MathWizard
formerly hh26
No bio...
User ID: 164
This seems absolutely terrible, comparable to affirmative action in nature. Artificially increasing demand for a thing lowers the standards it has to reach in order for the market to accept it. This can't have a positive impact on the amount of genuinely quality Canadian content, because content they make that is comparable to non-Canadian content is/was able to compete in a fair playing field without regulations demanding it be spread. So this only impacts low quality content that wasn't previously good enough but now is accepted anyway to meet quotas. If you want people to consume your product, make a good product that people genuinely want to consume out of their own free will, don't force it on them. Now the average piece of Canadian content people encounter will have a lower quality than it did before, which actually reinforces stereotypes and breeds annoyance and resentment.
I can only see this going poorly.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Are there any good centrist or right-wing think tanks in the U.S. that are respectable, principled, and might have interest in hiring a mathematical modeler that I could apply for jobs at?
For context, I have a PhD in math, I specialize in game theory and mathematical modeling. I also have some experience with disease modeling, though not Covid specifically. I am currently nearing the end of a postdoc research position at a University, and a few published papers and several drafts I'm still working on. Over time I've felt less comfortable in academia as everything shifts less and all diversity stuff keeps getting worse. It hasn't affected me directly much (though you can never tell when you don't hear back from a job application whether being a straight white male was the cause or not), but it's kind of uncomfortable, and some topics that I'm interested in I'm afraid to actually go into because the papers might be rendered unpublishable. And just in general I feel the papers I publish don't actually matter all that much, and I suspect something more applied like this might feel more meaningful.
I'm still applying for some jobs at universities, but also industry jobs and am wondering if maybe a right wing think tank would be a good opportunity. Given the left's capture of the Universities, this maybe implies there's a shortage of right-wing academics and I'd have a better shot of getting in? But that's probably less true in math. And I definitely don't want to work for some propaganda machine that just hacks studies together to conclude whatever they already believe is true. I think that the left sometimes has legitimate points that are worth considering, and ideally would like to be able to make good scientific papers and mathematical models that give insight to people on both the left and right, and can potentially make the right stronger and smarter.
Bonus points for places that allow working remotely or are near the East Coast so I don't have to move very far, but at this point I'll take what I can get.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I'd welcome any thoughts people might have on what that might be.
Something along the lines of Trump's "Make America Great Again" but more concrete and effective.
1: Small businesses. Make it way easier to start and run a small business. Slash regulations, maybe taxes too. Take like half the forms and policies and regulations that businesses have to do and either remove them or make them only apply to businesses over a certain size. Make harsher anti-monopoly anti-corruption laws or just enforce existing ones more harshly on large businesses. The American dream isn't that one day you might be a wageslave to a megacorp, it's that you can make it big by your own hard work. Freedom and perseverance and all that. This also will help the balance of power between labor and corporations, more small businesses means more competition for megacorps trying to convince employees to work for them, and a more credible threat that an underpaid employee can just quit as start their own business.
2: Infrastructure. Build fancy buildings and cities and parks and bridges and highways. A modern first world train system would be nice. Cut the cost disease, be less wasteful, and do great things. Create employment for working class people who build stuff, and probably bring some manufacturing jobs back.
Elon Musk seems remarkably well-suited towards being a figurehead or inspiration or actually in charge of parts of the above points. He's good at taking things that everyone has been doing poorly, like space travel or electric cars or internet, things which everyone knows could be better but for some reason aren't, and actually doing it better. And, importantly, these can be part of inspiring utopian visions about the future, not the past. The internet allows for new decentralized employment like Uber or Airbnb, maybe self-employed tradesmen could use similar things to be plumbers or electricians or something, and maybe weird crypto stuff could allow workers and customers to coordinate without some large corporation pulling the strings and leeching the profits. And fancy new technology makes building fancy new infrastructure possible.
