coffee_enjoyer
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If doing good to others were the ideal life, then a world where everyone focuses on doing good to others is an ideal life. But if we try to imagine a world where everyone, all day, tries to relentlessly find something good to do for someone else, with no time for anyone in this world to actually enjoy something, then it sounds like hell. By doing good to others, don’t we mean helping them to experience good emotional states? If those people feel that they have a relentless obligation to do good, then we are actually reducing their ability to experience good emotional states.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
If you had a son, and your son was fine with living a life as a Minecraft server admin, would you (or any other person in the world who you believe is a reasonable judge) be fine with this life decision as well? What about your friend? What if he claimed he was fine living a life that centered around huffing paint? Wouldn’t we intervene on this friend’s life choice, because we believe a sane person wouldn’t center life on insignificance and huffing paint? Similarly, if our friend was yelling at a wall all day every day, and when we asked him about this he says “I am experiencing heightened righteous anger”, we would call a doctor to come and interfere in his life choice.
What I’m saying boils down to: our actions in the real world prove that we trust the assessments of reasonable people on matters of mood , not in every case but in cases. And we believe in clear things that are bad (regarding emotional states). The class of people who we agree are reasonable on matters of life decisions (the “reasonable person” which our entire justice system revolves around) will overwhelmingly believe: living is good, an alcoholic life is bad, certain emotional states are desirable. Is this not so? If it’s so, then we can’t trust an unreasonable person’s assessment on their life quality.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Memory and experience are not mutually exclusive. To have a great memory of an ideal experience, you need to experience the present sharply.
Do you think a reasonable person would choose to live a life filled with anger? Do such people report high life satisfaction? Do we have records of people giving up not for more anger, or do we have the opposite? Do major world religions prioritize anger over other emotions? No reasonable person would decide to prioritize only anger in his life, and we know this because no reasonable person has ever done so.
The criticism denies that there can be any improvement in mood or life satisfaction. But reasonable people decide all the time to focus on improving their mood and life satisfaction, and they don’t pick “maximum anger”.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
It’s definitely possible to discourse on it with sufficient rigor to come away with more clarity than before. The Socratic dialogues are essentially that; the Summa is almost that. We’re not trying to Wittgenstein our postulates together to form a Tractatus. The alternative of never (not once) attempting to circumscribe how humans should live means we will forever be doomed to uncertainty on political or cultural shoulds.
a sense that "the good" is a discoverable truth that's the same for many people, as opposed to say an "invented" individual preference
That many different cultures developed to include the promotion of certain emotional states and the negation of other emotional states is evidence that humans are sufficiently similar that we can talk about them as a class. We can also use words that describe the deeper patterns of the human condition, like “desire” and “satisfaction” and “memory” to make progress on the question. Further, we can look at human narratives of people who have positive “life-changing realizations”: what do these have in common? Generally an aversion to addictions and an attraction to “deeper” emotional states involving gratitude and awe. And the science of well-being supports this. We can also ask, “when humans feel that their life is missing something, what do they generally desire more of?” You don’t have a lot of people lament that they have too few addictions or pains, or too many good memories with friends. These clue us into universal patterns of the human condition.
The Good is what people want, really?
That’s not quite my view. “We can imagine that if this ideally-lived person were at a dinner party, he would not wish to replace his life with anyone else present ever — this is what we mean by ideal. We can also imagine that a reasonable person would be convinced of the superiority of his lived life.” So it’s not about want exactly. When we’re confronted with another person we can judge their way of life. Most reasonable people have had the experience of meeting people who are living better than themselves and living worse. For instance, someone who loves video games might meet someone whose happiness comes off as much greater; even though he personally wants to play video games, he senses a superior way of life. I think this is a universal experience. When people watch David Goggins, they don’t want to do what he does, but they want to want to do what he does. Something something Lacanian desire.
how do we decide which reasonable group's wanting we should trust to define the Good, when the Good itself is the criterion we'll have to use to define reasonableness?
