curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
That link doesn't work for me
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The leniency that religious people receive on this site is nowhere found in every other site where you would just be called a "bigoted religious nut
Eh, the willingness to go along with religious discussion without raising the 'uh this is fake tho' arguments is pretty common in general. I think it's in part because everyone's tired of making the same new atheism style arguments, in part because it just feels ... mean, they're enjoying their world and it makes them feel good and doesn't seem to have too many negative consequences.
Like if I saw OP and had no context on religious discussions on the internet, I'd reply with a standard argument for atheism on the grounds of physics, the cultural history of religion, the history of the universe, and how physics is a better ground for morals anyway. But ... everyone knows about that, and nobody cares, really.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Right, but then your miracles are evidence for 'any entity or process that intervenes in the world to help humans', not 'God specifically', because by that logic it isn't evidence for the Muslims when "Allah" appears to do it.
When I hear the actual account though, it's generally fairly easy to dismiss it as a hallucination, a fabrication, or simply a normal dream.
I think there are some rather sophisticated claims of Buddhist, Hindu, and Islam miracles, and many unsophisticated and obviously false Christian miracle claims. This means the distribution of miracle claims on plausibility is as far as I know similar for different religions, so if you're arguing that this is evidence for Christian God over others I don't think that's true, although I'm not sure if that's the argument you're making or not.
The thing is Christianity, I think, claims that a significant number of instances of angels visiting people / God speaking to people / observable divine intervention happened. It's weird that it just stopped, and all we get now isn't easily falsifiable.
Also, I think you're just getting lucky generally. You pray a lot, sometimes something like it happens, you count the few pieces of strong evidence that prayer works and discount the larger number of weak evidence that it doesn't.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I think your miracle evidence is confused, but in lieu of that I'll point somewhere else - many intelligent Muslims and members of other faiths have similarly seen personal miracles from their god(s) and used them as evidence for their faith. Their arguments are very similar to yours. Which is weird, right?
was unmistakably influenced by Western biases.
True! But are we not all sinners? There are tiny dust specks in my eye, yet I still see. What hasn't been influenced by biases? Our conception of "color" is biased by our photoreceptors, in turn biased by the distribution of light in our ancestral environment, but we still find color useful. The question should be - how biased is it? I think you should "put a number on it". How much, precisely, were race/ancestry groups influenced by Western biases? If the number is say, 80%, then yes we should probably abandon current categories of race. If the number is 4% ... then maybe they're good enough.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Obviously, when it comes to genetic differences, this can't be true from a smell test alone,
It's more that there are many ways you could interpret it as an incredibly broad claim, and that some of them are technically true but misleading. I think it usually refers to Lewontin's claim in this article.
I mean everything is a social construct. Rape is a social construct. Property is a social construct. Google is a social construct. The Internet is a social construct. Love is a social construct. Anti-racism is a social construct. Yet we still have uses for all of these, they're in fact extremely important, and can debate the way we act on them in the exact same way Scott is doing. It's reasonable to say that I probably shouldn't consider the entirety of San Francisco to be "my property", even though it's a social construct, because it's not very useful and may have negative effects. It's similarly reasonable to say that maybe it's better to consider "race" to just mean "ancestry" than to jump between "group membership/identity social construct" and "ancestry" depending on the situation, leading to the plight of the professor in the OP.
I am just saying Scott makes the conflation that social construct means it doesn't exist.
I don't think he is?
I am pretty sure ethnic differences are larger within one race than between different races.
You mean genetic differences. There are a lot of technical arguments here but ... sure, why not. There are many white people with lower IQ than the average black person. This doesn't mean that the average black IQ isn't lower than the average white IQ, and it doesn't mean that doesn't have a genetic component to its cause.
The original argument was about - is there a genetics-related meaning of "race", or is it just a social construct?
I'd argue that race is, genetically, as real as the color of a fruit or vegetable. If you had huge matrix with tens of thousands of low-level properties of various fruits, the 'color' variable would explain very little of the total variance, but color is still a property worth discussing, a common kind of variation. The question of how much of traits we care about race 'explains' is a different one with a higher bar for evidence, but the PC does show that "race" does have some meaning, even if a weak one. It rebuts "race is a social construct" when itself used as a rebuttal to more substantial arguments about race.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Yes, Chris is better than him. In the relevant sense of writing better posts, all this does have some correlation with all other ways in which you can judge a person's quality. The quality of posts an individual writes is strongly correlated across time, and I'd rather themotte have more chrises and less tyres, proportionally. There's a hierarchy - some people are better than chris, some people are worse than tyre, and a lot of noise, but it's true.
