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 Now my thoughts are likely based on very outdated knowledge and so I'm open to having them updated by the latest state of the art.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
1yr ago
I like the idea of this place, I really do, but why do people write such long posts. It strikes me as quite obnoxious. Don't you get bored of writing and reading so much text?
ShariaHeap
6mo ago
As a meta-comment on all the hawkish hot takes, I'd love it if we could gather all motte hot-takers in a no-holds barred cage fight so we could distinguish between the psychopaths, veteran fighters and pissant weaklings who try to compensate for their inferiority complex with words. I think we have to be alert to the possibility that people that talk a big game could easily wet their pants in real world life and I'd love to see who those people are.
ShariaHeap
9mo ago
Can you point me to a name, link that does the genetic proof for HBD. Most of the content I see here already assumes this axiomatically or is low resolution. What id like is something where I can start to 'cleave the arguments at their bones'
Eg, I'm curious what interpretation people have for the Flynn effect, or what the evidence base is for isolated genetic pools over long history..
Yep that's the level of analysis I'm thinking, and how each piece scaffolds to the broader claims around G intelligence over broad groups of lineages. I've read some Charles Murray and I'm underwhelmed by some of the aggregate data presented. I had thought by now a lot of interesting work on phylogenetic trees would be informing the conversation with some controlled natural experiments available.
But even then, 'some populations' being isolated limits representativeness and relevance for other populations.
Also there are different distributional considerations- perhaps some data is a group at the tail, ie Asian Americans. The analysis is very sensitive to what we consider our population and who were measuring etc.
People talk about Koreans being smarter but are they really genetically all that different from other Asians in the region?
I guess I want to learn from conversations on here so they have to actually have substance. I don't get that from the HBD enquiry here. Whereas a recent series of comments on the US and French revolutions gave me a lot.
The Neanderthal gene discovery is pretty fascinating. And aboriginals clearly have had time to become somewhat different. But is this a shorter term phenomenon akin to adaptation rather than a longer evolutionary time. I guess it does get into the overly complex here but I'm suspicious that any group over long enough time wouldn't select for intelligence in some form. When is G not useful in an environment. Similarly there's cultural/environmental factors that can lead to homogeneous populations but over long time the advantage is genetic mixing, so how long do homogeneous populations exist. Can we really assume that much about our current race categorisation around genetic similarity, or are we arguing that early divergence was the key differentiator.
ShariaHeap
4mo ago
Francis Fukuyama has some interesting political philosophy that tries to do big picture, Jared Diamond style analysis of why some regions have a less stable history in terms of whether a central ruler governing the local areas of its domain was able to assert power over long periods.
In this analysis, India is noted as being unstable in terms of central government, instead suffering waves of conquest by foreign powers from the North, I forget the historical elements. This led to, or exists alongside, to cultural tendencies towards nepotism, with family being more important than society broadly speaking. This is pretty awful paraphrase probably but the idea of different peoples having different cultural tendencies is not unusual.
But I think the power of culture is that, people, especially second-generation often grow up adopting the customs, and culture, of the country they live in. Such is cultural development for everybody. I think America still has a culture of meritocracy that should maintain, I mean presumably cultures are constantly at risk of change due to other, but often don't change. In any case, cultures are increasingly merged.
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
Well that's sad to me but I sense it, and it becomes reinforcing- as less people are having children society seems to have also become less accommodating of having children. I have to say it's a stressful business in the current age.
How much is fear of global catastrophe? I wonder if all the environmentalism has curbed the instinct, or is it that we've become more online and less physically connected.
ShariaHeap
10mo ago
My guess is hereditary biological determinism...
I admidettly only scan over this material but the best examples are Askhenazi Jews are inherently smart, in it's worst guise Black people are inherently stupid.
As far as I can tell, the low-IQ version of this argument starts with a racist mindset that then uses a naive attribution of IQ to genetics, and constructs an elaborate just-so story to justify any inequality of black people as a natural consequence of the world.
My guess is that the high-iq version has better arguments and data but is just another elaborate just-so story like evolutionary psychology or blank-slate cultural constructionism or marxism or whatever other thought system that lacks sufficient epistemic humility and likes to draw long-bows.
The inquiry is fine and there may be the beginnings of a genuine science taking shape but easy answers are a lot more fun to post than the complexity of the real world.
ShariaHeap
9mo ago
Yes, absolutely - a range of physical talents have genetic basis. And why shouldn't different kinds of intelligence have genetic elements. Fine, it is the coarse theory I'm critiquing which ends up with some people in a Victorian hierarchy of being argument l. Human intelligence is multifaceted and overlaps with culture. Why has IQ gone up over time, why is it I can increase my IQ from practice? What is the genetics of a mixed race person in HBD, what level of mixing do different groups have, how much is adaptation to environment over shorter timescales, how well does the tail reflect mean behaviour.
