TracingWoodgrains
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User ID: 103
TracingWoodgrains
9mo ago
Per the core definitions used, ethnic cleansing is explicitly "get them to leave" as distinct from "destroy them" entailed by genocide. This is common across most sources. See eg:
That's one of the major reasons to have separate terms for the two! They're often paired in history, but it's not weasel-wording to use the actual definition of the phrase as it's actually and deliberately used in practice.
TracingWoodgrains
9mo ago
My impression is that there's little reason to contain culture war in specific. Other similar spaces I participate in (eg /r/blockedandreported) do just fine with a discussion thread for most topics and independent posts for particularly effortful or relevant commentary. I think it would make sense to preserve the culture war thread as it stands while allowing effortful posts touching on culture war topics to stand independently if the author wants to post them at the top level.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
It's the same set of 4 charts I embed towards the top of my article, showing the relative rankings of students of different races on academic, extracurricular, personal, and overall axes.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
I wouldn't call them all amazing scholars. As I mention in the post, Harvard hasn't selected primarily on intelligence for a long while. I would call the ones I met noticeably capable, well-adjusted, balanced people when compared to the median individual: smart, knowledgeable, conscientious, well-connected, well-off, and ambitious, the sort of people who stand out in any group they're in as being the ones who get things done. Not better than anyone else in the world, but noticeably highly selected in those domains.
This is a generalization, of course, not a rule, and reality is always less shiny than generalizations of this sort allow for, but I've been sincerely impressed by the Harvard (and Yale, and similar-school) graduates in my life.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
Oh, of course they're lying. To my eye, it's mostly kayfabe: they pretend to believe those things and other informed observers pretend to trust them. That's part of what makes holistic admissions so insidious to me, though: for uninformed observers, the kayfabe becomes real, and people start to accept that there must be sound, justifiable reasons for highly capable applicants to be rejected in favor of candidates with lower objective scores across the board.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
I disagree. This chart is nothing if not ranking people from best to worst along every relevant domain Harvard can muster. Axes of diversity go into their rankings within some of those metrics, but while their numbers may not match up to what you or I would rank as "best" or "worst", they are very much trying to select, and justify their selection as, the best.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
I don't have a deep-felt opinion on whether Harvard should be egalitarian. I prefer egalitarian entry criteria for elite institutions both for self-interested reasons and because I prioritize academic excellence over things like wealth, but there's something honest about an unabashedly elitist finishing school for the rich and powerful that I have to respect. I do think it's trying to awkwardly staple a facade of egalitarianism over a core of elitism, though, and that leaves it in a precarious and self-contradictory position.
You could be right about the amount of leverage it gives, but I think the way the ruling explicitly set California schools as a good example gives a lot of reason to be skeptical that the leverage will amount to a great deal in practice. I'll be watching with interest, and I expect mountains of litigation to come out of the ruling, but I have trouble anticipating serious changes as a result.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
I wrote a rather long post on my reflections in the wake of affirmative action, detailing why I'm mostly ambivalent about its end and what I see as the core problem with college admissions. One section is mirrored/excerpted below:
[...] hearing some prestige university arguments for affirmative action in non-technical positions, I find myself almost persuaded.
Almost. And then I see the chart that gives the game away, the chart that should be seared into the mind of every observer to the affirmative action debate: the Asian Discrimination Chart.
Why, if the goal was to ensure representation of vulnerable or historically discriminated against populations—why precisely did Harvard and other top universities use "holistic" factors to ensure Asian Americans had to climb a steeper objective hill not just than under-represented minority students, but than all others?
Well, just what sort of business do you think Harvard is in?
Harvard's Business
You don't get to be in the position Harvard is without understanding certain games on a deep institutional level, without playing them better than all others. Harvard is no mere technical school, seeking to train domain experts in rigorous ways. No. It's an Ivy League School, and more than that, it's Harvard. Its mission is not to find the best, but to define the best. And with all due respect to Yale and new upstart Stanford, it's been the best in that business since before the founding of the United States.
