TracingWoodgrains
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User ID: 103
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Thanks for the thoughtful response and for your willingness to engage! I know it can be tricky to speak across the divide of belief, and I appreciate your openness. I'm not aiming to be rhetorically deceptive in any sense, though I'll certainly cop to choosing my words with an eye towards persuasive effect.
Firstly, because I just argued that it took place over the course of decades, and here you imply that I claimed it was a sudden discovery.
To clarify, with the "suddenly" I was referring primarily to the 1954 committee. I broadly reject the notion that they re-examined the scriptures and concluded there was no scriptural basis after having defended it on a scriptural and doctrinal basis for years before that point. From my angle, it's more accurate to conceive of their conclusion not as "we learned there was no scriptural basis" but as "we would like to move away from our prior emphasis on the scriptural basis for this ban". I do think their opinions gradually changed; we agree on that point. I do not agree (and, to be clear, do not assert you believe) that any new doctrinal information emerged between 1947 and 1979 that would have given them doctrinal cause to reassess; rather, I think their social conditions changed such as to provide strong cultural motive to reassess, and they altered the doctrine as a result.
I also wouldn't present any of this as simple rhetorical strategy. I don't take a particularly cynical view of their beliefs; I think most or all who reach the core leadership of Mormonism are true believers. I think leadership most likely genuinely changed their minds over time, but the proximate cause for that change was not divine guidance that happened to coincide with major social upheavals, but the upheavals themselves, bringing with them increased salience of those issues and sociocultural pressure.
I do take your point in terms of addressing differences between Smith's and Young's practices of ordination. I won't quibble about that difference: while there is a degree of ambiguity in Smith's views and he made enough claims about racial inequality for Young and others to build on, his actions absolutely made the mid-20th-century doctrinal shift simpler. That's a clear difference between the doctrinal shift on interracial marriage and ordinances for black members and a theoretical shift for gay members. My claim is both that they adapted doctrine to stick with the times in response to social and cultural pressure, and that Smith's actions made that change easier to enact.
I think "Young made a mistake" is the most comfortable answer for modern LDS members, but would argue that it mostly falls apart once the record is clear that it was seen as unambiguous and lasting doctrine, not as temporary policy: claims like Woodruff's "the prophet will never lead the church astray" are compatible with many errors, but I do not believe they can comfortably be made compatible with virtually every leader in the church for more than a century being in apostasy on questions of racial equality, marriage, and salvation. When someone's framework contains the belief that virtually every leader in the church was in apostasy on those questions for more than a century, I don't find "...and they continue to be in apostasy on <pet issue here>" to be a serious stretch. The doctrine of continuing revelation and "he will yet reveal many great and important truths" provides serious leeway for ambitious/creative theologians. The language against interracial marriage during that time was every bit as clear as language against gay relationships is today.
Will the church ever come out and say that homosexual behavior is not a sin? I think not, and I'd be willing to bet on it, but I don't imagine you'd be willing to bet on a statement like that resolving within our lifetimes.
If reasonable terms could be arranged, I would take a bet at around 25% odds that the institutional LDS church will come out and say that homosexual behavior within the bounds of committed monogamous partnerships is not a sin within our lifetimes, whether via an overt institutional shift or via a schism. I think it's more likely than not that the shift does not occur, but that 1% is much too low.
I respect your preference for scripture/doctrine over beliefs over time, but I believe both are important to understanding religious evolution and the bounds of what is possible. As far as scriptural/doctrinal support goes, I think the wide range of beliefs among Christian denominations serves as a good sanity check for just what people can be convinced has serious scriptural support. Joseph Smith, so far as I am aware, never said a word about homosexuality in the works of scripture he dictated, his sermons, or otherwise. That is: setting aside the words of recent prophets (which can be done! As the Lowry Nelson letter indicates, unanimous written consent of the first presidency at any given time is not sufficient to determine doctrine), the LDS church relies strictly on the Bible for its doctrine on homosexuality.
While Paul's statements on the matter are unambiguous, the church has been shifting temple ordinances and other words/actions away from similarly unambiguous statements of his (eg women covering their heads) in accordance with modern social instincts. To go further back... well, let me quote a Catholic writer (from what is probably the most honest, perceptive Catholic argument for a shift on doctrine around homosexuality I know of):
During the 1850s, arguments raged over the morality of slave-holding, and the exegesis of Scripture played a key role in those debates. The exegetical battles were one-sided: all abolitionists could point to was Galatians 3:28 and the Letter of Philemon, while slave owners had the rest of the Old and New Testaments, which gave every indication that slaveholding was a legitimate, indeed God-ordained social arrangement, one to which neither Moses nor Jesus nor Paul raised a fundamental objection. So how is it that now, in the early twenty-first century, the authority of the scriptural texts on slavery and the arguments made on their basis appear to all of us, without exception, as completely beside the point and deeply wrong?