The first sentence is obviously somewhat inflammatory, but I don't think it should be. It is - first - a neutral statement of fact, phrased in the simplest possible way - and then, second - inflammatory because people do not like hearing it directly stated. But in order for the second meaning to exist, the first meaning must have come first, otherwise there'd be nothing to be upset about.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The most reactionary explanation of this, of course, is that Christianity was an original form of what we call progressivism or liberalism, and that some resistance to the use of power and hierarchy are a common theme. The many historical Christian states, by this standard, simply didn't follow Jesus's teachings as they were intended, because ideas and religions co-evolve with power. And the thing that claimed to be the Church ended up having quite a lot of political power and wealth anyway.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Right, because most of the smartest and best people are still fundamentally progressive, and oppose your actions. Change that, and you win. Don't change that, and you lose.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I think there's something weird going on with the way you're using that concept, but whatever.
I think translating out of that language - you're arguing that such conversations aren't a good way to get information on the margin, but I'm arguing that, if approached correctly, they are. It's the same reason I just read random comments/posts on all social media websites - it's both valuable and intrinsically interesting to learn about all the varied aspects of the human experience.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I'm sympathetic to Yud here, tbh, despite my object-level beliefs. AI risk is a thousand times more important than trans stuff under any reasonable values (including the correct ones mine which find it to be generally bad). It probably isn't worth blowing up the influence you have. That doesn't justify the technically-not-lying. But, if I were Yud, I'd plausibly just practice the "virtue" of silence. Which is just as bad. Are you, in both, abandoning your friends to the memetic wolves? Yes. There are ... a lot of wolves, though, and I can't, in fact, stop them all, and I should probably look at my options and pick the one that stops the worst of it. The main sin of Yud's approach isn't that his concept-language is slightly broken, it's that he's - knowingly or not - cheering his close friends and followers along a bad path. Being silent is barely better. And it's better still to be loud than to barely speak up (eg me commenting here).
I'm pretty sure Yud genuinely believes that the "meat" of his support for trans people, including the 20% of rats with penises, is correct. Plausibly you know differently in the dms, but he appears to think that - maybe they're still psychologically male in significant senses, maybe everyone's being a little bit systematically misled but they're better off and happier 'as women'. The latter is really the important thing to address - all the theory and math is interesting, but it's only relevant because the community isn't directly debating the object-level issues. Not even the ones about pronouns. 'what parts of what we call 'women' really apply to them, where do the desires come from, and what should we do about that'. I genuinely wonder if that will happen, or what'll come of it if it does. Will your posts be read by everyone, considered 'interesting', even 'thought provoking' and then just forgotten? The material points discussed, minds changed, but only in private (and thus only a small number of people)? You could imagine LessWrong dialogues on 'should the median rat trans woman have transitioned', but I (from the outside) don't think it'll happen, even though (ignoring the meta concerns above) it should.
Another reason Yud and rationalists generally might be averse to discussing the issue: Many trans people, IME, find critical philosophical exploration of the experience of being trans to be very psychologically painful, as much or more than misgendering. If you think 'saying he hurts someone -> I should say she', and it hurts more to really deeply question the thing than it does to say the wrong pronoun ... And when you're surrounded by people who are deeply invested in it all, potentially losing them or causing a huge split might be a much bigger barrier than pissing off progressives.
Or not, maybe most trans-rats are perfectly fine discussing the philosophy of 'is trans real', idk. Your posts don't seem to have gotten much pushback of that kind.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
From what I've seen kids that decide to transition do so due to a mix of autism and puberty blues.
I should've said "medically transitioned" not "transitioned", those are often used differently, and that was a mistake. Medical transition is a lot more of a commitment than wearing the other gender's clothes. I know a lot of people who "realized" they were trans as teens, and didn't transition until much later.
Chances are that if you get through puberty, "dysphoria" turns out to not be such big deal after all
Medical transition filters for the most committed.
"""Consent""". Yeah they argument-from-authority the parents until they sign the paper, and most of them think the guy in the lab-coat knows better.
