aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
2mo ago
I mean they need a reasonable offramp and Trump isn't that. This is why the Democrats have, correctly, zeroed in on the strategy of just pointing out the wild stuff Trump does and not talking about much else. If the republicans want to be the party of normal they need to actually take up that mantel.
aqouta
2mo ago
Look, the problem isn't just that people who don't think gender essentialism is a coherent worldview think that we're sacrificing the wellbeing of many children and adults needlessly. That's a problem of course but it's secondary to the point deer make horse dynamics. It's deeply unsettling to have what seems like plain reality not just denied but the denial to have in many cases incredible force behind it. There is a troubling kind of argumentation, where one is made out narratively to be a victim and then a huge chunk of the country will blindly support them while being not just immune to argumentation otherwise but actively against it. This feels like an autoimmune response, I don't know if a country can survive this kind of unreasoning in the long term. It's mildly terrifying to consider how easily nearly anyone can be framed as the oppressor against a new invented victim. There does not appear to be any limiting principle.
aqouta
3mo ago
@The_Nybbler might be slightly too narrow on what it takes to be a libertarian but it really does seem quite strange to call yourself a libertarian and then endorse laws like seatbelt laws. I just call myself a normal liberal so I can go one way or the other but it's hard to take some who calls themselves a libertarian seriously when they take a case where all the relevant externalities are internalized, risk of injury due to not wearing a seat belt, and decide the state should have a say. It just feels like one of the most central cases of not being a libertarian.
aqouta
3mo ago
I'm more narrowly addressing calling the removal of books censorship. To answer your question I recognize the word game being played. There are positive and negative liberties that live under the same umbrella. welfare is framed as liberty maximizing because it frees the recipient of needing to earn those resources and thus opening up their options. I think this form of positive liberty is something worth considering and in many cases pursuing. But it has little to do with negative liberty which is fundamentally about being unconstrained. Between the two types of liberty you can indeed probably describe nearly all policy, where you constrain you do so to benefit others which is their positive liberty and where you do not constrain you are doing so in furtherance of negative liberty so the only type of policy that could do neither would be one that constrains to no benefit which would be a strange policy indeed.
Because of this reasoning I'm pretty much indifferent to naming a party that isn't particularly constraining after liberty, and on balance I think the "moms of liberty" group falls closer on the side of negative liberty. After all they're just asking for the state to use their resources in a way slightly more aligned with their interests so they aren't clearly constraining anyone besides maybe state employees.
aqouta
3mo ago
I take freedom of speech pretty seriously. I'm tired of people trying to dilute it into describing the process through which state runs schools decide how to apportion the limited space they have in school libraries and school curriculum. No one is banning books, that's a false framing. People are saying they don't want the state to use their tax money to buy books to make available in buildings their tax money spent constructing for the purpose of indoctrinating their children. If I write or love a book I have zero right for the state to put that book in public schools and I don't have any idea where the belief I might have such a right comes from.
The exact right process to decide which books go in such a building is the local government and that precisely the process these people are lobbying. How else could it possibly be?
aqouta
3mo ago
It'd depend on the reporter a think and what kind of story they can get out of it. "There are obscure forums where people are discussing wrong think" is a dog bites man story.
aqouta
3mo ago
If the NYTs does do this at least someone should point them to https://www.vault.themotte.org/ it wouldn't take a journalist that long to get a feel for what the community values outside of picking some nuts in a community oriented around allowing nuts to cook.
aqouta
3mo ago
The consensus building is both tiresome and against the rules but at least the readership very obviously leans liberal as distinct from progressive. The commentariat is a mixed bag of disagreeable people who will take basically any position besides main stream progressivism when the opportunity arises. The readership like more than anything novel arguments and novel arguments are what are reward by replies and upvotes, irregardless of the perspective. People appreciate Christian arguments that they've never seen before over arguments that more align with their beliefs but appear to be a dime a dozen. That doesn't change that there are what, six to ten regular Christian posters?
aqouta
3mo ago
We've stayed under the radar because we are very small. Even Scott is only recently on the radar and he's orders of magnitude larger.
aqouta
3mo ago
People naturally cluster their beliefs about things into this neat little narratives. They see John running and get attached to some particular theory about why he is running. They interpret his pace and the look on his face to mean he must be running from someone or something and then build out theories about what the pursuer could be. They think extensively about all the different types of pursuers and that occupies so much of their mind space that they end up way, hilariously, over estimating the likelihood of each of those theories. It's very easy to accidentally discount the possibility that he's just out for an exercise run and made a funny face way below where it belongs if you're not careful.