Harvard students, put simply, are better than you. This isn't me saying this, mind: it's the whole holistic edifice of university admissions and university rankings, the Supreme Court and the halls of Congress, really every prestige institution in the country. Ask McKinsey or Deloitte if you need convincing. Check where your professors went to school. Run up to a random passerby on the street and see what they think of a Harvard degree. Like it or not, it's a near-universal symbol of competence.
Some are better than you because of their heritage, some because of their wealth, some because of their connections. Some, in part, because of their race: you cannot maintain credible elite institutions with few black people sixty years after the civil rights movement. And, yes, some because of their academics, their intelligence and their work ethic. What sort of elite would it be, after all, if it did not pay lip service to the ideal of meritocracy that inspires so many of the hoi polloi, did not reassure them that academic skill, too, would be counted among its holistic ranking? Most, to be clear, have a combination of the above, a mix precisely in line with Harvard's dreams. Admit just the right set to render your institution legitimate as the elite.
I've met many Harvard students by now, and to be frank, it was almost always clear quite rapidly why they were attending Harvard while I was not. I'll give their admissions team this: they're good at their jobs. It's comforting to imagine some sort of cosmic balancing, where aptitude in one domain is balanced by struggle in another, but Nature is crueller than that. I won't claim every Harvard student is peerless. But they are, by and large, an extraordinarily impressive group of young people, by any measure. That's what happens when you spend several centuries building a reputation as the best of the best. It is a true signal of excellence, one that any individual, rational, ambitious actor should pursue.
For twelve years, every student in the country toils away in a system shouting egalitarianism at every turn. Look at policy priorities and school budgets and you'll see it: an earmark for the disadvantaged here, a special program there, an outpouring of funding for special education in this district, and of course classroom after classroom where teachers patiently work with the students who just need a bit of extra help.
Then comes admissions season, and with a wink and a nod, the system strips away the whole veneer and asks, "So, just how well did you play the game? ...you were aware you were playing the game, yes?"
Let us not mince words: the role of holistic college admissions is to examine people as whole individuals, to account for every second of their lives and every bit of their cultural context, and to rank them from best to worst. Or, more precisely: to justify and to reify the values Harvard and its co-luminaries use to select best and worst. Not just the most capable academics, mind: are you telling me you want a campus full of nerds? Please. Leave that to MIT and Caltech.
I don't want to be reduced to just a number, you say. Very well, Harvard responds, we will judge the whole of you and find you wanting. Is that better?
Let us return to the question, then: why does Harvard discriminate against Asians?
Set aside every bit of high-minded rhetoric, even understanding that most who give noble justifications have convinced themselves of those justifications. Set aside every bit of idealism, even understanding that most at every level of education are indeed idealists. Harvard discriminates against Asians because it is not just an elite school, but the elite school, and Asians are simply not elite enough.
I try to be cautious in using the phrase "systemic racism"—I find it often abused past the breaking point. But as I've said in terser form before, if you want a pure example of the term, and a pure demonstration of just what game Harvard is playing, look no further than its treatment of Asian Americans. Elite values—the true values underlying an institution like Harvard—are never fully legible and never fully set. In easy cases, they align with the values trumpeted on the surface: we value intelligence, we value hard work, we want to give everyone an equal shot.
One problem: Asian Americans came along and took those values a bit too seriously. They started gaming the system by taking it earnestly at face value and working to align with explicit institutional values. But admit too many, and the delicate balance is upset, the beating heart of elite culture animating the whole project disrupted. Academics-focused students, after all, lack social development and, as Harvard infamously argued in the case, simply have bad personalities.
Harvard's been around long enough to have played this game a few times before. When a new group gets too good at understanding and pursuing the explicit values it uses to grant its project the veneer of legitimacy, it smiles, thanks them for their applications, and then changes its process.
