intolerant of the LGBT crowd. So what happens when you tolerate people who are intolerant of gays? You end up with the intolerance of gays, exactly as predicted.
Many of these immigrants rarely had much in common with them on social issues. They just voted left because of economic interests and the fact that the white left is more likely to let their entire family back home settle in the West.
And liberals mistake this for some sort of solidarity, when in reality, it's ludicrous to expect people with a vastly different culture and a vastly different set of values to ally with you. The only justification I've seen for why they would want to "join" them was that they were a minority in the same vein as blacks, trans people, etc. which is simply not how it works and has never worked that way.
InfoTeddy
11mo ago
I don't really see how the pro-trans crowds goal is to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Indeed, it seems a central feature of their (our) arguments that there is a meaningful category called "women" and that it includes trans women. The anti-trans crowd clearly does not like this fact but it seems obvious to me the pro-trans crowd is not anti-categorization in some general way. We just want more complete and accurate categorizations for the purposes we think they should be put towards.
This was a misspeak on @aqouta's part, they meant discrediting the concept of certain categories, i.e. the ones that would place "trans women" in the "women" category.
I do agree with them that there is a certain game that's always played (and is a bit tiresome) where people attack a definition by pointing out edge cases. It's like, you say that men are born with a penis and women are born with a vagina, and then they point out the existence of intersex people who may be born with an amalgamation of both or neither.
Well, so, what if those people exist? Does that mean that it's wrong to use the category of "men" and "women"? I personally find no problem with using those categories as-is and going about my daily life with much bigger concerns to deal with than where I should properly place intersex people in my mind.
And besides, if I really end up needing to properly place a given intersex person (either in "men", "women", or some third category), maybe because I personally know them, this doesn't (and shouldn't) affect my original definitions of "men" and "women" - it was an edge case, so I dealt with it like an edge case, not by tossing everything out and starting completely from scratch.
The reality is, you can't expect people to give a tight, locked-down definition of anything, much less what a man and woman are. All they can do is give a general overview by a common case, maybe describe a few exceptions here and there, but certainly nothing that would stand up to infinite philosophical scrutiny.
And really, it's pointless, because the trans skeptical are simply not going to categorize "trans women" as "women", even though trans women share more attributes of women than most men share attributes of women. The reason for this is simple: They still simply share too many attributes with men, and we are not at an advanced level of technology yet to completely patch them out.
A trans woman has a penis - well, okay, so then they get gender reassignment surgery. But now a trans woman has a hole in their groin that must be kept open by dilation. Sure, a trans woman wears a dress or a skirt, maybe did some voice training to talk more feminine, grew out their hair, is interested in girl things. But a trans woman still has a male bone structure, male bone density, male facial features, male puberty (no, you cannot just "choose your puberty", that's a whole other rabbit hole that's just wrong), etc.
A trans woman has a whole host of very male-like things that can't be faked or changed as easily as their social characteristics.
InfoTeddy
11mo ago
I'm far more inclined to believe it was a typical teenage row that got out of hand in which the victim incidentally happened to be trans, as opposed to a hate crime.
This is most likely correct. One of the attackers was trans too.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
I am confused at how the above comment is promoting hate upon vulnerable groups and would like to see this claim elaborated on.
InfoTeddy
9mo ago
A lot of the talk about suburbs is confused because "suburb" can refer to many forms of development that are less dense than skyscrapers. Commonly what urbanists are referring to when they hate on suburbs is the sort of low-density, single-family neighborhoods built throughout North America. Some urbanists (like Adam Something) make a distinction between American-style suburbs and European-style suburbs, and their argument is that European-style suburbs are better, because they are denser ("missing middle" housing) and can be served with transit.
If I were to be charitable to urbanists, I would say they just use "suburb" as a shorthand since many people in the States will think of a low-density, single-family neighborhood when they hear that word, and that is indeed what urbanists are talking about (and railing against). They don't need to put any more qualifiers than "suburb", because most of the time they aren't comparing between European-style and American-style suburbs, and they don't really have any qualms about abolishing even European-style suburbs as they prefer living in the urban cores anyway.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
That's true, but I see this as a form of evolution, the same way that 99.99% antibacterial soap ends up producing superbugs through natural selection. It's just a matter of consequence that trans activists' deplatforming efforts would end up hitting on one guy who just happened to have the smarts, wits, etc. to figure out how to effectively resist censorship and would want to dedicate enough time and effort to doing so.
InfoTeddy
5mo ago
Furthermore, the biggest target of the video was actually someone ostensibly on Hbomberguy's team (Somerton).
I doubt that this is Hbomberguy just acting without bias, since he more-or-less gives Hasan Piker (and other react streamers) a pass despite react streamers committing arguably worse plagiarism, and Hasan is another BreadTuber friend. Around the same time his video came out, a couple other videos attacking James Somerton also came out. It's really hard to not see these videos as coordinated.
InfoTeddy
9mo ago
Sure. Never express yourself, just keep everything held down.
That is not what I meant. What I meant is that, for example, if you don't want to reveal to others where you live, you shouldn't mention the name of your city or town. Basic stuff like that. You can still express yourself.