Do you really believe common sense is a reliable scientific guide. Phrenology was once accepted. I'm open to inquiry in this space but I've noticed people prefer the axiomatic assumptions than thinking about it.
In reference to a previous conversation Im not race blind but I don't get the hate boner people carry, sometimes over their lifetimes, around race. If you're going to make a strong claim, you need strong evidence.
ShariaHeap
8mo ago
I don't have great insight into this field but I think you overstate the science somewhat. A number of genes have been 'implicated in' intelligence but that is a long way off from the proof that inserting these genes into someone will make them intelligent. I believe there is evidence that genes can function differently in different circumstances/populations so it's not a trivial X makes Y scenario.
ShariaHeap
10mo ago
I might be misreading you, and I'm addressing your parenthetical point, but I don't think your post gives sufficient acknowledgement of the importance of mimesis/memetics.
Perhaps you're focused on strategy rather than ontology but I'm inclined to think mimesis and esoteric ideas like hyperagents are the critical ideas we need to think about to understand current issues.
The reality is we have agency and can aspire to individual rationality (which also requires wisdom, not just formal logic). But we are also subjects to 'interpellation' from the top down, which helps shape our reality. We are mimetic creatures and look to others to know what to think and care about. We can't avoid the cognitive necessity of 'framing', which necessarily narrows our perception and understanding of reality.
So what, you might say-how does this relate to the culture wars?
My contention is that some people are more able, whether due to upbringing or inherent personality inclination, as well as training, to either orient to truth or to occupy contrariwise positions. Others are more susceptible to going along. So there's that dimension-not everyone will act in the same way in what I will outline here..
Our moment sees postmodernism arise with the internet and institutional decay. This gives rise to mimetic possibilities that draw from culture but then proliferate as a dynamical system and operate back down on the culture. This level of hyperagency, or the egregore, explains qanon and the current gender ideology. It needs to be understood at this level because it's spontaneous, contingent and also not rational - it's the old, 'you can't reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into'. People need to see that we are mimetic creatures that are prey to mass delusions and we should normalise talking at this level.
Other facets of the problem are more mundane, ie good faith vs bad faith, politics, cognitive biases that prevent people appreciating contextual factors in current world problems, conservative vs progressive preferences etc. They feed in, interact with, the culture war issues but aren't enough to explain the phenomenon.
Yes, I agree with you. There's a sense of solidarity by a modern liberal woman with anything perceived as progressive that overrides debate on certain issues.
I'd like to outline my meta-critique of feminism in relation to this phenomenon. It's a kind of speculative post-Jungian thing and doesn't attempt any evidence so take it with a grain of salt.
The first thing women know is that men are more powerful than them physically - they are stronger and more violent, so the average woman would lose in a fight to an average man. Additionally because of procreation they are more vulnerable- men desire to rape woman more often than they desire to rape men, so even a weak man will be safer on the streets from that kind of violation (though more likely to experience common assault).
Men also have higher representation in the tails of achievement across many different domains - this is not describing the average, but does mean that generally the smartest woman would have usually found a smarter man in her domain (of course there are spectacularly smart woman in the distribution as well).
All this means that deep in their psyches, women feel an inferiority complex in relation to men (men in turn have inferiority around the ability to procreate, hence a push to have the heavenly father dominate over earth mother in Western traditions). Also as an aside both men and women are misogynistic, projecting their existential disgust/despair onto woman as the closest to 'life/creation/existence'.
This inferiority combines with the actual injustice of historical patriarchy, servitude, male domineering that woman have experienced into feminism.
To avoid the knowledge of male primary power, feminism took up the ideas of social constructivism a la Foucault, where power relations determine the way things are. Thus the exclusion of biological science in discourse in favour of blank-slate ideas. And the explicit use of politics and solidarity to wield power.
But, political aims work against truth discernment and so feminism has wandered, and failed to integrate biology and evolution, and has, like a lot of social science, favoured novelty over synthesis.
This political wandering has led to internal factionism, first with intersectionality, which undermines solidarity across the category women, and now gender ideology and queer theory, the bastard sister of gender studies, which undermines the very category of women.
But modern liberal progressive politics demands solidarity across the sisterhood, and so more than anyone, women are responsible for sustaining the politics undermining feminism, and womanhood, itself.
ShariaHeap
8mo ago
Perhaps if you outlaid it in a way that gave reassurance and pointed to what you agree with. Maybe occasionally allude to the tragedy and antisemitism. It's always presented in a way that it feels like Part 1 of a series where ultimately I'm going to be led to believe nobody was gassed at all. Start with your conclusion and present evidence and counter-evidence.