As sociologist Jerome Karabel documents, this is in fact the original inspiration for holistic admissions. From The New Yorker:
The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.” [...] Finally, Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit.
As public values change, the conception of "elite" changes with them. Harvard and its co-luminaries do not quarrel with each change in turn. They simply adopt them, embrace them, and embody them. In the '50s and '60s, this meant (again per the above New Yorker article) Yale accepting a mediocre academic who seemed like "more of a guy" than his competitors, proudly noting the proportion of six-footers, and watching out for troubling homosexual tendencies. In the 1980s, it meant disapproving notes from Harvard admissions about "shyness," a student seeming "a tad frothy," and one poor soul who was "short with big ears."
In 2023, it means hyperfocusing on one particular, often self-contradictory, frame of Diversity, on preaching ideals of egalitarianism, social justice, and inclusivity quite at odds with its pedigree. And yes, it means that Asians have stellar academics and extracurriculars but, alas, inviting too many would wreck the vibe.
What galls about this all—and look, how could it not?—what galls is the hypocrisy. What galls is watching some of the most elitist and exclusive institutions in the country preach inclusiveness while closing their doors to all but a minute fraction of those who apply, preach egalitarianism while serving as the finishing schools of the most privileged.
If the leaders of Harvard and Yale truly believed in the values they espouse, they would tear their schools to the ground, stone by stone, brick by brick. If the administrators and student body truly, in their heart of hearts, believed in a philosophy of egalitarian inclusiveness rather than the image of themselves as the deserving elite, nothing would be left of either by tomorrow morning.
In the other sections, I focus on a comparison to the Navy Seals (flat admission standards & high-attrition pipeline vs opaque standards where admission itself is the prize and graduating is trivial), examine my personal experience with the whole thing, and cover why I'm skeptical the AA ban will change much in a practical sense.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
It’s mostly my fault, alas—she’s a private person who was understandably a bit overwhelmed by the flood of attention the post drew. I’m hoping she’ll be comfortable republishing the info in yet more anonymized fashion somewhere later, since it was a fantastic and useful post, but for now it’s down.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
The author deleted the page, unfortunately.
TracingWoodgrains
10mo ago
Yeah, one of my friends with absolute pitch reports the same thing—but relative pitch really is an incredibly useful skill for music, and the former entails the latter. I think those who have it and dismiss it often do so in comparison to “a generally good musical ear” and not something like my own near-tone-deafness and total inability to carry a tune when singing without accompaniment (this despite training early-ish on piano and becoming quite competent at it).
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
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
Yeah. His description was a bit odd ("I found an image online of a survey in which SlateStarCodex fans rated various things"), so it's hard to tell just what sort of proximity we're looking at, but definitely some sort of Motte-adjacency.
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
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
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. Talking about getting and spending, we lay waste the world.
Rarely is the chasm between my own thought and mainstream thought so apparent as when conversation turns to advertisers. I loathe these faceless entities working to wrest my thought into the shape of their own designs, prodding and pulling for whichever levers they can pull to make me consume ever more of their products. I block all ads I can block, recoil when one prods through my defenses and demands my attention.
Yes, this latest campaign is miserable, but not because of what’s in it. It’s because I must watch people broadcast their allegiance to consumption, because they pull ads into my consciousness and reveal their passion for the norm of advertising by crying out against deviations from that norm. Yes, Bud Light ads are grotesque, as are Nike and all culture war ads of the day—but when were they not grotesque, these machines spending untold millions to entangle people’s identities and values with the mass-market products they consume?
I do not care about Dylan Mulvaney, do not care about Bud Light. This lack of caring is not apathy, but a deep-felt antipathy towards the machine that pulls them into my sphere of awareness. Every time someone tells me with heated emotion about the latest symbol of consumption for this or that, the Enemy has won. Every time culture warriors line up for and against Product, the centrality of Product to Culture is sacralized.