3: Family/Community. This one is largely a return to the past, but part of the point of the right is that you don't destroy things just because they're old, you keep the good stuff. The leftist future is one in which you are either an individual who can do whatever you want and cut people's throats to get ahead, or you are a member of a collective group determined by your sex/race/orientation determined by your birth. The rightist future is one in which family and neighbors are bond together by shared traditions, cultures, and mutual duties to each other. You don't just pack up and move to another city abandoning your friends and family every four years even if it would maximize your career trajectory. You are loyal and act with honor even when it goes against your self-interest, because you actually care about the people around you, and they care about you. Also, I think there is potential for this to go in future directions, as telecommunications, and the easier work-from-home meta caused by Covid allows for increased career opportunities for people who stay in their small hometowns with their extended families.
Republicans are too busy playing defense against the Democrats to build such a utopian vision, and too afraid of being cancelled to shrug off accusations of "-isms" and stick to their own vision of moral goodness. And most of the voters are too uneducated and unambitious to demand such a utopian vision, or to demand honor and loyalty from their own politicians. And the Democrats have been crying wolf against Republicans for so long that all such accusations are now ignored by Republican voters, allowing some actual wolves to mingle among them unnoticed. It's a mess, and I'm almost as upset at the Republicans as I am at the Democrats for ruining the country. But at least theoretically a utopian right wing vision of the future is possible and would be inspiring to people to vote for and genuinely good if accomplished.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
3mo ago
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Gun rights are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, that makes them a Federal issue. Now, perhaps the exact wording and definition of what regulations constitute "infringement" or not are up for debate, but that is a debate about the meaning of the constitution itself. Once we've defined what is and is not infringement, no State has the right to make laws stricter than that. It's out of their jurisdiction. This is not a pure 100% Democracy, the electorate and anyone they elect do not have the legal authority to infringe the right to bear arms, even within the borders of their state, because the constitution does not give them that right.
Again, it's open for debate what does and does not count as infringement, but the legitimacy of getting involved in other state's business is present on this issue, and not other more progressive issues, because it's directly and clearly established in the Constitution.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
I think this requires noblesse oblige from the people higher up, which mostly only happens if there is accountability for people at the top via skin in the game. If you are a feudal lord with lands that your famils has held for generations and peasants under you whose families have worked for your for generations, you are incentivized to take care of them because their thriving is your thriving. If you mistreat them too terribly they will rebel and chop your head off. If you mismanage the lands you will go bankrupt and be reduced to poverty. If you do a good job you will be wealthy and loved.
If you are the patriarch of a family and you mistreat your wife and/or children they will hate you and leave.
If you are a modern high level bureaucrat or government official in charge of millions/billions of dollars of someone else's money and mismanagement is rewarded with a transfer or a golden parachute, there's none of this. There's no incentive to behave responsibly to those below you, and there's no incentive for people trying to climb their way up to do so gracefully when a momentary clawhold can be cemented with the powers obtained along the way.
If SBF, or the bankers who caused the housing crisis, or the politicians who ruined the economy during Covid faced the ruin of their families into longterm poverty, or beheading by angry mobs, those issues probably wouldn't have happened in the first place because they would have been more careful. If every politician who voted for war was required to lead on the front lines, we'd have a lot fewer wars. But because many (most?) hierarchies allow people high to foist the consequences of their decisions onto people lower down, we typically don't get the nice scale of risk/reward that you envision here, though it sometimes does work like that.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
but it's kinda irrelevant compared to the bit where it's just not going to happen
And sometimes people do get Made Examples
I find this incredibly relevant. Having a gigantic pile of insane laws that survive only because they're selectively enforced is a corrupt tyrant's wet dream. If everyone regularly commits felonies without realizing it, then everyone is at the mercy of the police and DA who can legally enforce these laws on whomever they dislike for any reason. It does matter, even if 99.9% never become the target of this selective enforcement, because the 0.1% who do will not be targeted because of their unique wrongdoing but because the powers that be chose to single them out, which can lead to a lot of bad stuff above and beyond jail time. Sure, you as a regular citizen won't be affected, as long as you keep your head down and never make someone in power dislike you. That incentive is itself the problem.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Historical examples can be misleading for making predictions.