Phrased like this it seems paradoxical, but we can determine reasonableness by the ability to make accurate predictions. This is really the problem of all authority, not just “authority on the good”. I trust that the bridge won’t collapse, but isn’t this a case of “trusting the reasonable group’s [definition of] the reasonable”, namely bridge construction)? But we don’t even need to “trust a group”; an inquiry into the Good can be used by an individual subjectively to determine what is best for himself given the arguments available. Almost every reasonable person upon reading the scientific papers today would say that awe and gratitude are positive emotions to cultivate — this is not just common subjective sense, but evidenced from testimonies and major world religions. The paradox is interesting to dwell on but not actually applicable to how humans make decisions in the real world, no? But I could be misunderstanding the heart of the argument.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Boas says there are a number of graves from before the school were founded, which were on the field of the school grounds. Boas was excavating 1897, the school was founded in 1890, but the graves were from much earlier
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Re: someone who prioritizes living in the moment, would this person choose to lose his memory entirely in exchange for greater one-time experiences? I think we can determine that even such a person greatly values his collection of subjective experiences (memories). A complete discounting of memory would entail an almost suicidal drive toward a single great experience with no concern for the future, because future is a prediction based on memory. We’re back to a hypothetical: is the person who is dancing naked in the rain right now eternally better lived than the person who danced in the rain 100 times in the past? The idea behind favoring the latter person is that we value the enjoyments of memory. Vivid present subjective experiences are savored by memory, which is why people collect and remember them, and would not choose to eliminate their memory if they could. (At least in my experience, everyone I know who is adventurous treasures their memories).
Re: someone who loves righteous anger, should we trust his own knowledge of what is greatest to experience? For instance, there are alcoholics is who truly believe a good life consists of getting drunk. Should we say they are right or wrong? To me, someone who loves to only experience righteous anger sounds inhuman — I would rather say they don’t actually know what is greatest for their own enjoyment.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
What is best in life?
It’s odd that this question never comes up, because both culture and politics hinge on an image of the ideal life. Ostensibly, humans want to maximize the greatness of their life. Or, we can say they want to maximize the “enjoyment” of their life, where enjoyment refers to the full spectrum of experiences (rather than just vices as it sometimes colloquially means). If you were to imagine a hypothetical person with enough money to spend his life however he wants, what would this person do to maximize his “having lived well”? What does his life consist of? We can imagine that if this ideally-lived person were at a dinner party, he would not wish to replace his life with anyone else present ever — this is what we mean by ideal. We can also imagine that a reasonable person would be convinced of the superiority of his lived life.
Emotions > Information
After considering this question, I came to interesting conclusions, which are perhaps interesting enough to post. The emotional life, or the “felt” life, has all the significance. When we study mathematics or get into programming, the fruit of our labor is a feeling. We stumble upon a beauty and order in mathematics, which is a felt experience. Or we reach a catharsis from solving a programming problem, which is also a felt experience. The value is not in the information or specifics per se; were a person to be put on an antagonist of the opioid or dopamine or serotonin receptor and were numb to the enjoyable emotional state, we would conclude they experienced nothing of value.
This means that mathematics and all “informational” learning is only valuable insofar as it induces great emotion, where the ideal life is concerned. If you could conceivably experience a greater variation of beauty and order from something outside of mathematics (which may not be the case, or it may be the case), then even learning math would be unnecessary to experience the ideal life. Put another way, if we are measuring someone’s life by their experience of beauty, then we care only about the felt experience of beauty, and not its intellectual antecedents or mental symbols. Someone whose brain cannot process the enjoyment of music would have no benefit from reading the sheet music of Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion (the antecedent); and similarly, someone who can already fully appreciate the music (the consequent enjoyment) gets no value from knowing the sheet music. And so the ideal life must consist of rich emotional or felt states — interpreted broadly as “mental states which affect our emotional life”, so as to include experiences of order and beauty and the sublime.