I think in the typical case the child's opinions are a more significant driver, and the parent is themselves bought into it. I agree that in some cases the doctor persuades a reluctant parent. But, still, the problem in general is that everyone believes this stuff. The parents believe it and the doctors believe it and so does everyone else.
If you are a parent, you can just say 'no you aren't getting your breasts cut off until 18' and that's that. Even for hormones, in the US I don't think kids can get them without parental consent. (Apparently they can for hormones in canada though ... lol) In the US the risk is more them ordering hormones online from ukraine or something, which does happen.
Out of the 2 I might give you 4chan, because truth be told, I don't know much about what's going on there. Private Discord groupchats rely on there being an ecosystem where like-minded people can meet, if you places when one sort group gathers, but not the other, you're still placing thumbs on the scale.
The theory here is ... that by banning nazis discord increases the number of trans kids? It's not wrong, but. More seriously, the size of the effect there is just going to be very small. Discord doesn't ban that many topics, and for small groupchats they struggle to actually ban any of the banned topics, including the ones everyone including you agree are bad (malware, cp, grooming). It's not really plausible that that measurably increases the frequency of trans. And 4chan is still a strong example, a whole lot of trans stuff there. The trans culture there certainly has a different character than the more popular trans cultures, but it doesn't seem to be less popular as a % of people there.
I, and I think others, brought it up before, it's about legitimacy. We all went through some goofy phase during our adolescence, and a big part of growing out of it was most adults being bemused with our antics. If my parents were freaking out about my acting out, but my school was yass-queening me all the way, I can guarantee I'd never adjust.
This is certainly the most plausible version of the argument so far. That's definitely a nonzero effect. It's just ... the effect doesn't seem so large. Like, the school allows the child to use their chosen new name instead of not. Maybe it assigns them a counselor they meet with a few times. I think this is a much smaller effect than the approval of their online and real-life peer group, and the large procession of celebrities, influencers, etc they see on tiktok or in media being trans accepting. I don't think it justifies the focus on schools as places that are harming kids with trans.
It's fine if you disagree, it just doesn't sound like a particularly right-wing thing to say, let alone "far-right". As to the fact of the matter - which America? The big cities, or OP's home town, and all the towns that acted as a refuge for crime for a couple decades? I don't even have a dog in this fight, but I heard this conversation enough times that I know what the right-wing response is. Someone who is "far-right" should be at least familiar with it as well, even if you ultimately disagree with the argument.
I don't even mean black violence, there was significantly more political violence from white people in the past too, which is the right class for airport security. It's just kind of a non sequitur. I would agree that crime, or even black crime, is not the same kind of dismissible minor issue. I just don't think airport security is particularly related to black crime.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
curious if you can reply to my comment on your post here? if i'm wrong i'd like to know i'm wrong but i cant find the evidence for your claims
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
People with this viewpoint often don't last very long on
Tyre's been around for about a little under a year, and the name sounds like an alt name a bit. But the invitation to stay around was implicitly an invitation to stay around while making more valuable posts, as opposed to more of that, yeah. It's not like I like his posts more than the average poster, but I think most people like that could post productively if they genuinely wanted to, so it's good to have some good cop with the bad cop.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
In this week's roundup in response to another comment @Goodguy says that infant circumcision is probably a worse problem in our society than any concerns on this issue, but that people can care about both
... why? I'd argue: Transitioning makes you infertile, preventing you from having kids, which from a utilitarian standpoint is bad because fewer people, and from an anti-egalitarian standpoint is bad because if you're one of the rationalists you probably had good genes. Also you waste a solid 10% of your waking life chasing meaningless appearances of being a woman. Whereas circumcision just makes sex feel a bit less good, maybe, and maybe causes some minor health issues. I still don't think anyone should get circumcised, but I think even when you multiply by the number of people affected trans is worse. (Yes this depends on contestable philosophical arguments that have significantly more important implications than 'is trans bad')
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
'relevance realization'? I feel like paragraph 1 is a fully general argument against e.g. having fun, randomly reading wikipedia pages to learn new things, or really anything other than 'working in the domain you specialize in', unless i'm misunderstanding, which is plausible.