You know what's even more misleading for making predictions? A complete absence of historical examples. You're extrapolating way too much from "this thing is flawed" to "this thing is useless" without comparing it to the alternative. People are already really bad at critical thinking about events and politics, we don't need less we need more. Now, you can make a really good argument that history classes should be improved to deliver more value per time rather than making them longer (which I would be inclined to agree with). But the idea that they have no value to give is absurd.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
The best argument I've heard in favor of unions is that the equivalent bargaining power of "a company" isn't "an employee" it's "all the employees".
Suppose we remove the distinction of capital versus labor, and suppose that we have two groups of people with disproportionate level of bottleneck in a production process. That is, if we have X people from the first group, and Y people from the second group, then the level of production is something like
f(X,Y) = A sqrt(X)P(Y)
where A is some constant, and P is 0 if Y is 0 and 1 if Y >= 1
That is, you only need one Y (the employer), but can have as many X as you want, but the more X you have in the same job the more diminishing returns you get. For each production process people can gather together and organize and form mutually consensual agreements to find some equilibrium level of X that makes this efficient. BUT, Y has disproportionate bargaining power here. If any individual X threatens to quit, their quitting drops the profits of the process by some small amount. But less than their average. The other X essentially pick up the slack, and the production keeps on going. But X is now unemployed and has 0 income, which is catastrophically awful and wasteful, as all of their potential labor is essentially being wasted unused. X quitting hurts themselves more than it hurts Y. But if Y threatens to quit then everything stops and everyone is at 0, so it's a credible threat.
But if all of the X form a union and threaten to quit/strike together, then again production stops entirely, just as if Y threatened to quit. So now they have equal bargaining power.
I'm pretty sure whoever I read this sort of argument from explained it way better than I just did, but I don't remember who or where (it might have been on the motte, so if whoever it was recognizes this argument as their own and can find the post, feel free to repost it and claim credit).
MathWizard
formerly hh26
11mo ago
Holy crap. That @ControlsFreak post on personalized pricing just blew my mind. I hadn't seen it when it was first posted, but I'm very glad that I did because it just changed my perspective on the whole financial assistance thing.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I feel like something like there's some component of the opposite of this though. That is, perhaps socially adept people have evolved to shame awkward men into hiding because if they agree to hide then there are fewer men in the dating pool and the remaining men have a lower male to female density and thus more market value. This only works with awkward and weak men as targets because they are unlikely to retaliate, and are more likely to drop out instead of saying "fuck you" and continuing to ask girls out.
We might consider this a form of artificial selection: humans are nudging the fitness landscape in a way that makes being shy and kind less adaptive than it already was, because they are less likely to find a mate, while more aggressive behavior (shamers, and people who ignore negative feedback) becomes more adaptive.
If this is the case, then the correct response is actually the opposite: you should ignore them and in fact become more proactive about pursuing women because you and people like you are being suppressed by a psy-op from a different phenotype of males, which primarily functions by deceiving you and wins if and only if you believe it.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
The solution is to not lower the status of people with lower IQ. It is possible, and quite likely, that we literally live in a world where black people, on average, have lower IQ than white people. If true, this means that, in reality, one of the following must be true: people with lower IQ have the same moral value as people with higher IQ, or black people have less moral value than white people.
No amount of obfuscation, linguistic gymnastics, or averting ones gaze can avoid this dilemma. You have to pick one of the two (technically there's a third option where unintelligent people have more value than intelligent people, but that's pretty niche). An awful lot of people firmly believe that people with low IQ are lesser, which forces them to either accept reality and become racists, or deny reality to avoid the logical conclusion of their beliefs. I would argue that the latter is just closeted racism because they believe unintelligent people are lesser, so all of the unintelligent black people who exist in reality are people they implicitly attribute as being lesser. The bullet to bite is that unintelligent people are not automatically bad people, and you're not better than them just because you're smarter than them. Once you do this, the entire structure of "racist truths" disintegrates, because you're not automatically assigning moral value or hatred to people just because of the way they were born.
