ShariaHeap
5mo ago
I don't know what you've described as I haven't had first person experience of any of this stuff but is it fair to say your summary is 'shit is weird, I'd like it to be weirder'?
ShariaHeap
10mo ago
I don't think you understand what the CW thread is, or apparently the toggles.
It's not a broad brush "trans bad", there's content to engage with here. If you choose not to engage with it that's fine but don't do the whole 'deplorables' routine thanks
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
Much of the refugee migration was out of Iraq, Syria destruction so off the back of US war mongering and lingering cold war stuff. We shouldn't forget these root causes when we champion the next intervention.
ShariaHeap
10mo ago
I think a useful frame for thinking about trans identification is as a culture bound syndrome. Some conditions obviously have a plain physical aetiology but other conditions are given shape by the culture of the time. For example, hysteria was a common diagnosis of a previous era but no-one suffers from it today. Similarly while people have always starved themselves historically for various reasons, ie religious martyrs, the modern form of anorexia as self-harm among mainly female adolescents is a recent culture bound syndrome - in a sense the cultural availability of the syndrome within the medical context of the time combines with the experience of the individual to give rise to the condition. This culture bound syndrome is hen active and in the modern age can be easily exported as happened with Korea which experienced a sudden arrival of anorexia as essentially a new condition. Note this means it's still very real.
Over time the experiences and language of how people to describe their state spreads and this is what I think is happening with trans. In adolescence significant anxiety and transition to the social world from childhood create a space of confusion and sometimes extreme anxiety in the self-space. The experience of feeling different from everyone else, not fitting in, is actually really common. Additionally some people have additional challenges around sexuality or gender non-conformity, or they may have dysfunctional family or have experienced abuse. In the past, people may have experienced this as more generalised anxiety, deep depression, self-destructive behaviours etc, in more recent times it has become expressed in new modes such as anorexia and direct self-harm. Because gender has become so salient it is now being expressed as gender dysphoria - the language and experience are given to the person by the culture and this reifies their self-experience in these terms.
Combined with the social contagion of the internet and in-group cult dynamics that give short term alleviation of the sense of difference and alienation then we see how the culture bound syndrome can spread.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
COVID made me aware that actually you can't resolve arguments by quoting scientific articles. There has actually always been a lot of low quality evidence that you can't trust. Researcher bias is a given in this area. Opinion pieces are mere sophistry. Science used to progress by consensus, whereby shared facts would gradually accrue through the process of reproducibility and sufficient status given to integrity and actually being right. Now science is just more polarised politics. There is no loss of status for spouting shit because your tribe will back it up. Actual biologists are failing to defend the most basic facts about biological sex, deliberately muddying longstanding understandings and erecting obvious straw men in pursuit of pleasing their tribe.
ShariaHeap
4mo ago
I'm not sure on selection of prosocial genes, will think on this - Fukuyama puts it culturally with regard to practises of Roman Catholic church disrupting familial inheritance etc
ShariaHeap
8mo ago
I've been curious about the popular appeal of transhumanism. From my perspective it seems to operate as a low-effort utopian vision that allows people to bypass some real problem that exists by kicking it down the road.
It also reflects I think a search for transcendence which is latent in the Western world and in this aspect acts as a misplaced transference of genuine searching.
Now, I also have a lot of hope in technology - I would describe myself as techno-fix, and I've no interest in predicting against its potential, particularly over time scales that feel very long against the rapid pace of change we see now, say 100 or 200 years, but even so I find the transhumanist visions outlined unrealistic and fundamentally missing the point. Now my thoughts are likely based on very outdated knowledge and so I'm open to having them updated by the latest state of the art. Also I probably lack imagination, so feel free to tear me a new one as they say...