The answer is that over time the human experience of slavery and its horror came home to the popular conscience. [...] once that experience of their full humanity and the evil of their bondage reached a stage of critical consciousness, this nation could neither turn back to the practice of slavery nor ever read the Bible in the same way again.
None of this is to say that such a shift around homosexuality is likely. But I hope that helps explain why I don't wholly discount it as a possibility, despite its obvious tension with the LDS framework. Stranger things have happened.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
In what sense am I not being skeptical enough? My strongest conclusion by far is based on the email from Singer she entered into evidence and the evidence of their collaboration during the time frame of the alleged affair. Did you read the email? Unless it is inauthentic, it makes it hard for me to see a world where they were not having an affair, he did not initially lie to her in at least one way about it, or he was not having at least one other affair at approximately the same time.
It’s worth being skeptical of her claims, and I am, visibly so and stated every time I post about it. I agree that the “made advances on every female coauthor” claim in particular strains credulity. But there is enough that does not rely solely on her word to make it noteworthy and tough for me to dismiss in full.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Disagree on magic words. The magic words are “Anyway, you seem chill. Want to grab a coffee?” or something very similar, within the first three or four texts. No point beating around the bush until a text conversation dies, and I think a lot of people are looking for the few magical connections via text rather than treating it as the minimal filter it should be. Just provide a safe, low-commitment date option and most people who responded to your first couple of messages will shrug and go with it.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
I feel like you’re eliding the point in arguing against my case that his behavior follows from his ethics by referring to the drowning child argument rather than the argument I linked, in which he states explicitly that sexual ethics is unimportant and sex raises no unique moral issues at all.
I’m not the one who tied them together—he is! “Why are you focusing on petty things like sex when there are kids starving in Africa?” is only the slightest rephrasing of his argument. I absolutely would expect someone who takes Singer’s explicitly stated attitude towards sexual ethics to have looser sexual ethics than someone who takes the mainstream societal view, and while it would be unfair to pre-judge him based on that, it is eminently reasonable to take it into account after the fact.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
I think his comment on sexual ethics provides a hint as to what his rationalization of having affairs would be: people get so caught up on sexual ethics when what really makes a difference in the world are things like donating to overseas charities and advocating for animal rights. Yes, his affairs were selfish, but they were a small selfishness as he was pushing large groups towards immense utilitarian good, so to focus on it is a mere distraction. Particularly if nobody finds out—as you say, what’s the harm?
Even in utilitarian terms, this is a rationalization. He knows the second-order effects of affairs and knows what society’s actual feelings on sexual ethics are. He knows, surely, that it is the stuff of scandals and cratered reputations, that it could bring immense harm not just to him but to the ideas he champions, to his philosophy as a whole.
And you can argue that in a utilitarian frame, but we are all at war with our own minds to one extent or another, and the possibility of rationalization depends on the strength of one’s safeguards. Singer’s brand of utilitarianism is unusually bad, I would argue (and I think his quote on sexual ethics supports my argument), at providing defenses against rationalizing sexual misconduct to oneself.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
While I don't endorse "come on, you should totally draw art for my product"–type behavior, I do think the position would have been appealing and appropriate for a certain type of person I am not far from. My monthly salary on top of room and board was significantly larger as a military enlistee, but I also wasn't traveling the world. I think they were realistically underpaying for what they wanted but also think "don't take the job" is an adequate remedy to that.
I take your point about the writing style, but for me it's secondary to the core impression that the investigation was very badly mishandled in a way that makes examining things now feel unfair. The initial report should not have been released as-is and it reflects poorly on the whole EA/LW-rationalist community that it was. Given the poor choices around its release, I don't feel inclined to focus too much on what really looks like mundane and predictable workplace/roommate drama.
TracingWoodgrains
5mo ago
I’ve been spending a lot more time on Twitter lately, particularly since I can mottepost there now. What I formerly read as fundamental constraints in the directions you point turn out to be mediated pretty heavily by the part of it a person spends time in and who they choose to interact with. There’s a self-selecting group in and around the ACX-adjacent parts of Twitter that is pleasant and full of smart, well-mannered, somewhat ideologically sympathetic people, with two clear advantages in my view:
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The decentralized nature means that incompatible personalities can self-select into slightly different subcommunities where people who get on with both can still interact with both in what feels like the same space, meaning in particular that the ideological range is much broader than here.
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The public nature means that when you chat with people in your quiet corner, your posts will occasionally leave the bubble and contact a much wider audience, sometimes including the public figures you talk about. In the recent OpenAI drama, for example, the interim CEO was a well-known regular in Twitter’s ACX-adjacent sphere.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
The author deleted the page, unfortunately.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
Also: gendercritical -> Ovarit, ConsumeProduct under the auspices of the .win network, OpieAndAnthony -> onaforums. Probably others, too.