The truth cannot be racist, because the truth does not assign moral value. People do that.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I think there are two main forces contributing to this:
-
Signalling being "hard to fake" is not just about the physical/financial difficulty of sending the signal, but also the knowledge of how to send it, or that the signal even exists in the first place. You have to know who the fashionable celebrities are and pay attention to them, and avoid paying attention to the wrong celebrities (doing so signals you have good judgement, or more likely know the right people who inform you about who is cool and who isn't). You have to keep up to date with new information and new products as the fashions shift, and not be stuck with yesterdays fashion (doing so signals you still know the right people and aren't getting your information second hand as fashion slowly propagates). And most importantly, you have to actually care enough to spend your time and money for pure signalling, indicating that you are committed and loyal to this signal and not just sending it out frivolously. Anyone with a few hundred bucks can buy an iphone, but only someone who actually cares about being cool will willingly sacrifice the superior quality/price ratio of android devices for an overpriced apple product just to look cool. It's a costly signal not just in money but in time, knowledge, and dignity. (The last two sentences are exaggerated for comedic effect, but hopefully you get the point)
-
Signals are more diverse than a one dimensional quality slider that you want to maximize. A lot of signals are about belonging to a particular group. You might wear lots of dark clothing and makeup to signal that you're a goth, or conspicuously listen to Taylor Swift music to signal you're a fan and belong to groups which tend to like her, or go to church every Sunday to signal you're a good Christian, or wear giant ear gauges to signal... I'm not even sure what those signal, probably nonconformity and a rejection of normal beauty standards. And while people in each group will see these as good qualities, people outside the groups may consider them weakly positive, neutral, or even negative signals if they dislike that group. You can't send signals favorable to every group simultaneously, so choosing one demonstrates some level of solidarity, loyalty, camaraderie with those people in particular.
Personally, I think Apple products are decent-ish but overpriced relative to their quality (or equivalently, low quality relative to their price), and have unfriendly business practices such as making all their stuff incompatible with other brands when it would be trivial to have otherwise, especially when they do petty things like change the shape of their usb cables so they won't plug in to non-Apple devices (and normal usb cables won't plug in to Apple devices). As such, I consider ownership of Apple devices to signal some combination of uninformedness, susceptibility to advertisements, and hive-minded prioritization of signalling over substance. A person who buys things because they're cool instead of because they're useful. So I treat it as a (weak) negative signal and respect people with Apple devices slightly less. But also I'm a weird nerd and I am neither cool nor popular, so people who send those signals are in fact successful in signalling that I am not one of them, they are part of a different group, and that's probably the signal they want to send. If everyone wanted to send the same signal then money would be the only hurdle, and you're correct that it's not all that much money so not a strong signal. But by choosing an arbitrary product that's worse in some aspects you select for people who care about the signal strongly enough to make arbitrary choices in exchange for status with the group, and exclude people who just choose the best product and don't know or care about the group. And that becomes part of the signal and its cost.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I wonder if a lot of bullshit jobs are acting as a sort of... I'm not even sure what word to use here... emotional/comfort embezzlement? A principal agent problem in which Middle managers, or even upper management and CEOs with plenty of slack that aren't worried about shareholders, hire or keep around people who make their work lives slightly more pleasant because that maximizes their own utility, not the company's. If a middle manager has a choice between a friendly face who hangs out around the office, chats with them, brings donuts to work, and is generally friendly, or a stoic competent worker drone who gets stuff done, the optimal choice for the business is the worker drone, but the rationally selfish choice for the manager is going to depend on how much slack they have and how important it is for them to maximize productivity. If the choice is between the friendly face in a bullshit job or removing the job and saving the company $50k, the rationally selfish choice is probably to the keep the friendly face around. Having an extra friend around at the office isn't worth $50k, and the manager wouldn't spend that out of their own pocket. But if it's just a number of a spreadsheet? That's worth paying. If the manager could take $50k of the company's money at put it into their own pocket, and get away with it, they would. But they can't. But spending $50k of the company's money to improve their lives and make their job slightly easier at an equivalent of $5k? If they can get away with it then it's worth it, because the cost is measured in company-utility and the benefit is in personal-utility.