Memory of Experience > Experience
I realized also, that memory is crucial to the ideal life. If we compare two men, and one of them experienced great states and has a clear memory of them, and the other experienced one greater state and has a poor memory, the former man has lived a better life. The fact that we intuitively see that having great memories is important to maximize the enjoyment of life actually tells us something profound about what we value: contemplation. We would rather live the life of the person who has experienced 99% enjoyment of ten things than 100% enjoyment of one. We would rather be the person at the pub telling us about his many adventures than the person who is currently climbing Everest experiencing the one great adventure of his life.
So the contemplation of our experiences is crucial. And there’s another way to prove this: who has a greater appreciation for a loved one, than the person who knows the loved one most? Having a deep memory of a person is necessary to fully appreciate them. So it is with appreciating a book, album, or story. We would not want to be an emotionally sensitive but senseless child with memory loss, who experiences wonder and beauty for the first time every day, because the inability to know and contemplate these things is the inability to fully appreciate them.
The Emotions that Matter
To me, it’s actually obvious which emotions are great, because human societies have come to general conclusions on this no matter the time period. There’s the experience of deep serenity and peace and security, which can come through family and certain rituals and prayer. There’s the experience of Power or the Sublime which often induces a state of pleasant fear and fuller appreciation of living itself. There’s the experience of order which leaves us relieved and satisfied and warm. There’s beauty which entrances us, and the experience of love and belonging and connection which warms us. There are, IMO, certain general patterns and there’s little reason to reinvent the wheel here. Although I’d say, the satiation of our appetite for food and sex is considerably less important than the amount of thought we give it. For one, it goes away as soon as we are fulfilled. Food then should be associated with memories to enhance those memories, and sex should be associated with love to enhance our bonds.
The Training of Memory
As I’ve determined for myself that emotions are what matter, and what’s more that the contemplation of our emotional experiences are most important, I reasoned that the organization and training of emotional memory is necessary for the ideal life. It’s not enough to have a memory, if that memory is not accessible in the mind. It’s not enough to experience a good thing, if we don’t devote it to memory. Scott had mentioned in a post of his on depression that there’s a failure to update negative priors after a positive experience — there’s a failure to actually learn from the positive experience, to remember, to cohere it into the mind, and to update the prediction model of the world. The experience goes right through us and this is what makes depression so, well, depressing. On the other side of the coin, there is research on experienced “lovingkindness” meditator Matthieu Ricard whose brain shows changes that suggest a greater capacity for joy. That you can practice the memory and skills related to positive emotions is not exactly a new thought in the history of Western and Eastern religion. But for how important it is to ideal living, it’s little mentioned.
Problemata
If great, heightened experiences of varied things is so important, why doesn’t everyone do drugs? Should everyone try opium once in their life to experience a deep relaxation? And to this I say… maybe? If we know for sure that a person would not get addicted to opium, then there’s a legitimate value in trying it once to develop a memory of the deepest depths of peace. I would say the same with marijuana and alcohol and tobacco. But the ideal application of drugs is not the real world. Because everyone can fall into addiction, these things have to be used with extreme caution or not at all.
If personal enjoyment is so important, then what’s the point of a social life? To this I say, that socializing produces unique and more expedient enjoyments. We learn about enjoyment from socializing. And what about the obligation to have children? I would say that children are remarkable because they are little microcosms of human life, and by raising a child you can come to experience greater fullness of life’s enjoyments.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Another interesting thing is that Franz Boas did excavation work near Kamloops from 1897 to 1900 and noted in his journals that there were stories of the site being an Indian burial ground. He specifically mentions “on the field near the school”, that there were childrens’ graves particularly, that it would take months to exhume all the bones, that the Indians didn’t want him to take any of the bones as they knew it was a burial site, and that some graves were marked with crosses from many decades ago due to possibly Christianized fur trappers.
That’s obviously enough to call Kamloops a hoax, but if someone needed even more, the death rate of tuberculosis and small pox is significantly higher among Native Americans than Europeans which we know from contemporaneous accounts of death rates. So even if there weren’t a literal children’s grave at Kamloops from before the school was built which we know courtesy of the father of anthropology, we also have to deal with the fact that a higher death rate and thus burial grounds is entirely explained by disease rate susceptibility.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Have there been any studies which had two IQ-adjusted teams of male-only and female-only compete for some end goal? So 30 men versus 30 women to compete to develop some objectively-measurable project?