There’s a meme that successful break-off communities are impossible, but it’s hopelessly out of date. General-purpose break-offs fail, but if people are in a habit of visiting specifically the community instead of just seeing it pop up occasionally on their front page, they will follow it to a new location. Honestly, fully unsuccessful community break-offs are rarer than successful ones at this point. The reddit diaspora is large and growing.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
It's a bit petty and I haven't talked about it here to my recollection, but basically: when he ran a survey of his fanbase, he copied the format and many of the questions I used to survey r/themotte, repeating a number of items verbatim and copying much of my presentation of the results down to specific color choices. That's totally fine in my book—I'm glad he was impressed enough to use it, and it's a fun format that I think should spread—but when sharing the results of the survey, he first requested someone make an imitation of my results table, then removed all mention of my initial table after someone had copied it. You can see the archive here, where it links my work, with no mention of it in the live version.
Technically he did attribute my original when he was asking the questions, but it left a bit of a bitter taste for me when he edited any attribution out of the results page itself, and when I reached out asking about it, he first replied by saying that he didn't know what I was talking about, then went radio silent. It's not the sort of thing I'm interested in making a huge fuss over, but it did leave the lingering impression that his disagreeable approach is more than just an affect and that he can be a genuinely unpleasant person on an interpersonal level.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
there isn't really a culture war around them.
It's actually teetering on the verge of being a serious frontier on the culture war. After one or two furries made some noise about joining a trans counterprotest to Scotland radfems, culture war sites started going after uninvolved but gross furries in the vicinity. Graham Linehan is in on the fun, as are other commentators in a similar milieu. Fox News has taken note of a Boston College professor who teaches a furry-focused course.
Will it erupt into something more? Eh, I'm not counting on it, but we'll see. It definitely shows signs of real potential as a culture war front, though.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
For what it’s worth, I expect you and I can or could still have plenty of good conversations—but when people tell me they don’t want to share a society with me, I take seriously the need to build alternate spaces alongside those who do.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
“I don't see how that is shown by the email in question.”
“If you were thinking you were the only one, and if that was crucial to what you felt about our relationship, I’m sorry, that isn’t true.”
That is: he lied by omission by not mentioning multiple simultaneous affairs. I don’t find your “emotional cheating” reading plausible; in context, it seems strained to read it in any way other than “actively pursuing the same sort of relationship he has with her, as the opportunity arises based on distance.”
Yes—the email I screenshot in my Twitter thread on the matter. Unless it’s fake, which I place low likelihood on given that she submitted it as evidence in a court filing, it’s strongly indicative that they had an affair and that she was not the only affair partner at the time.
EDIT: The court filings also include an email from him rebuking her about an interaction they had at a fundraiser meeting for her charity, which he was on the board of. The contents of that interaction and email, as described in the court filing, are not nearly as clear of evidence but are still worth mentioning.
TracingWoodgrains
4mo ago
There’s no evidence either way about an arrangement except the accuser’s claim that he lied about having one.
If you do not consider breaking monogamous relationships up and giving career benefits to affair partners in a domain where he holds immense power to be evidence of wrongdoing, I will not be able to convince you otherwise, but my impression is that most people (correctly, in my estimation) disapprove of both.
When:
- someone is in a monogamous relationship, 2. Singer propositions her, 3. They have an affair, and 4. He publishes alongside her through the course and in the immediate aftermath of the affair…
I see very little left to demonstrate.
TracingWoodgrains
5mo ago
He posts astute and data-driven threads on a wide cariety of topics worth talking about, including a number that are of obvious direct personal interest to me. Why on earth wouldn’t I recommend him?
TracingWoodgrains
5mo ago
IIRC Tracing has "I am a furry, here is my favorite gay furry porn I made with the gay furry porn AI generator" in all his bios.
Hm?
It's pretty much limited to profile pictures, to be honest, and I don't really talk about porn at all. I do AI generate pleasant SFW furry pictures on a quiet Twitter alt from time to time, but that's about it. It's only really a major part of my persona in BARPod Lore, and that's mostly just because that's what's appropriate for the show's vibe.
TracingWoodgrains
5mo ago
Very well put, and neatly in line (down to mentioning Jane Street) with a recent thought of mine:
smart, rational, capable, serious people shuffle into Jane Street and Silicon Valley and rationally, sensibly make millions of dollars. But they abdicate the role of culture-shaping to teenagers on Tumblr and TikTok. Many sane individuals exist in an insane culture, but deep-lying incentives point them away from building culture—and then they find themselves tossed about by the cultural and political forces they neglect.