Yes, you might say: you may not care about these things, but they care about you. That is, in short, the problem: they care about me when I do not wish to care about them, they spend millions hunting me while I work to evade them, and then they tap into the passions of vectors like you and in so doing find me once more, force themselves into my consciousness once more.
Ad culture is grotesque. It has been so long before Mulvaney and will be so long after they are replaced by the next in a flood of spokespeople sacrificing their lives to the Machine. Drink what beer you will, treat it as an expression of your deep-felt values if you must, but in my book this ad campaign should receive just as much attention as every other hostile, shrieking intrusion into our minds: none at all beyond a muted channel and averted eyes.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
there are certain subjects where I fear that if I deviate too much from the party line, I will be cast out into the outer depths before I even begin.
Richard Hanania is a good counterexample here. I don’t particularly like the guy (not least for his one-time soft plagiarism of me, but that’s a tangent) and I’m not a central member of his audience, but he spends a great deal of time and effort writing essays that castigate and rebuff people who do particularly like him and who want to be central members of his audience. He is a Problematic writer who constantly and openly decries the pathologies of the Problematic, spending more effort than plenty of leftists chronicling all the ways conservatives go wrong, and pulling no punches when doing so. Not just that. He doesn’t touch third rails, he bear-hugs them, and his audience only grows as a result.
And that makes him Interesting, and so I read what he has to say, and sometimes I learn things.
The primary thing a public-facing writer needs is to be Interesting. Forget tribes, forget cancelation, forget whatever: deviations make someone Interesting, and the Freddie deBoers of the world flourish while a thousand cut-and-paste Breadtubers with impeccable production value and assembly-line opinions drown in the kiddie pool before anyone cares who they are.
Oh, and the fiercest partisans? They won’t forget a single thing you say against them, and they’ll bring it up as part of the chattering Discourse around you if you get big enough, but that won’t stop them from loudly amplifying everything you say that expresses their worldview eloquently enough. Most people don’t pay attention to most things most of the time; they notice people when convenient and forget about them otherwise.
In particular, for all its faults the online right ecosystem is higher-variance than the online left, defined more by shared opposition than shared values. They’re used to envisioning themselves as a cloud of heretics, and while they can and will scream bloody murder at you for committing heresy against their particular orthodoxies, they cannot precisely kick you out and will not stop listening unless you are Dull.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
I'd have a hard time looking back on marriage equality advocacy and thinking that it was intended legitimately for family benefits. But I'm open to being corrected.
Family benefits were always part of the package. Andrew Sullivan's landmark 1989 argument, to my understanding the first major advocacy article on the topic in the US, is worth reviewing:
Marriage provides an anchor, if an arbitrary and weak one, in the chaos of sex and relationships to which we are all prone. It provides a mechanism for emotional stability, economic security, and the healthy rearing of the next generation. [...] Legalizing gay marriage would offer homosexuals the same deal society now offers heterosexuals: general social approval and specific legal advantages in exchange for a deeper and harder-to-extract-yourself from commitment to another human being. Like straight marriage, it would foster social cohesion, emotional security, and economic prudence. Since there’s no reason gays should not be allowed to adopt or be foster parents, it could also help nurture children.
Andrew Sullivan, one can point out, is for a gay man unusually conservative in his sensibilities and was making an unabashedly conservative argument in favor of gay marriage. But gay marriage has always been more the purview of the more conservative-minded in the subculture.
You're right that it's comparatively uncommon for gay couples to have kids, but it's more that their kids often don't enter the sphere of Public Discourse. I didn't know Neil Patrick Harris had kids. Looking it up, I see Anderson Cooper, Dan Savage, Jared Polis, and Perez Hilton have kids as well. Dave Rubin is a new father. It's not wildly common, but it's not an anomaly.
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
Well, of course everybody wants that.
I feel like you're reading my comment as saying "I, uniquely, want a values-driven society, and cruel people like you prevent that."