The practice reminds you to think critically about each additional compounding conditional in this way and prevents common failure modes. It fits nicely with the demand to measure both probability and confidence in things like bets. I've seen myself moderate my beliefs in real time when faced with the need to define odds and offer a bet, it's a humbling thing to have happen.
It also breaks you out of the "my team vs their team" mindset. When I assign a probability besides one or zero to something I've given myself a reasonable out to it not happening. I'm less emotionally invested in some outcome and can more easily resist each new piece of evidence to the contrary causing me to double down about how it really, if you squint, supports my original position. I think this is something a lot of people who end up sucked into ideological pipelines could avoid most of their bad ends if they adopted. "From the evidence before I think I was still right in favoring outcome X, but I see I now that I was too confident and maybe evidence Y and Z should be less compelling to me in the future" is a much superior mental state to "No, bullshit, I was always right and there must be some kind of conspiracy to hide the truth". And the latter appears to be a very common occurrence.
Can you make due without these tools? Absolutely. Some people are able to free solo crazy climbs. But I find it strange that you don't least recognize their value.
aqouta
3mo ago
Putting a probability to your beliefs is just a health tool to get you out of the silly narrative mindset where you get committed to one narrow line of possible events. It gives you a bunch of other useful tools for thinking about uncertain events like making sure that compounding conditionals should lower your probability rather than raise it. It's not really a substitute for having gut feelings but it's a very useful set of tools for discussing and reasoning about these gut feelings.
aqouta
4mo ago
On a meta-note: I feel a ton of this discussion about transgenderism is getting repitive. I'm seriously considering putting together a document with the most commong arguments pro and con, so instead of spending way too much time poorly reconstructing the same counterarguments, I can just say “you are using argument 69a, please see rebuttals 23a through c.”
This could be an interesting project. I find it's often hard to argue against the entire memeplex because the argumentation shifts constantly as it runs up against dead end and starts a new one until the interlocutors are exhausted.
aqouta
4mo ago
Olympics have allowed trans athletes for 20 years. This isn't that new, and it wouldn't take a huge amount of data to do a t-test.
Olympics get their competitors from some pipeline. That pipeline has not had actual trans people in it. This is ridiculous.
my response is that guessing is not a good enough reason to restrict people's actions and liberties on something like this.
We're only guessing that global warming is going to be catastrophic based on the information we have. We don't have to experience something to have a pretty good idea of the results.
This is not the question at hand, as I've spent thousands of words explaining.
Of course it isn't to you. You want the question to be some impossibly nebulous thing where we have to calculate the exact advantage so you can compare it to other unearned advantages like height. And because it's impossible to actually calculate something like that you're going to keep pleading ignorance. It's all such blatant tactics.
You don't get to claim the null hypothesis on this.
aqouta
4mo ago
Look, we're not finding you some wide spread statistics on how well transwomen do in sports because this whole transgendered athlete concept didn't come out in force until yesterday and coincided with a global pandemic that shut down youth sports. We don't have historical data on how well transgendered kids did at sports because "transgendered kids" as a concept wasn't even widely known about and the idea that there'd be a kid who got gender affirming care and was interested in sports and was in a place that would actually have humored them was an empty set. It's an experiment that can only be done looking forward and it wouldn't even be without seismic shocks of confounders until they were allowed to compete for some time.
So we're using our experience in the world and our knowledge of male vs female anatomy to make some educated guesses. Testosterone exposure at any point in time seems like an escapable advantage. Nearly every developmental step males take away from females represents a physical fitness advantage. It would be larger than the difference of taking steroids.