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Religion is not about literal scientific claims. “Religious language” is unique. Definitions of God are also not as simple as imagined. Origen was writing about how Genesis is figurative in the 3rd century, Tertullian was writing about how the absurdity of Christian led to a stronger belief, and the earliest Gospel commentary we have is allegorical (Fortunatianus).
While the point of the religion is to have a perfect belief that God was born to a virgin, walked on water, converted water into wine, and so forth, this is tremendously difficult. The number of Christians who truly believe these things on a deep level are approximately the number of Saints. Consider how differently a person would act if they had a true, deep certainty that Jesus as depicted in the Gospel is returning: that imitating Jesus leads to true happiness, that you receive a new life, that Godly suffering leads to joy. You would be the most restless missionary ever while having no anxieties.
Christianity uses all kinds of things as propaganda to draw people into the inner faith, but at the heart of it it’s not “literal”. It’s true, and in fact more true than the literal. But not literal-scientific.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Why stop at verse 18 when can study the whole passage
Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. 17These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. 18Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions,d puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, 19and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God. 20If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— 21“Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” 22(referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? 23These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.
Now in 17, substance means body. Remembered that the fulfillment of the Old is found in Jesus. What’s more, in Christianity there’s a process by which a “child” in Christ becomes an “adult” in Christ. The astute Bible fan would now note that the chapter divisions are a later division. So let’s move on to the continuation of the teachings:
then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth
It’s very clear then that the intention is not to focus on the human-made rules and regulations, which are a shadow of the true light of Christ.
Nothing in Romans goes against what I am saying. In Romans 6 we read
What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. […] But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.
Your criticisms are convoluted and purposely opaque. You don’t seem understand that a thing can be bad, and also that hyper-focusing on rules regarding the bad thing can also be bad and ineffectual. If I have a wife whom I love, I may decide on a list of 80 things which a lover does with his wife. And if I hyper-focus on adhering to these 80 things when I am with my wife, then I will never be able to actually love my wife. Those 80 rules or principles may be of some use in diagnosis, but has no use in treatment. To love your wife you must focus on your wife as a person and yourself as a person, and if the love is true then it may line up with the “80 rules” produced. The key distinction is that the treatment is not the diagnosis. This is Christianity in a nutshell: it is not a rules-based religion, but a spirit-based religion. Although there does exist somewhat amorphous criterion for measuring righteousness, the only thing of value is the inner disposition. And this is exposed by Jesus again and again in the Gospel where he breaks letter to perform the spirit
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
A big part of Christianity is to turn the soul naturally good, that is, it doesn’t do things out of guilt or “slavery to the law” but because it loves God. As such, these aren’t really behavioral prescriptions. Someone who loves their child and does things for the child naturally is not obeying a mental list of rules, they are being guided by the spirit of love without the involvement of forcing oneself — this is grace. This is how the Christian sees God working in their world, how they see Christ behaving in the world, and what they have faith to receive by worship and prayer — not strenuous effort or rule-following.
Consider 1 Corinthians 13:3: “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
It may be least rule-based of any ancient religion known, especially in the early days. Colossians 2:16, romans 4:15, and Galatians 4:10 prove that there were no significant rules on holidays or diet. 1 Corinthians 6:12 implies that the religion has an entire spiritual dimension in which nothing is forbidden. Romans 14 strongly suggests that judgment should not be passed on a Christian for earthly things.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
And if she is represented as a good person who is victimized because of her religion, the positive valence of Christianity will increase, which is a step forward for Christians in American culture.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Rule-following is Judaism with its 613 commandments, not Christianity. Much ink was spilled in the New Testament about how true religion is a spiritual orientation toward God and not following rules to the letter (the flesh of the letter which worketh death is contrasted to the spirit of the law which is fulfilled in Christ). People do certainly want to understand their place in the Universe and who to trust, and this Christianity attempts to answer comprehensively. I would note, though, that news sites for the irreligious function the same way, where the news du jour takes on existential importance and much E-Ink is spilled on who is the most trustworthy anonymous source in news. If not news, then scientists and sciencism, with its illusion that the fullness of an ocean can be understood by analyzing the contents of a bucket.