Moving to Mars, space
Now I think space frontiers should be explored, but we do run up against some pretty hard problems here. The most utopian visions, creating a fully viable atmosphere and water rich environment would seem to be somewhat fanciful. The second choice, some kind of resource-supported colony would seem to require inordinate resourcing and even then you've just got people living indoors, in a desert, not really much to inspire the human race with. Also what happens at this colony, who runs it, owns out- I don't think anyone thinks it would run any better than the systems we have already but I guess as a last resort to nuclear fallout and environmental catastrophe it bears thinking about. But again, not really very inspiring vision here.
More to the point, we already have a beautiful planet with an atmosphere, water and abundant resources - shouldn't the utopian impulse make us redouble our efforts for poor old Earth, instead of giving the glad eye to some ugly red rock? Of course both are possible but you do have to wonder about distracting focus.
Freezing our body, brain to come back later
The technical challenges of this are immense, as to how you maintain function while in the frozen state. It's not only the fracturing problem in freeze, thaw it's the lack of the electrical, chemical signalling on which neurones are formed and maintained. I'd go as far to say it's a modal confusion of what we are, which is a process more than a thing. But perhaps I'm not being sufficiently visionary in the technology.
Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.
Changing sex
I'll admit changes are afoot in terms of biology. Gene editing is already being tested for rare diseases, organ creation could become trivial, re-enervation to treat spinal injuries etc. But I'll admit I'm still puzzled when people talk about changing sex, and even changing sex back and forth. What do people mean here? Obviously secondary sex characteristics can be changed and new tech could mean surgical techniques become straightforward and remove risk and provide function, so conceivably issues around numbing of sensation in a new nipple could be resolved, or an embryo could be implanted successfully in an implanted/engineered womb, uterus. But are we really calling this changing sex? How far will it be possible to engineer all the internal bits, eggs, fallopian tubes, etc while simultaneously atrophying the wrong bits. I'm struggling to see how you'd ever get ethical permission to establish such an insane idea, or why you would want to try. This says nothing about brain structures developed during puberty and the various complex hormonal interactions that influence structure, function and ultimately behaviour. This would seem to really get closer to some omniscient level of requisite knowledge of exactly what makes us up. Will we ever be able to change all of our cells?
I just don't see the appeal to this idea, and the fetish around changing sex or being something other than what you are already. It seems like a dystopia to be so focused on the surface aspects of Self when we could imagine a world where your sex is less relevant.
So to my mind, and possibly uninformed view this transhumanism is a utopian distraction from the issues of the day and a failure to think about true transcendence through a more spiritual realm. It is exactly the sort of mistaken thinking our late-stage secular materialist society would make when faced with the existential problems of today. And frankly it seems lazy, rather than explore philosophical questions around what it is to be a man/woman or what identity is, it acts as a catch-all macguffin type thing.
ShariaHeap
6mo ago
Isn't this a contradiction? On the one hand, you bemoan the dilution of some truer, nobler Christianity of the past, presumably sullied in your view by forces such as the reformation and liberalism. Instead you would seem to want Christians to behave as they did in the Crusades and fight back against the intrusion of those with a foreign religion.
But then that would surely bring you closer in your Christianity to Islam, undermining your Muslim exceptionalism claim.
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
Well there's no particular moral judgement from my side. Im just not familiar with much of this world and these things on the internet that pop into being seem so arbitrary - I mean presumably anything can become an object of desire and identification through conditioning. I'm left feeling overwhelmed that we will have any shared high level culture or values remaining, or whether the future is just atomised norms and behaviours.
ShariaHeap
4mo ago
Yes it was a hunch based on tail effects but realised after posting that would be safer bet with just black-non black.
How normal are the tails though? If you adjust your thresholds, what is the sensitivity to your estimate? I contend there is still a chance you have majority non-blacks, let's forget about the sexes...
My point running alongside the white majority question is that if you find the explanatory factor at the root of OPs HBD motivation, then you should apply your theories, policies on the basis of that factor, so you would run it across all races.
I don't know what the policies are for people like OP but whatever they are I'd be more inclined to agree with them if they were universally applied, it wouldn't be scientific to do it any other way.