Any time you give someone control over someone else's money, inefficiencies are bound to happen in one way or another. It's just a question of to what degree.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
2mo ago
even though you've never believed in the validity of the accusation at all?
This is an incredibly rare scenario that almost never sees play anywhere, especially in the examples you give. Nobody in mainstream politics or culture thinks that being a racist or a pedophile is okay and therefore an invalid accusation that can simply be ignored. Dismissals are always founded on assumptions that the accusation is so obviously false that they don't even require rebuttals, that opponents are wolf-criers with no credibility, not that the accusations are true but ignorable because the they aren't bad.
Therefore, it is entirely consistent and not at all hypocritical to believe that opponents are unreliable wolf-criers who shouldn't be taken seriously when they make accusations, but then if you find actual evidence of them misbehaving to accuse them of the same crime, if you have actual evidence. Which of course, each side believes about themselves and not their opponents.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I think it's important to still care about convincing the other side, because it's useful. We live in a democracy, therefore more public support for our side increases our chances of successfully implementing it. If we lived in a dictatorship with you or I in charge and could just ban it immediately, then authoritarian suppression would be the way to go to guarantee it stops as soon as possible.
If, in the current environment, everyone on the right gives up on persuasion and just decries their opponents as inhuman monsters then all of the areas controlled by the right will ban it, all of the areas controlled by the left will not, and everyone in the center will see one side pretending to be kind and compassionate while we superficially look like authoritarian bigots despite being the ones actually helping people.
In general, the right has a huge optics problem. Or rather, the left has an optics advantage because the majority of their positions are chosen based on optimizing for feelgoods and superficial appearances, which makes them look better than they are in practice. The only way the right (and moderates, and logical people who don't optimize exclusively for optics) can stand a chance is by being logical, persuasive, and thorough enough that the superficial appearances are stripped away and the actual superior policies are revealed to the people around.
Gender affirming care for minors is an evil policy with horrible results. Most people who support it from a distance aren't evil people, they're naive people who haven't actually looked into the details and have just bought into the propaganda that all anti-trans arguments are founded on bigotry and hatred. And you don't change their minds by acting the same way someone who irrationally hated trans people would act, if you try then they'll stop looking further as soon as you confirm their prior beliefs. You change their minds by being kind, compassionate, logical, explaining this in detail, and then banning child mutilation because it's the kind, compassionate, and logical thing to do.
Removing honors classes and putting the smart kids in an easy class where they don't need the teacher is comparable to just sending them home and having smaller class sizes. If they're not learning anything from the teacher because they don't need the teacher's help, then why are they even in school? It's just a way of having 20 actively learning students in a class but pretending you have class sizes of 30. I can see the appeal from a certain perspective, this combines the steps of:
-
Have smaller class sizes, which increases learning and costs.
-
Stop teaching smart kids, which reduces the costs created by step 1.
-
Mask the whole process so it looks less obviously unjust than doing steps 1 and 2 in isolation.
But if you're actually paying attention, you realize that step 3 doesn't actually change how just it is, merely the surface appearance. I don't see the dilemma, this is a strictly worse policy than just letting smart kids test out of school so you don't have to spend money teaching them, and then having smaller class sizes for whoever's left. Which is itself a pretty dubious proposition, but still less dubious than wasting the smart kids' time.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
-
The same would apply to a lesser degree when working for the government in a prominent position.
-
Conservative women's clothing exists: women go to court all the time. A non-binary/gender fluid/trans person who stuck to their guns that they are genuinely a woman and didn't believe their gender nonconformity was obnoxious and unprofessional could wear respectable women's clothing to court.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
An important distinction needs to be made between the film "Starship Troopers" and the novel "Starship Troopers" that it's inspired-by/parodying. Given that the director did not actually read the novel, absolute despised fascism, and set about parodying and mocking the original story, they are clearly distinct stories in a way that most adaptations are not.