This seems to be one of the most pertinent problems of our time.
How is it a problem? Arguably, it's the other way around, and wanting your identity affirmed or expressed is the problem. The entire trans movement and its externalities stem from a misguided goal to affirm and express their identities.
InfoTeddy
10mo ago
Interesting, and not something I've considered before. Is there an article or blog post that I can link to the next time someone brings up the progressive misinterpretation of the paradox of tolerance?
InfoTeddy
11mo ago
AI risk seems like another religion or pseudoscience. I remember similar hype from the early 2000s about nanotechnology destroying the world
To the best of my understanding, Yudkowsky's current risk model involves AI using nanotechnology to destroy the world.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
Technically, that's a website :P
Some big music YouTuber made a video on it, and there's a Kiwi Farms thread refuting several blatant lies in said video. Shame that the thread hasn't spread much, but that's likely owed to the YTer's influence and generally positive reputation and KF's generally negative reputation.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
Screwing up the dating market, for one. China has the opposite problem with vastly more men than women as a result of their former one-child policy, and that leads to a ton of men being unable to find a partner. Analogously, an excess of women would leave a ton of them unable to find a partner. Of course China has more demographic problems beyond that (namely having more old people than young) but you get the point.
InfoTeddy
5mo ago
Your post puts my pause about supporting EA into better words than I possibly can write. I've always found it... cheating, kinda?... that the entire premise of EA seems to just be brute-forcing morality and ethics by shoving as many zeroes into a number as possible. And that's how we get what you have described here, where it's easy to say that you've saved 200,000 or however many lives, but then people don't interrogate that result beyond that. People just see the number and go "wow that's a lot of zeroes so it must be good".
I guess what I'm wondering is if there's much focus put in to long-term solutions (and I don't mean "longtermism" like figuring out how to get humans to colonize the stars or whatever to maximize the number of future lives) rather than just whatever saves the most lives in the short term. For example, I was always under the impression that you can't just brute-force solving world hunger by confiscating all the world's billionaires' wealth (ignoring the fact that much of it isn't liquid and actually kinda doesn't exist and if you confiscated it then most of the wealth would just go away) and funneling it into programs to distribute food to starving populaces (ignoring the fact that this would outcompete and devastate local markets, etc.). Sooner or later, their governments would stop you, because it turns out that the reason they're starving in the first place is because their government wants them to, and there's plenty of things the government can do to get their country in a place to feed them, but they don't for various reasons. So there's a good short-term solution by just distributing as much as you can, but an actual long-term solution requires some change to the government, and a lot of focus seems to be put on the short-term brute-force way of doing things.
Downthread, @FirmWeird posits a similar scenario where the population is way beyond carrying capacity. What do you do? Feeding them makes the line on a graph go up, if you ignore that this means you'll need even more in the future (induced demand). Not feeding them makes the line go down but it results in a more stable equilibrium. "Just shove as many zeroes in as you can" ignores plenty of side effects that may or may not be desirable, almost like a paperclip maximizer.
An interesting tweet from Elon Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671370284102819841
My initial reaction to this was that "well, aren't you already allowing slurs on Twitter, Elon?" But then I realized that there's a distinction here - slurs may be allowed, but harassment is not. After all, he used the words "cis" and "cisgender" without any censorship, much like many would censor a typical slur such as "nigger" as "n*gger" or "n-word". You may be allowed to use "cis", but you're not allowed to directly call someone "cis" on the platform.
More to the point, I think it's very valid to describe "cis" and "cisgender" as a slur, insofar as a slur is something you call a group of people who don't want to be called that (similar to the "'TERF' is a slur" debate). Certainly, "cissy" is definitely a slur (which the person Elon Musk was replying to was called). So why don't people want to be called "cis"?
I think it's because labeling the vast majority of the population (something like 99%) and making them have to use a qualifier to describe themselves is a systematic effort to make them seem more different from the norm than they really are. For the vast majority of human existence, a woman would be described as "a woman", until suddenly (around the late 2010s or so), she would now have to be described as "a cis woman", to distinguish her from "a trans woman". The implied argument seems to be that "a woman" is now suddenly ambiguous and one does not know whether one is referring to a woman in the classical sense, or a trans woman.
I would agree with this, except that I still see many instances of "women" being used when it's really being used to refer to trans women. If a qualifier is needed now, why not just keep saying "trans women" all the way through? So the "cis" terminology seems to just be a ploy to redefine "woman" to by default mean "trans woman", thus making the "cis" qualifier necessary to refer to a woman in the classical sense. But this would seem to contradict one of the supposed goals of the trans movement, that trans people should be treated the same as non-trans people. Why not refer to trans women and "cis" women equally, without the qualifier?
And it's not like it's impossible to refer to non-trans people either. I've seen many terminologies used that are much more acceptable, such as "biological women", or "non-trans" as I've been using. There's also "assigned female at birth", but I feel like that's much more of a misnomer, as it implies that gender/sex is something you're "assigned" rather than a fundamental property that is immutable (at least with today's primitive technology).
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