I can't show you data because it doesn't exist and won't exist in any usable form for some time. But what is your actual confidence here? What odds would you place against "Natal males who at least went partially through puberty have an advantage over natal females who underwent normal puberty all other factors(diet, training regimen, genetic twins) held equal"? I can't actually believe you would get that less than 95% odds of being true.
aqouta
4mo ago
You're on the verge verge of understanding the importance of 2A to the people you described.
And yes, I don't want to tell lies. They chip away at an important part of myself.
aqouta
4mo ago
I've not seen these videos. I'm not totally sure how I'd feel about it, I suspect having a kid is going to change some of these feelings but I appear to lack the ick factor about having my likeness used to train AI. As for the soft core CP stuff? I'm overwhelmingly disgusted by pedophiles but I don't really think there is a way to prevent them from ever even seeing young children. I may still not like the idea of there being a lot of content on the open web about my future children but it's not really because pedos might find it.
Excellent write-up, I agree with much of it nearly exactly. Including liking but being perplexed by deBoer. It's like one of those What english sounds like to non-english speakers videos. The underlying tone and analytical thought is there but he somehow manages to sprinkle in some moral mutant level different values in so he ends up veering all over to places I wouldn't have gone.
aqouta
4mo ago
I'm afraid when I'm made to interact with nazis through words rather than bullets I have only realpolitik's at my disposal. They are moral mutants to me, much like AI is. The direction you're trying to get me to go for animals proves too much and I really don't see why it would be more convincing to an AI overlord whether or not I have hold some kind of non-hypocritical reason for why it should value human life while I don't value life of less sentient beings.
If the way we need to align AI such that it values human life is to give it a value system that also values the inner lives of cows and pigs then we should do that. But I can't stress enough how I don't think it works like that.
aqouta
4mo ago
Sure, it's not quite the definition I use, but I'll point out all definitions have problems like this because people genuinely differ on how wide of a scope they want "racism" to cover. I frankly just try not to use the word because it's heat strength outpaces any useful light application. Of course people have always sought to weild heat where ever it can be found.
aqouta
4mo ago
I worry a lot that people in spaces like this one get blinded by the aesthetics of intellectualism and academic rigor. But it's actually not very hard to use big words and phrase thing in empirical framings. It's not even that hard to do a literature search and find the one paper out of 5,000 that has some stats supporting your view which you can cite.
I'd probably be fine calling him a racist but this really is hinging on what your definition for racism is. It doesn't appear that he has a deep seated hatred or irrationality based on race and some people might reasonably require that. It's one of many reasons we should probably taboo our words more often. If we're determining whether to call him a racist because when we apply that label it means we'll engage with his ideas differently(or not at all) that seems like it's removing and not adding to our objectivity. If we're doing it because we want to have a neat taxology of who the racists are then I question the purpose.
I'm honestly really fine dismissing what he says because it's an anecdote and he seems like the kind of edgy person to exaggerate, hell I'm engaged and deeply in love with a "Hanoid" or whatever he called them. But I don't need to do this based on some weird label technically.
aqouta
4mo ago
Perhaps true but from the perspective of the progressive it's intolerable that any are oppressed and large gears are the mechanism by which they're able to crush oppressors. You can say they shouldn't but that's a values disagreement.
I acknowledge there exists a motte of social gender understanding that jettisons nearly the entirety of the movement's beliefs which is merely overly neurotically fixated on gender trappings. As you say though, it has practically no constituency because from that standing it really can't make any demands. The movement needs more than mere preference as motivation to justify demands for extraordinary treatment.
There is a clear and tangible need motivating treating adoptive parents like parents. They've taken on a real responsibility for the care of a child. If they just really liked PTA meetings and being seen pushing a stroller around we wouldn't humor them, or at least wouldn't tolerate any kind of top down demand to humor them.
If we reduce the question of trans down to "some people want to be treated s or they're the opposite sex". Then sure, it's coherent, and I'm even willing to humor it to a degree even though I think it'd be better liberalism to just say men can wear dresses and be treated like women while still being men if they want. This is of course all academic, we're talking about a reasonable version of trans activism that doesn't exist and won't ever be prominent.
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