I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the rubber meets the road with values differences at some points, and that's where the culture war becomes most complex and most serious. It goes without saying that I believe my values are correct. They are, after all, my values. Others disagree with them, and the truce of liberalism is the most stable way I've seen to deal with those clashes up to this point, but the culture war stops being an abstract chat when your decisions cross someone else's line in the sand or vice versa. I condemn or criticize some choices. Some condemn or criticize my own. I have strong feelings about who is right and who is wrong in most culture war conflicts, but the stakes are high for everybody. At some point, conflicts or no, people decide what sort of life they want to live and find allies where they can. The value I have chosen to make my own stand on here is that bringing people into the world, becoming a parent, and working to raise children well is a good that should be pursued even as circumstances fall short of the most ideal.
The resentment you describe is understandable but a bit peculiar. There was no slippery slope from gay marriage to surrogacy. Gestational surrogacy has been legal in (most of) the United States since long before gay marriage was allowed. There was no carve-out in the push for legal marriage saying "we want to have all the legal rights straight married couples do, except for the option to pursue already legal surrogacy options". Marriage and surrogacy aren't even directly connected, except for questions like who the parents listed on birth certificates are: single men can pursue surrogacy, just like single women can find sperm donors.
Not to lean too much into the villain role in your story, but... what did you think was going to happen? Did you think all gay men who wanted to get married simply saw marriage in the shallower modern "if two people love each other very much..." light and not as the best option for stable, happy family formation and child-rearing? Did you see the collection of legal rights attached to marriage, routes to adoption and surrogacy that straight couples were already using, and assume gay people were simply uninterested; were you treating the idea as primarily symbolic rather than a specific legal change that would open up specific doors for people?
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
Aye, that's the trouble with culture war spats, isn't it? None of them are abstract for everyone, and the culture war has real stakes. I want to live in a culture where my family and I can live according to our values and build alongside people who share those values. Emphasizing where surrogacy fits within that frame, and carving out space where people won't look at my family with the sort of suspicion and hissing condemnation @Catsnakes_ below illustrates is a real, important part of that.
To opponents of surrogacy, "literally purchasing another human being" and "providing compensation for the complex and demanding circumstances needed to create a human being" are a distinction without a difference; all I can say is that I see a crucial distinction, and see surrogacy as no more purchasing a human being than IVF or, more disputably, paying a hospital for childbirth. We live in a world where money is inextricably tied up in even intimate human interactions, but that doesn't strip them of their humanity or their worth.
As for changing my mind—look, obviously people stake a lot on major life decisions, and I can't pretend I expect my mind to change on this one. If it were to change, though, it would happen the same way it always does: either by convincing me that some of my values are poorly conceived, or working within the frame of my own values to convince me that my plans don't live up to them. That's why I don't really expect a change, of course—I've spent a long while considering my values and finding the right landing spot, and I suspect I'm mostly past the stage of serious, rather than marginal, adjustments. But the pathway to change is straightforward.
People often defend surrogacy with the idea that people have the right to do what they want with their bodies. I appreciate and respect those willing to stand in a libertarian defense of something I value, but for my part, I strongly prefer a more affirmative case.
For context, my husband and I are currently talking with a potential surrogate and working out some of the many, many logistical challenges on the road to parenthood. We're in early stages, and there is a great deal to be worked out, but we fully intend on becoming parents as soon as realistically possible. Given that, none of this debate is abstract for me, and I am as far from a neutral party as one can get.
While there are cases in which I respect the value of libertarian frameworks legally and I lean far towards "live and let live" from a metacultural standpoint, there is nothing libertarian about my moral approach to life. I do not believe all choices are equally valid or that there is nothing wrong with hedonism. I do not see things like parenthood as neutral choices that people can take or leave. Rather, what is perhaps my most fundamental philosophical conviction is this: life is Good, human life especially so. The most natural things in the universe are death, decay, and emptiness. Growth, life, and creation are fragile anomalies. We belong to an eons-long heritage of those who have committed to building and maintaining life in the face of inevitable decay. Our duty is to do the same.