And yes I'm aware there does exist racial favouritism in regards to university admission etc and I'm against that too.
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
Yeah, I can imagine finding it humorous to get the internet a-stir with these things, and there is a legitimate point you can make so sounds credible.
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
I dunno, this seems basic information theory. Meta can't be decoded without other info, ie if you share the signal as another meaning there is no way for the receiver to disambiguate, without extra info.
Now your Bayesian based on his work etc leads you to conclusion X. But you also have to account for his potentially hiding his true views. Perhaps he's hiding his true depth of nazi feeling, trying to fly undercover with a few subtle references here and there?
Perhaps he actually doesn't know his own Nazi sympathies because coming from 4chan world he has constantly engaged with meta that can't be unambiguously decoded as meta, and his mind is the same superposition?
ShariaHeap
11mo ago
This was the existing accommodation and understanding of trans-sexuals. But the progressive social engineers, legal activists (out of a job after successful gay marriage laws) and the queer activists (a golem of post-modernism and a broken academia) took over (over-reached) and now 'the machine' has taken over. Now we've got social media disembodiment and cult dynamics, an acquiescent media, rogue pharma and surgeons and a cultural fashion that morphed into winning the culture war through hegemony. Self-ID now let's weird criminal males transfer to women's prisons.
The level of philosophy is just to satisfy oneself that one is not a bigot and that gender ideology is actually incoherent. Of course no one on the peak-trans side really cares about these ideas, it's about cultural power.
ShariaHeap
6mo ago
I suspect this is tongue in cheek, but one wonders about the gish-gallop style of rebuttal that takes place here in contrast to debate on the substantive issues.
ShariaHeap
6mo ago
I agree we should focus on economic issues and intergenerational disparities but gender ideology is ubiquitous - in the sense of scale it's huge, an attempted takeover of a prior social consensus. Just because a lot of people ignore it, doesn't mean it's not consequential.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
As someone pointed out in another thread it is stunning how much we need to be concerned, change our entire society for, less than 1% of the population, yet within that population - the irreversible infertility of an entire group of people (males who don't go through natal puberty) is not even worth mentioning.
Also, what are stats on women who don't go through their puberty having their fertility return-seems like egg preservation is recommended for women as well as men on gender clinic sites- though that could just be because it's an additional revenue stream I suppose...
Yes, this feels right. My focus has always been on what is true, or what can I learn and I've always been willing to entertain, if not actively share, ideas that are taboo.
The adaptation of knowing which way the wind blows and avoiding going against the ruling elite makes a lot of sense of course. Perhaps I have just been fooled by the 'end of history', of modern liberalism founded on enlightenment values.
I have a friend who literally never shares his political persuasion even when prompted. I assume this must be some hidden trauma in his genes that makes good sense over long timescales.
Of course it's frustrating because all it takes for the counter ideas to be made normal is the mass of people in the middle expressing them, as they used to only a blink of an eye prior.
ShariaHeap
6mo ago
Trust me, I'm in the same boat professionally speaking. But in private with friends I'm happy to share. But perhaps that's they're reservation and just more cautious?
ShariaHeap
8mo ago
Yes, happy to. I think 'trans' is an umbrella term that covers a lot of interrelated issues, so I also don't believe in the 'trans' adult as a distinct thing either. I think the best frame is that of a culture bound syndrome (Helen Joyce's position), as I've outlined previously.
https://www.themotte.org/post/587/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/120789?context=8#context
To inquires into trans means we need to differentiate the different component parts - applying a label trans child/trans adult is already question begging. It locks us into a particular metaphysical frame where it's very easy to assume, 'people are born like that'.
I don't preclude biological or genetic aspects or some mechanism like hormones in natal development on the brain for some portion of trans identification, but even then I don't jump to 'trans person' as a response but 'person who may find difficulties with the assumed gender roles and presentation that is normative for their sex', ie gender dysphoria and gender non-conforming. Mental illness is a broad, unhelpful term but there a host of psychological conditions that could impact someones social identity formation and self-concept that don't have any need for the creation of a 'trans person'. OCD, autism, body dysmorphia.