Well let’s discuss it.
Many powerful groups in America use a victim narrative to further their interests, in particular Jewish Americans (discussed in the recent “Day of Hate” topic you can find in my reply history). Recently, Asian Americans (the least assaulted group in the nation, the doors for whom were open in a way they would never be in Asia for Americans) have also been winning publicity with claims of extreme assault, and perhaps Oscars with claims of under-representation (they are the most over-represented group). Indigenous groups just a few years ago burned down many Catholic Churches over a largely meritless victimhood-promoting report on the Komloops School burials. There is no group but White Christians who fail to use a victim complex. But this was not always so.
Christians once thrived on a victim narrative. This “saving victim” narrative was once crucial to Christians, who prayed “O Saving Victim lend thine aid, our foes press hard on every side”. Early Christians talked about “being persecuted for righteousness sake”. Jesus says that blessedness (happiness) lies in being persecuted as a Christian which leads to heaven. Jesus pointed the finger at a powerful group as causing this persecution and cursed them; early Christians too were persecuted by Jews and Romans and were venerated as martyrs. The Mass focuses not on the resurrection of Jesus, but on his death and sacrifice.
The Church in its earliest days saw themselves as God’s true victims. When presenting their message to others, they preached the glory and memory of their savior who was willing victimized. And in their rituals, the feeling of pity and love is stirred up by acknowledging the torture of God at the hand of sinners. This is enough to consider a victim narrative natural to Christianity. If a victim narrative is natural to Christianity, then it should be used to benefit Christians.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
My problem with the ad campaign is that the money is spent poorly. With that amount you could wrangle Christians together to produce a victim complex lobbying arm that demands one attractive crucifix-wearer in every show and on every board of directors.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
But in actuality, not by the letter of the law but how it plays out, the residue of violence colors the view of judges and prosecutors. Chansley was held without bail, and he was charged extravagantly despite all of the other protestors being guilty of the same crime.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
I’ll share something about the J6 footage. The video shows that the “shaman” Jacob Chansly was a non-violent protestor on good terms with the police whom guided him through the corridors of the capitol. He is on video praying for the police and telling everyone to leave peacefully after reading Trump’s tweet. Also persuasive is the fact that only 106 officers were injured, whereas 180+ officers were injured when the progressive insurrectionists in 2020 attempted to seize the White House (burning down a piece of history in the process, a church of God). Remember that the media then laughed because Trump was placed in a safe location.
This only interests me a little though. What’s more interesting and scary is talking to an older relative who refuses to even watch the tape. Why? Because the news pushed stories to his iPhone immediately after Tucker’s monologue (which has 4mil views only on YouTube plus everyone who watches JRE plus etc). The News pushed debunks, or perhaps prebunks, in an attempt to inoculate their subjects viewers from ever being persuaded by Tucker’s video. None of it had anything that even vaguely amounts to a debunking. If Chansley was indeed violent, it should be as trivial as publishing the clip. The shaman didn’t exactly blend in with the crowd. But in fact, they can’t debunk it, so they just attack Tucker with persuasive linguistic programming.
I also noticed how insanely uninformed my relative was on what happened in the Greater Insurrection of 2020. His entire memory of the event is “Trump dispersed peaceful protestors for a photo op”. The media is so crafty and so consistent in their messaging, it leads to such resilient disinformation. What, the President shouldn’t be able to speak a few miles from his house, about the piece of history insurrectionist burned down? That’s clearly insane.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Living a ”model” life does not do anything toward solving complex problems, at all, and its influence on the behavior of other people is slim. For instance, let’s say I wanted to be the best model mathematician. I wear math shirts every day and I talk to everyone I meet about the beauty of mathematics. My influence on the lives of others would be less than had I spent my time working toward getting better math classes in school. We live in an organization-centric world, and in a sense it has always been like that. Opting out of any care beyond “being a good person to others and being joyful” is not enough in a world where your life is dictated by political ideas downstream from culture. Even the most joyful and caring parent may have children who get their behavior from bad peers or Tik Tok. Francis of Assisi lived a model life, but more importantly he created organizations and produced culture. Organization and culture are the only ways to make the world better which underlies your ideas about “living a good life”.