TracingWoodgrains
9mo ago
I'm prepared to bite whatever bullet is here and say "those who read it and interpret it differently are wrong." It's a useful phrase with a clearly defined meaning. I use it as appropriate and if someone overinterprets it I'll correct them. I'm looking to describe a set of events that happen sometimes, not encourage overreaction.
I would say "You're welcome to suggest another phrase for the process of deliberate removal of a group of people from an area by any means necessary," but that feels silly. We have a phrase for that. It's ethnic cleansing. We don't need another. If people are overstating it or overinterpreting it, they should knock it off, since the word "genocide" already exists for that purpose.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
while it is true that speakers of tonal languages are substantially more likely to exhibit AP, even among musically trained children it's not really an "almost everyone" thing
I do think it’s worth emphasizing the difference between “musically trained children” and “children trained in absolute pitch.” It’s a specific skill related to musicality but neither fully contained within it nor necessary for it; knowing that children receive musical training says relatively little about their specific pitch training.
It’s possible that I’m stating it too strongly! It’s an understudied, underutilized training process, since people have broadly treated it as a mysterious divine gift rather than a specific, trained skill. I think the most precise statement would be “far more people than generally acknowledged can develop absolute pitch during early childhood with relatively low effort.” But mostly I just think people should move from completely ignoring it to studying it enough that we know how prevalent it can be.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Honestly, talk to @KulakRevolt. You can aspire to be a scene player fitting into one of the silos, or you can just do interesting enough things that you catch the attention of a lot of silos and build your own specific audience, cross-promoting and jumping between scenes as you see fit. Kulak twittermaxxed and grabbed the attention of everyone from Scott Alexander and Tyler Cowen to Scott Adams and Jordan Peterson in short order. By the time you're at the stage where people tweet about you being a homosexual crypto-Jew, you've already won. If they care enough to slot you into a role in their mind, they care enough to pay attention when the people they like notice something you say. Let them tweet. The people they read will still link you whenever you say interesting enough things about the things they care about.
I dunno. I think basically anyone honest will alienate large swathes of people in their natural circles at times, but that's when you find out which ones are interesting and which are simply tiresome. Heaven knows I've done and said enough to alienate plenty, and as my profile grows I can't imagine that pace of alienation will slow down, but you don't want to be an ideological foot soldier, and interesting people don't want to hear only from ideological foot soldiers.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
You posted somewhere else in the thread that the obvious core drive of a human is to escape death. I assure you, I find that statement as repugnant as you appear to find its opposite.
You're Christian, yes?
I find the Christian objection to transhumanist anti-death pushes fascinating, because "death" means such different things to Christians and atheists. To a Christian, there is no need to escape death on Earth, because Christ already overcame the bonds of death for us with the Resurrection, and we too will be resurrected and raised to a state of perfection if we hold firm. To seek to overcome death on Earth looks like pursuing a shallow, partial, impossible form of what is already granted free of cost to all of us. Christians have fulfilled this drive already in their minds. The rest of us, lacking such a perceptual safety net, do what we must.
This fundamental disconnect over what death is makes it complex to have a meaningful conversation about the nobility of pursuit of immortality between Christians and non-Christians, as the rest of us seek to build what you believe you already have.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Sounds like a reasonable bet; I'm happy to take it. To reduce mental cost, I'd be happy to run it on a sort of "honor system"—if one of us happens to still remember it in 2050, they can prod the other and claim their due? The current value of a VTI share looks to be $200; at the time of resolution; I'm happy to go with your preference between an inflation-adjusted equivalent amount of cash or stocks so you don't have to think about it. I'll note that I do think 2050 is a bit on the early side of where I'd predict anything happening—my "25% chance" was positing sometime probably around 2060-70 (treating now as the equivalent to 1940 or so)—but it's a good compromise in terms of keeping it even theoretically resolvable, so I'm happy to stick with it.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Fair enough! I’ve been out of the dating market since pre-COVID, and it’s possible/likely a lot has changed since then.
...yeah, I'm going to have to second @RaiderOfALostTusken here. There are many things Mormons can be accused of, but having no sci-fi/fantasy chops just isn't one of them. Orson Scott Card is one of the sci-fi greats; Brandon Sanderson is one of the most successful and imaginative fantasy writers around. Twilight has a bad reputation, but I'll cop to thoroughly enjoying Stephanie Meyer's The Host. I've never paid much attention to Battlestar Galactica, but it seems close to the core of space-faring sci-fi classics. The list of successful, popular LDS sci-fi/fantasy writers drags on: Tracy Hickman, Shannon Hale, Brandon Mull, James Dashner, so forth. None of these rely on tired American political slogans to define their work.
I have no interest in or particular knowledge of Rings of Power, but I see very little to suggest Mormonism is the cause of its triteness. You'll have to look elsewhere for that.
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