aqouta
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aqouta
18hr ago
I'm not exactly sure where your disagreement with curious_straight_ca is.
It's not necessary that we have a huge disagreement, althogh I think there is something we disagree on with the underlying phenomenon.
But it's also an undeniable fact that some people just feel a spontaneous desire to be the opposite gender, even without prior exposure to pro-trans material.
This is kind of what I'm trying to examine. We live in a causal universe, I don't think there is such a thing as spontaneous belief. trivially if you were separated from humans at birth and never encountered someone of the opposite sex then I don't think you could develop a belief that you should be categorized on a binary you couldn't know exists. I do think that people exposed to no pro-trans material can still develop something that kind or sort of looks like trans because gender is a salient category and identity formation has some failure modes. I don't think this is a born this way thing, I think it's still social even if that doesn't make it a choice.
Corn/maize naturally developed through evolution in nature and this development tells us something about the corn we've bred/engineered to be giant and calorie dense. But it can't explain everything about our modern corn or our corn syrup products. They're something new of our creation and have tons of down stream implications that may end up being very harmful to society. It might be totally natural for identity formation to go awry sometimes and leave someone in a strange maize level trans predicament. But now that we have the meme we're seeing the corn syrupification of gender nonconforming identities, purified and mass produced.
Responding to a late response from last week's culture War.
I'm aware of this the various accounts of AGPs and I think back to Scott's musings on the anorexia and other culture bound illnesses. His conclusion didn't seem quite right either.
I think what's going on is that the human mind is capable of innumerable states. The uncharted territory of the mind shifts with great plasticity, but once examined begins to harden and harden in response to the type of examination. Like shining a bright on a photopolymer, call this the photopolymeme theory of identity.
The type of examination is dependent on the environment, which is not random. In a trans naive environment you are still exposed to gendered binaries constantly and there is plenty of plausible cause to start that hardening process in a peculiar direction, maybe you made a friend of the opposite gender in kindergarten and when the care takers separate out their charges by gender the nubile mind recoils in being split from your friend and some part of the identity hardens in that you belong on that side of the divide. Maybe a million other things.
When you introduce the trans meme into the environment suddenly you go from identities lightly hardened by stray beams of light to precision directed lazers etching the face of the meme on kids at industrial scale.
It's generally accepted that reading webmd had a normal effect of convincing many people that they have whatever obscure disease they're currently looking at. Symptoms tend to be vague and our senses have difficulty differentiating between imagining symptoms and having symptoms. I'm convinced that when you ask every kid Ina generation to carefully examine whether they're really trans with a laundry list of symptoms that could just be normal cisgender experience you're going to be hardening a lot of plastic minds.
I like this theory because I don't think self described trans people are usually lying. I think they've examined themselves and found these features. I think trying to reshape that hardened plastic might be difficult, painful or impossible. I think adults are probably entitled to shape their identities as they please so long as they don't harm others in the process.
I also think that as @TracingWoodgrains has described before, when talking about frames and cages has some validity. Can we be sure that the Chesterton's gendered cages we're ripping down weren't vital frames that kids need to provide structure for their identity?
aqouta
4d ago
I think they spend the same or similar amounts of time, it's just the learning seems secondary to the selection and socialization. All colleges have been suffering through becoming more and more instrumentalized as they become a necessary Goodhart's check box for middle class life. I think this process is downstream of the internet bringing all the contours of the various credentialing systems and their bounties to the attention of everyone. You can see this in the sharp plummeting in the ivy league acceptance rate starting in around the 90s.. If you offered someone either the education they can get at Harvard or the connections and credentials which one would it be more rational to choose?
There is undoubtedly learning at Harvard, but is the point of Harvard the learning? And if it's not, if its primary purpose is as an exclusive club for hand selected elites to rub shoulders then the willingness to throw out merit to service political goals makes perfect sense. And also I'd quite like to burn it to the ground.
aqouta
4d ago
On the whole dysfunction of the schools and their criteria. It just seems like the age of the usefulness of higher education as a selection criteria for the elite should have passed a long time ago. It's too legible, too gameable. What we should do to fix them is the wrong question, we need a whole new pipeline. It's clear from the discussion that teaching people things is not really part of the elite college mission, it should be separated out.
I support an Investment bank department. To my understand analyst is more rank than role and can do a wide variety of things depending on the department. The group of analysts I work most closely with are looking at the developers that have successfully won bids to build low income housing for Low income housing tax credits. LIHTC pay out over like 10 years and developers don't want to be in the business of keeping assets on their books, they want to build and move on.
So the analysts I'm working with are trying to determine what a good deal with one of these developers would look like, Most basically we supply the capital and our org gets to put our name in the proper place that lets us get the tax credits but there are many different ways to go about it, and then bidding on those deals. In practice you have pricing analysts that try and find the best deal, usually with an eye for price per tax credit. There are underwriting analysts doing something close to building up pitch books for the deal, turning the data we get from the developer in a comprehensive document and looking into things that might impact occupancy like nearby crime rate and the kind of special needs populations that might be serviced in the area as well as the various guarantees and business stuff. There are risk analysts that I know less about and I believe to be looking at the whole portfolio to make sure we're looking good from a risk perspective.
AI isn't really threatening our department any more than us tech guys already are by building out tools to make the process more efficient. In the end of the day these deals have big dollar amounts of them and making labor more efficient probably wouldn't have us cut head count as much as make us willing to go after smaller deals that we currently don't think are worth the time it takes to underwrite them.
I pushed back in that way because you didn't engage with the mechanism explanation I put forward. I was trying to describe a mechanism that would apply to both the environment with and without trans messaging. I describe how it could come about naturally here:
and you accused me of not describing that instead opting for putting everything under a low resolution "spontaneity" bucket. So I assumed you have some kind of weird philosophical attachment to spontaneity or did not read my post. I considered the weird philosophical attachment to it the more charitable read.
Bringing HBD in will probably just confuse stuff. I fully admit that people can be born with different characteristics. One of those characteristics could even be predisposition to hardening identities in a trans-like way. But I'm talking about the identity formation itself.
I don't think people have fully built mental skylines from the moment of birth that they then explore like one would an ancient ruin to find buried truth. I think identities are the structures we build on the inbuilt landscape. Someone who loves the Dallas Cowboys and has Dallas Cowboys supporter as a major part of their identity probably had a kind of mental landscape with territory ripe for structures like football fan that in a different time and culture or even just if different life situations occurred could have hosted different identity structures. Certainly one could imagine if the fan was born in New York rather than Dallas at least the team would probably have been different.
People go around building things in their identity skyline in response to environmental factors, not directly consciously. Embarrassingly as a young kid for some reason I had built something like a "picky eater" identity structure. I identified with my picky eating, most likely in response to my parents trying to get me to eat something I for some fickle reason didn't want to eat. This identity seemed useful to me at the time, like a crude shack one might build hastily in minecraft as night falls. I've since dismantled it for good reason but I remember how hard it was to part with, how it was reinforced by others affirming it, even if doing so exasperatedly.
I think I could have built the trans structure in my head if things had gone differently. That's kind of what fascinates me about this subject and what I have a hard time getting across. I think my latent identity landscape was ripe for it. If a few different environmental factors had gone differently, if I had started down that path and been affirmed, I can see it and that terrifies me. In a no longer trans naive world where we have people surveying every young mind looking for places to construct that identity and handing out blue prints and construction advice. I don't think it's good to discriminate against people who have built the trans identity structure, but I do think it's a bad idea to encourage others to build it. It seems like a bad use of that identity space.
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