As an example of the concerns here, there are many Afrikaners in South Africa who are living a good life, and maybe they are even Saints. But as a people they are doomed because of political and cultural reasons. Unless they develop a form of sovereignty, they will be overrun in every city and town that they founded. Hence the importance of organization and culture. Another example: Afghans were able to resist American imperialism not because any individual was “good” or “skilled”, but because they had intense cultural practices and organization that gave them the ability to defend their homeland.
There are no shortage of Christian communities today that practice insane levels of self-sacrificial charity, truly loving the moral life, but all it takes is a biased news report and propaganda in media to make the average person instinctively hate Christians. And indeed, the early Christians did not focus on living a moral life. They focused on creating organization (centered around the eucharist) and culture (art, stories).
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Combining walks with music, musing, stories and reading (if on treadmill) is easier on my willpower than walking alone. This probably has to do with the evolutionary antecedents to these cognitive processes: using stories to store information on the world, music to make sense of one’s environment, etc. We could even say that walking is supposed to be associated with such informational activities.
What other evolutionary cheats are there to implement?
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
It is “Definitions of gender and sex: The subtleties of meaning”
https://sci-hub.ru/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1007123617636
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
(1) Normal people decide the definitions of words, academics only define jargon; (2) academic jargon of gender acts as a sleight-of-hand that confuses normal people who historically adhere to a ”sex-based” definition of gender; (3) definitions are a consequence of utility, ie the practical and real interest of normal people, which is why FTM will never be women (qua utility and significance), and only women* (we have been forced by social shame and guilting and pressure and fallacies to authority to use this word to mean something new devoid of its previous utility and significance, despite the utility and significance of the distinction being inviolable)
It doesn’t hinge on definitions, it hinges on the utility of language versus power dynamics.
When liberals think of definitions, they think about what a specialized academic body has defined. This is, in fact, not actually a definition. This is a “term of art” or jargon which can (at most) act as a lesser definition. A legal definition of argument is different than the real world definition of argument. The legal definers do not get to force their definition upon the normal, everyday majority usage. So it is with all terms of art.
Per a survey 20 years ago, the majority of people believe the word is rooted in male/female division. Only 10% bring up social roles or “socially defined”. A self-perception origin of the word only accounted for 19% of origin beliefs, but because only 42% of definitions supplied a statement on origin, this is more like 8%.
Now, the power dynamic today may be that the academics do get to foist their “social construct” definition on the word gender. For a time, there will exist a purgatory of definitions where the previous majority definers are tricked into believing that this is the real definition. But what will happen is that most people will discount the importance of “gender” as a word. It would be as if someone created a new word, “spashiboo”, which refers to a social construction — the majority will simply not care about “spashiboo” and go back to caring about the male/female sex distinction.
But why is the male/female sex distinction so important and resilient to attempts at obfuscation? And here is where the significance lies: words are used for their utility. There is hardly a definition in social affairs more important than the male/female division, because it dictates our sexual aims (and thus our evolutionary and biological aims, and our social aims), and it efficiently categorized the psychological differences between men and women.
This is more important than anything that the ivory tower gender wizards can brew in their textbooks. Normal people care about having sex and procreating, and they also want to divide humans according to useful social categories. The first reason mandates the priority of a male/female definition. The second reason encourages a male/female definition, because men and women act differently, and I have seen no evidence than MTF are more womanly in their psychological orientation (in fact I have seen evidence to the opposite: excelling in video games, typical male autism, masculine faces, etc).
The article you linked doesn’t say anything about memory. Can you cite where that’s mentioned?
This should be obvious by context, but the discussion has never come up on themotte. We’ve had dozens of posts on repetitive topics like the plague of homeless people and the transgender question, but not many that actually try to discuss things from the topic.
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