Becoming a parent and raising children well is, put simply, the most good almost anyone in the world can do. It is a force multiplier: the good an individual can do is necessarily constrained compared to what their descendants can accomplish. People try to dodge around this, and even longtermists like Will MacAskill who intellectually understand the value of parenthood make excuses for it in their own lives. But it seems incontrovertibly true to me. People, particularly if they are in a position to provide well for children, should become parents. It is not a neutral action among many neutral actions. It is a moral ideal that people should pursue.
All of this takes us to adoption and surrogacy. I accept as a given that the ideal situation for a child is to be raised by their biological parents in a stable home. Inasmuch as social science is worthwhile to note, it has mostly backed this idea up. But for the most part, when people pursue other outcomes, the choice is not between "have biological parents raise a given child in a stable home" and "pursue other family structures for that child". For adoption, the value is obvious and non-controversial given the choice: "bring a child into a loving, stable home without its biological parents" or "send the child to an orphanage, toss it to the wolves, or pursue one of many other tragic outcomes for unwanted children". For most cases of surrogacy, the choice is a bit different: "create a child that will be raised by one or both biological parents in a stable home, but whose birth mother is not their genetic mother or caretaker" or "create no child".
Some people's moral intuitions are that nonexistence is preferable to, or not obviously worse than, existence in a less-than-ideal setting. I wholly reject this intuition, and looking at the record of the persistence of life in the face of adversity, belong to a heritage of those who have, time and time again, rejected it. Life is Good.
As for surrogate mothers? There is nobility, dignity, and grace in parenthood. Bringing a child into the world is an act of hope. To do so on behalf of another, even when provided financial compensation, is not a neutral or profit-focused choice. It's certainly not something that could or should ever be demanded of someone. It's a selfless choice both on behalf of the child who would otherwise not be born and the prospective parents who would otherwise have no children. The woman I've been talking a bit about it with is a young mother who feels she is not in a spot to responsibly raise more children of her own, but strongly wants to keep having children on behalf of others. That's a standard profile for a surrogate, and it's one I see as deeply admirable.
On my own behalf, I claim no fundamental right to have children, because I claim no rights that require others to act. But I absolutely claim that a society in which those who are equipped to raise children, and want to do so, can work alongside those who want to give birth to others' children is in a better spot than one that keeps children with potential to lead meaningful lives from being born. For my own part, while I won't claim to any extraordinary personal ability in terms of parenting, I have no doubt whatsoever that my husband is someone who should be a father, and I am grateful to live in a world where that's a possibility.
There are margins at which some of these arguments shift. There are absolutely exploitative and tragic environments that should be understood and called out. There are settings into which it's not appropriate to bring a child, and edge cases to analyze and discuss. My aim here is not to address all edge cases, but to examine the central case, and in particular, the case for an educated, well-off prospective parent in a society with lower-than-replacement fertility and increasing dismissiveness towards the value of parenthood. Life is worth pursuing and preserving to such a degree that you can get very far from the true ideal case before nonexistence is better than existence, or choosing not to become a parent is better than choosing to become one.
Is this all a foot in the door for transhumanism? I won't speak for others, but on my own behalf I eagerly answer: yes. In a universe where the most natural things are death, decay, and emptiness and all of life is in rebellion against that natural state, it is not just acceptable to prioritize what is Good over what is natural, it is correct. While we all must come to peace with limitations we cannot change, the high points of human history have been our collective work to push back against that creeping entropy and the arbitrary, often cruel limits it imposes. We have already become much more than we once were, and we can and should become much more than we are now.
TracingWoodgrains
1yr ago
I suspect it's more like the latter. I've never particularly liked the community, and I'm far from alone in that among people who are fond of anthro animals, but etiology-wise I suspect it's much more like being gay/trans than most of any of those groups want to credit. Culture wars heating up only encourages identity--nothing like a bit of Persecution to build a determined culture (for better or worse).
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.
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