For children the assumption (by adults on the child's behalf) is even more egregious. Part of gender is obviously socially constructed and we learn in development language, customs around gender. To answer my earlier question, this means it is adults supplying the children with concepts and language to talk about gender. The current iteration of ideas in my view is clearly a social contagion drawing from all sorts of problematic and contingent elements such as queer theory and an ideological fervour from progressives.
While children learn early about sex categories our awareness of our sexed nature's and social identity doesn't really take off until early adolescence and in particular puberty. Society, through child development, is shaping ideas around gender expression and what it is to be a self. Why are we shaping it in such a way that we are allowing some children to take drugs with serious side-effects and surgeries as well as foregoing puberty without a strong evidence base, is shocking. For many children we are foreclosing the rite of passage to adulthood, surely limiting their integration as a social being.
It's because of activists, and a big blob of people that aren't treating this as a public health issue, so are complicit in unethical medical harms.
ShariaHeap
1yr ago
Yes, the gaslighting of parents in this is another real cost.
ShariaHeap
10mo ago
This reads like hagiography to me. I'm not Australian but I've visited a few times and engages with Australians abroad and I couldn't help noticing how racist some people were. "Don't get me started on the Lebos", "Abos are just paint sniffers etc". Mind you this was from a second generation Indian migrant so perhaps assimilation in Australia is to become racist?
Perhaps in Australia racism is at a casual and non-consequential level and that's healthier than a deeper racism of other countries who have a pretence of non-racism.
Or might you be in a liberal well-off bubble where people are genuinely getting on fine racially - ignoring the ugly racism that to me seemed to occur fairly regularly throughout my travels...?
ShariaHeap
9mo ago
I think your last paragraphs sum it up for me, it would be a fascinating topic for me if you had visibility of scientists arguing science at the individual issue level, so that you could get a sense of the thing. Instead you have people many levels up with their understanding and particular biases and material is locked into that frame, which actually limits inquiry and learning.
The same goes for global warming, there is actually a real world phenomenon of global warming (to whatever degree, causes and impact that it is) and funnily enough reality doesn't care about what the left or right happens to think about the issue. But the debate is culture warred out - people tend to start with their politics and build out from there and so we don't really progressed, it gets frozen in time.
ShariaHeap
11mo ago
He points to some true things and may quote worthwhile science in the manner of a broken clock being right twice a day, but he is just another grifter.
The better question is why people who apply razor skepticism to anything approaching a mainstream view would be so inanely credulous of random shit grifters say on the internet is beyond me. There are people who would lie down in traffic or give their first born to such heroes without having the ability to do the first-person epistemics needed to find out how true any of the claims are. It's hard to know why people are so gullible in certain directions, it's probably a cult thing.
The current social media environment incentivises this of course and COVID was peak grift. Don't get me wrong the establishment got a lot wrong, but that doesn't mean you just trust random people on the internet cause they have a suck it to the man attitude and a cosy supportive audience you can cult-out with. I'll inflame a few people here but Brett Weinstein and most of his COVID guests were also in this camp.
ShariaHeap
6mo ago
Yes, I've looked into Walter Freeman and how he'd casually deliver lobotomies during an afternoon first-time visit, true evil I think and unrepentant to his dying day as far as I can tell. Obviously Monaz won a Noble prize at the time, which shows how unaware science was of what is patently a grotesque 'treatment'.
I don't have time for the back and forth research game, but why the conviction?
How did major international reviews find the evidence to be inconclusive and low quality but you state the opposite as fact?
Some studies that have been held up as gold standard such as the early Dutch puberty blockers studies have been shown to have major methodological flaws such as not accounting for the fact that people would transition in the pre/post survey instrument, thus rendering some of the items equivocal/unreliable. Recent studies have shown that even on its own merits it is inconclusive on showing improvement.
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