I'm assuming /u/bearmarket is referring to the film, whose main character "John Rico" is white. But if so, this undercuts his actual point, since this is a parody attempting to demonstrate how this white imperialism is BAD, not celebrating it.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
6mo ago
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
This culture war has been happening for decades, it will likely continue for decades into the future. We need to do other stuff to help ourselves in the short term, but not doing this is just going to make the problem continue to get worse in the long run.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
11mo ago
But you could make a similar argument that a human brain is a derivative work of its training data. Obviously there are huge differences, but are those differences relevant to the core argument? A neural net takes a bunch of stuff it's seen before and then combines ideas and concepts from them in a new form. A human takes a bunch of stuff they've seen before and then combines ideas and concepts from them in a new form. Copyright laws typically allow for borrowing concepts and ideas from other things as long as the new work is transformative and different enough that it isn't just a blatant ripoff. Otherwise you couldn't even have such a thing as a "genre", which all share a bunch of features that they copy from each other.
So it seems to me that, if a neural net creates content which is substantially different from any of its inputs, then it isn't copying them in a legal sense or moral sense, beyond that which a normal human creator who had seen the same training data and been inspired by them would be copying them.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I don't think this is as separated as you seem to think. One of the main tactics of wokeism is to hijack and abuse the government's regulatory apparatus. Ie, a bunch of woke idealogues see something they dislike, complain enough to raise it to public awareness, a woke bureaucrat in the government raises legal action against it via some sort of ambiguous law that can technically be said to apply if you stretch the language a little, and then a woke judge rules against the company.
This only needs to actually happen in a small number of cases in order to create a culture of fear that disincentivizes companies from invoking the ire of the woke, same as with any other legal threat. And because the law's are often ambiguous and/or selectively enforced, this can be wielded as an idealogical weapon. If the government selectively enforces ambiguous regulatory laws against wokeism's targets more often than its allies, then companies can reduce their regulatory burden by being an ally.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
My brother has a gluten issue (I don't know if it counts as a "sensitivity", but the doctors aren't 100% sure it's celiac, but is extremely similar so the distinction is moot), which causes him to be lethargic, messes with his digestive system and causes him to break out in red sores all over his body. The latter of which can last for weeks after having eaten nontrivial amounts of gluten in a single meal, and is the most obvious and provable evidence that the condition is real.
It's not like it's going to kill him (though the doctors say that it may increase the risk of colon cancer), but neither will drinking a small amount of bleach. It's basically literal poison for his body.
I understand that it's inconvenient to plan around. And it's especially annoying given that hypochondriacs and trenders and exaggerators exist and are difficult to distinguish from people with real biological conditions. But from the perspective of someone who actually has one of those conditions, if the choice is to be inconvenient to you, or eat literal poison in your food, they'll be inconvenient. And if you don't like it you don't have to invite them for dinner.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
As a libertarian, I don't see much difference between a government and a sufficiently competent/potent drug cartel.
I tentatively agree, but with the caveat that a strong drug cartel is a type a government, not that government is a type of cartel. That is, you can governments which are and are not cartels, or an spectrum more or less cartel-like (show me a cartel that lets all of the citizens in their territory vote on their leadership). So it's definitely a noncentral fallacy to say something like "government are like cartels on these metric, cartels are bad, therefore government bad". Which you didn't say outright but appear to be suggesting (please correct me if this is a wrong interpretation of your view).
But as your own post demonstrates by comparing Philadelphia vs Juarez, having a force with a monopoly on violence can create stability and order that otherwise wouldn't exist. If we just abolished governments then everywhere would be like Philadelphia but worse, with various competing gangs violently competing over territory. And any coallition that became powerful enough suppress or unite them would be de-facto a government.
But I think the main distinction here between a good government and a gang-like government-like thing is something like Legitimacy. Which is hard to define perfectly objectively, but is related to the following:
1,) True Monopoly on violence.
If you have five different gangs trying to control the same area, making different rules and overlapping in territory, it's hard to say that any one of them is the true government. Or even one gang (or official government) makes rules but can't enforce them and other people run around doing whatever they want, then this detracts from the legitimacy of the supposed government.