The construction is too heavily in your favour currently, as if I'm being given a tour of a communist country by the regime. Go left here, point to this building on the right, talk to this baker, ...
ShariaHeap
10mo ago
Yes and why people can't see this strange to me. One day about 'born in the wrong body', another day queer theory transgression. But the reality model doesn't allow both, either gender identity is an essential attribute or it's something that you can choose, that changes, you can't have both. So many contradictions, sex and gender norms need to be thrown off, yet it's sex appearance and gender stereotypes that define the desire for, and results of, transition. You can't pathologise it, yet you treat it with powerful medical interventions. Trans people are unsafe while violence towards woman occurs at womans rights events. And of course, the persistent motte and bailey. It's about all this other stuff except when people point out the flaws and then it's just extreme gender dysphoria (with no other possible solution).
But why don't more people voice their distaste with this incoherent babble? I can think of the following groups:
**General apathy.
I appreciate this stance, it's where I sit on a number of other important issues such as the environment.
**Both sides
It's too complicated to understand and is just another culture war issue so the truth is somewhere halfway between but I can't be bothered finding out where it sits.
**Progress junkies
I must have socially liberal progress, even if I have push it out to some trans-human utopia. I don't care about the details. Trans woman are woman!
**Resigned
Yes it's nonsense but it's just the way the world is moving. Nothing stands still.
**Eugenicists
Well less people can't hurt the environment really. If some people want to opt-out of reproduction all the power to them.
**Third wave feminists
Social engineering is coming for you, ah ha ha....
**Religious fanatics
All kneel for the sacred caste
ShariaHeap
10mo ago
But I lose information content if I adopt your trans-inclusive language, a man identifying as a woman is more informative, than just woman. It's also true and scientifically provable. Why is this lossy or ambiguous - the trans inclusive language is ambiguous because it conflates gender identity with biological sex.
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
This is not a ban worthy post whatever patterns you're seeing. I personally think moderation should be uber-light. It is the overall community we need to trust in maintaining standards, not moderation. There should be a ban line at explicitly inciting hate, but not at allusions, dog whistles etc. I may be naive but I just don't see how a broad base community like this will get swept up in a descent to all out racism or whatever. People will counter till they will get bored and then disengage. A small minority will feed off each other's posts potentially but I think it's worth being radically open here given what is happening internet wide with censorship.
ShariaHeap
11mo ago
My advice - don't rush to dating necessarily though you may be enjoying it. Make sure you have another focus to your life and are creating your own freshness and also reduces the desparate. Two, among other things dating is a game, be prepared to learn it's rules but your question on authenticity is great. It's tricky, sometimes authenticity doesn't pay off but then maybe it's a good shortcut to finding out readiness, suitability. But key is not to look desparate, needy or to assume too much, too early. This requires a bit of strategy about how you're coming across. Also, try different things, you don't want to capitulate in a power sense but you don't want to think entirely in power paradigm and you'll have to take some risks in how to present yourself as a confident person.
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
I think there is a lurking leftist middle that probably exists here, at least I am one, and I certainly don't believe in HBD as it's typically used. The difficulty is that the world is complex and it's hard to build and formulate the kind of critique necessary to capture nuance and rebut the plethora of arguments hoarded by the HBD side.
I think the tribal thing is overdone with left v right, the problem is the failure of people to think for themselves. I mean your claim that all blue is pro-immigration seems unlikely, or is evidence of some serious group-think. Immigration is a complex, and contextual issue. If half the population has one view on it, that's stupid.
I'm broadly in favour of diversity and different cultures existing as a plurality but words like multiculturalism and for that matter diversity are ruined for me as they have a monolithic group think sense about them.
I see this site as having plenty of people from the left who escaped from this kind of mindless group think.
HBD isn't mentioned all that much these days.
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
Oh right, see no evil, hear no evil...
Given that lives are on the line, a countries foreign interventions should ethically be of great concern, both for the lives of their own citizens but also foreign citizens. Even if you hold your own nationals as being more important, it would still be important to want to limit unnecessary foreign deaths where there are no strategic gains.
The idea that you would be happy just for innocent people to die, would put you in a pretty small set of people. Some people speak rhetorically in such a fashion but I question whether they would actually be able to kill an innocent person themselves if they knew there was no justification. As you point out, the key is not to know about it or to be in the fog of war.
If you're looking for relevant examples, think Iraq war. Lot's of innocent civilians dead, no strategic gains beyond regional chaos perhaps. This sort of thing is only possible when the truth is hidden. Otherwise people tend to understand that it's bad, because most of us value self-consistency and aren't psychopaths.