2,) Consistency/Integrity/Honesty.
Laws and processes which are consistent and predictable are much easier to follow and create more order and stability relative to their cost. If someone has a 5% tax imposed on them for thirty years, they can plan around that. They can get a job to earn enough money, save enough, make businesses, that all factor this constant tax into account. If instead you have a dictator or gang that randomly smashes and loots businneses whenever they feel like it, or suddenly doubles taxes on whatever company or businesses they temporarily dislike, then it makes it much harder for citizens to plan ahead and feel secure investing in long-term projects. Similarly, if a new gang replaces the old one every 5 years and changes up all the rules, none of them is especially legitimate. It sort of accrues over time. Or a government which pretends to obey a certain set of rules but blatantly violates them is less legitimate than one which consistently follows its own rules.
3,) Consent of the governed.
This is probably the most important. Obviously, the highest score it would be possible to have on this would be to literally have people sign a social contract in which they agree to allow the government to rule over them in exchange for the government agreeing to various things. Most places don't do this (though I think some charter cities like Prospera are doing this). But we can still get some of this by considering hypothetical questions. Like, if you had a magic button that would cause the government to suddenly vanish, or be replaced by a random or average different government, and presented the button to random citizens, what percent of them would press it? Or, how badly would they want to press it, how much would they pay for the option to press it? How much would they pay to prevent the button from being pressed? A government which does not require the consent of the people because it's powerful enough to force its will on them, but nevertheless has their consent anyway, is more legitimate than one which only forces its will to great protest. Note that this does not require the government to be a Democracy, a Monarchy in which everyone agrees that the Monarch should rule them is still legitimate.
All of this is on a spectrum. No existing government is perfectly legitimate, and any individual who wields a nonzero amount of force could be considered by a tiny government with a tiny amount of legitimacy under this perspective. But usually you'll find one entity, which everyone considers to be "the government", which is orders of magnitude above all of the various gangs and cartels and forces within it. (In cases where there isn't one unique outlier, we call it a "civil war", and it tends to be a temporary arrangement until one faction wins.) Nevertheless, I would argue that governments with high legitimacy, according to this metric, tend to be significantly better, both morally and pragmatically for the people living under them. It is inevitable that someone is going to use force on someone. If you are counting gangs and cartels, then having no government at all is not an option, so pick the best you can. I'd much prefer it be a mostly legitimate government like the one I have now that wants to tax me my entire life rather than some gang with low legitimacy and low time-horizons such which would rather loot my corpse while they're still in power.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Disclaimer, while I am accepting of trans people as human beings with rights, I am highly skeptical and in some cases openly hostile to the efforts trans activists to dismantle the concept of gender or biological reality. I'll do my best to explain my perspective on the issue without strawmanning anyone, but given that I don't know your actual beliefs on this, I can only speak for trans arguments I typically see.
It really depends on your definition of "man" and "woman". For hundreds of years in English, and via translation in the majority of historical languages, and still for the majority of the population, there is no meaningful distinction between "woman" and "cis-woman". They don't even use the term "cis", because you can just say "woman" when you mean an adult human female. For anyone who still holds this definition, then to "pass" as a woman means that people to mistake the trans person for a biological female. This is inherently deceptive, because the trans woman is not a biological female, and yet is deliberately causing themselves to be mistaken as one.
I'm pretty sure this counts as transphobic, despite not really being a normative claim, because it ignores/denies attempts to change language that trans activists have been making recently. I personally think all of the "-phobe" words are overused and nearly meaningless, but I usually interpret it as meaning something along the lines of "hinders the trans agenda", which this definitely does.
If you take the opposite extreme, and define "woman" to be purely "anyone who identifies as a woman", and if everyone embraces this definition you end up in circular logic where the word becomes meaningless. Why would anyone care what word they or another person identifies as if the word means literally nothing other than identifying as it. You might as well identify as a "snurxoth". This is consistent, it's just no different from having a name. Someone might identify as "Alex", and it doesn't allow you to infer anything about them at all, it's just a word you can use to pick them out of a group of people with different names.
Under this definition alone, then, it's impossible to pass as a woman or man without wearing your pronouns written visibly somewhere on your person. If gender is purely a construct of the mind and a person's self-identification with no external foundation, then you can't infer that the person you linked is a woman. Maybe they identify as a man and just like that style of hair or clothes. Maybe they're nonbinary. More importantly, why would you think that hair and clothes are associated with women at all? If everyone's gender identity were purely internal, then there would be no reason for all of the biological females, who tend to have long hair and wear that type of clothes, to decide that the word "woman" was their gender identity. If the word doesn't refer to anything physical, then there's no reason for people to divide themselves up into the same two categories that most people are in now. Rather, I would expect most people would identify as random stuff they like like "Dragons" or "Princess", or just their names.
I'm pretty sure this definition is also transphobic from a different perspective, because if you entirely deny the existence of a biological basis for gender, then trans people basically don't exist. Or rather, they're not meaningfully different from cis people. Everyone is just born as a person, has a gender identity, and their physical body doesn't matter at all, so there's no such thing as bodies that men have or women have, because anyone who identifies as a man or woman is equally a man or woman. There's literally no reason for anyone to try to transition or pass, because even if they do, there's no way anyone could know their gender identity afterwards without reading their mind, or asking, same as before. On the other hand, there's no way for this to be deceptive, because claiming a thing is literally all it takes to be that thing. Except in circumstances where someone outright lies (you ask to be referred to as a man but secretly identify as a woman in your mind).
But what I mostly see as the accepted trans activist position is a Motte and Bailey at play. The Motte is the above position, that gender identity is just self identification, the Bailey is that gender identity means a bunch of things that historically it has meant tied to biological sex. Most trans women don't want to be perceived as "someone who identifies with the word woman" or the pronouns "she/her", they want to be perceived the same as biological women, with all of the cultural baggage that that perception has picked up over the centuries. It's only because the majority of the population believe that "women" have meaningful physical and behavioral differences than "men" (a statement which is factually true if gender = sex), that trans women want to be categorized alongside the cis women and trans men want to be categorized alongside the cis men. Imagine if tomorrow all of the cis women decided that they no longer identify as "women", they have a new word, I don't know "snurxoth", and suppose all the cis men decided to go along with it and the word was quickly adapted to regular use and the old one abandoned.
I highly doubt the trans women would continue happily identifying with the word "woman". No, they would want to follow suit. Because at the heart of trans ideology isn't self-identification, it's factual and normatative claims that trans women and cis women aren't meaningfully distinct, and similarly for trans men and cis men. There's no point for trans women to want to pass as trans women but fail to pass as cis women, because it doesn't truly mean anything. Or, maybe there is some point. Other trans activists will use certain pronouns and treat them a certain way because that's what you're supposed to do to be a good ally. But it seems to me the real Bailey is that they want to be treated the same as cis women, and the only way to do that in a society that treats biological males and females differently is to deceive people into thinking you are a biological female: a cis woman.
I guess a society that treats biological males and females differently would be considered inherently transphobic . Your specific question of whether it's transphobic for you to think of passing in terms of passing as cis, conditional on already living in this society, are going to depend a lot on what that word even means for you. Is it more important to advance the trans agenda as a whole by dismantling the gender norms and deny biological differences matter? Or is it more important to help individual trans people try to slip into the existing categories by imitating the other sex? Either could be considered transphobic depending on the priorities of the accuser (which is why I don't think the word has much bite).
Unless colleges themselves start dropping Gen Ed requirements (which they should), AP courses of nonsense subjects are incredibly useful because they let you bypass them in college. I took AP Psychology and AP Government in highschool, they were mostly pointless, I passed the exam, and then when I went to college I had two fewer useless class eating my time and money so I could learn math and physics. (I also took AP classes for some of those too, but that just let me fastforward to more advanced ones in my major)
More options
Context Copy link