ShariaHeap
5mo 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
I have plenty of generalised anxiety of the future myself though now that I'm in deep with kids of my own, the immediacy of their care reduces that background. I do feel a bit bad for them sometimes with the uncertainty in the world but of course other generations had their thing and the characteristics I hope to instill are removed from time. Resilience will always be useful.
While I have probably always wanted kids or thought I'd have them eventually it was my partners ticking biological clock that got me over the line :) Are biological clocks no longer ticking?
My parents had us young and warned us against doing the same with some of their thwarted ambitions. But then I've gone the other way and wish I'd started earlier.
Just to add that the payoff for children for me has been meaning, I get connection to meaning.
ShariaHeap
5mo ago
That would seem to somewhere marginalise the concept of child development, which we have consistently taken into account in applying other restrictions on choice as a society, alcohol, driving, joining the army.
But I can see the framing as being sufficient at a first, say libertarian, brush.
The problem of course, as you point to, is that the systems of trust advising on these matters are captured and are being grossly negligent in providing accurate information.
I kind of see myself at a privileged place in history, in that it's actually really easy to get information. 10 hours of reading on substack will get you all you need to know to have a visceral experience of concern. In the past, the systems of trust were limited. Also we understand biases and self deception much better than previous generations.
I met the parent of a three year old who told me their child gets to decide every day if she is a boy or a girl. Schools are responding to this Manchausens by proxy parental abuse by... obliging them... Surely an average person would look at this and say, hmmmm, that's not right? Are three year olds now masters of their own destiny?
ShariaHeap
6mo ago
Well I have no idea of that scenario obviously, not having been in it. I've done some minor karate/Kung Fu sparring to know my skills and strength are negligible on the curve and on the street I've come off second best in several encounters though usually extremely drunk and in my youth. I suppose I have a quiet confidence that trained and with weaponry I would stand my own under fire but it's completely hypothetical. My theory is there's some advantage to calibrating your actual skills and courage to reality, rather than some wishful ego conception, so that way when it comes to crunch you don't find yourself unable to bridge to reality.
Now of course, instigating war doesn't require the instigators to have courage, they can pass that on to others, as well as the moral torments of having directly killed innocent people.
I just think I'm tired of the over-confident manner of mottizens in general. Talk is so cheap, and real thinking so expensive. So little on here has any relevance, interesting as it may be, because there is no reality test. As far as I can tell a lot of commentary just reinforces the position and ego of the commenter without persuading anyone else one way or another. On average people just like the friction of their position relative to others rather than being willing to actually adjust their position or acknowledge epistemic deficits. I'm worried that the tendency for over confident takes is actually psychological compensation and that the motte is actually riddled with a bunch of right brain autists metaphorically jerking off in their parents garage.
I think if you advocate genocide in a hot take you need to justify your bona fides. ie you should have murdered someone, or been a war veteran, or had your family murdered or something.
This site is resembling Reddit with the confident geopolitical hottakes.
The gender ideology movement sort of feels out of the news cycle where I live, but remains very top of mind for me.
As I see it, the whole umbrella is actually multiple, almost unrelated strands, queerying category activists, social engineering progressives, AGPs, internet cults, all underpinned by unthinking legal activism and of course corporate profiteering. Did I mention an overtly political and enabling media environment bereft of any journalistic values?
I am fascinated by all these things but mainly I want to talk about the social mania aspect. I'm very interested in how smart people, who would inevitably class themselves as above-average in rationality and morality, are able to brush off child-safeguarding concerns, discarding the previous medical ethics consensus (first do no harm, evidence based medicine) in favour of ideas that barely existed even 15-20 years ago.
I have been looking into previous social manias such as the satanic panic and the child care workers given wrongful convictions and it's shocking how difficult it is to reverse the tide of mania once it's begun. Parents, police, the justice system, and media all fall into lockstep and condemn innocent people to terrible fates they and their families bear in almost total isolation, with only a few supporters able to parse the information in front of them and figure out what is going on.
I mean this is just human behaviour - we make movies about the Salem witch trials, we are modern people and have access to perspectives of humans across evolutionary time. Is it really true that people still don't know who we are, how we behave in herds?
I understand apathy, I understand things moving out of the news cycles, but I can't understand how people can maintain a neutral view on unnecessary surgeries on minors. When institutions such as medical bodies fail in their basic safeguarding responsibilities, suppressing dissent within their ranks, it is not hard to work out what is going on. How many manias does history need to present before people learn what we are?
A failure of courage I understand in any given context but the neutral middle doesn't even seem curious in private.
Can anybody enlighten me why people aren't more curious, why they're happy for children to be groomed into lifelong medicalisation, with their life choices pre-emptively narrowed before they even understand what consent means? The true-believers I understand, it's supposedly smart, moral people that aren't engaged that I'm confused about. Are they secretly true believers but just don't want to say?
Plain old cognitive dissonance?
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