I agree with paragraph 2. But there are a variety of people out there, with a variety of experiences, and there are a lot of potential things to talk about. The common man isn't an infinite well of wisdom, but if you can't get anything out of talking to random people at a reasonable frequently you're doing it wrong.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The problem with your argument is that without the support of the education and healthcare systems "children being trans" wouldn't mean much more than "children being emo"
I agree that the healthcare system is in a direct sense harming every trans kid (and adult) who transitions*! That said, (based on contestable personal inferences) most children who transition as kids (distinct from most children who identify as trans as kids) would've transitioned as adults anyway in the current social environment. I don't think the education system is doing anything at all similarly impactful. Even in the case of the healthcare system, they're doing it with the consent of parents in almost all cases, and it all basically reduces back down to 'it's happening because everyone involved believes in the trans stuff and people want to transition', not 'institutions are forcing themselves on unwilling people'. The only way to stop the healthcare system from doing that is to win on the main issue.
I think saying 'education and healthcare systems' isn't right, because it's just healthcare.
Responding to more points OP made:
"The state taking your children away to transition them" ... just doesn't happen that often, and every case of that I remember was something more like 'a custody battle where one parent wanted the kid to transition and the other didn't' and 'the child was trans but the state claimed the reason for taking the child away was abuse and a severe eating disorder'.
That's without touching on the fact that the Internet itself is far from a neutral meme melting-pot, and has several thumbs on the scale built into it, including by the state. The problem isn't people coming to the wrong conclusion. People come to these conclusions, because our institutions deliberately stifle debate, and put propaganda on a pedestal.
I'd like for you to justify this more? I don't see any plausible mechanism here. Trans stuff spreads exactly as quickly among kids in private discord groupchats or on 4chan, places where I don't think the thumb is particularly likely, as it does on reddit or tiktok.
Reacting to "my country used to be safe and high-trust and it's not anymore" with "this sucks but it's minor" will, at best, get you pegged as a Hlynkaesque alt-right progressive
I do not think this makes sense. America was much more violent in the past than it is today, even if it's also lower trust today. Flying being annoying is an attempt to compensate specifically for violence, not lower trust generally. So it's much more an example of a pointless, poorly executed regulation than it is of violence getting worse.
- I understand it's philosophically complex to claim something like this
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
OP:
But what's the point? Seriously, why even talk about this just to get gaslit by the people who are celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening?
Me:
Especially the first two are the kind of thing Ezra Klein wold talk about on his podcast, they're not taboo like OP complains
And - It would be shocking, a complete departure from history and plausibility, if literally everything about the present was better than the past. But, by most peoples' values, the vast majority of things are better now.
I probably should've been more explicit above that I think the 'modern values' that are being satisfied are incoherent and wrong, but OP is trying to criticize the modern world on its own terms and, as a result, failing.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I doubt that'll happen as described. The platforms will probably just implement the AI filters themselves, and on big platforms most people either follow their friends, where they can manually filter, or follow a number of specific big accounts where the 'follower' relationship itself serves as a filtering mechanism the AIs can't hack (the replies were already on the quality level of AI-generated text before LLMS were even a thing), so the AI spam won't really hurt them.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
FWIW I do hope you come back after the ban and keep posting here, even though we disagree you clearly have things to say.
On the particular topic of plurals: It's not even a new thing. There have been waves of multiple personality disorder diagnosis before the internet was a thing, and in the resulting controversy a consensus emerged that the diagnosis was actually helping to cause and perpetuate the supposed disorder. here's a very nice article about that.
MPD was an extremely popular diagnosis when hypnosis was in vogue 130 years ago; then emerged again 60 years ago when The Three Faces of Eve became a best-selling book and hit movie; was revived 40 years ago following the vogue of the movie Sybil, and its many imitators; and reached a peak 30 years ago when several people started conducting weekend workshops all over the country minting an army of poorly trained MPD therapists who suddenly diagnosed and treated it in all their patients.
Having seen hundreds of patients who claimed to house multiple personalities, I have concluded that the diagnosis is always (or at least almost always) a fake, even though the patients claiming it are usually (but not always) sincere.
In every single instance, I discovered that the alternate personalities had been born under the tutelage of an enthusiastic and naive therapist, or in imitation of a friend, or after seeing a movie, or upon joining a multiples' chat group—or some combination. It was most commonly a case of a suggestible and gullible therapist and a suggestible and gullible patient influencing each other in the creation of new personalities. None of the purported cases had had a spontaneous onset and none was the least bit convincing.
There's an interesting parallel here to claims I've seen here about how teachers "find" transgenderism in kids, it fits really nicely. However: I think in your discord explorations, most of the kids weren't diagnosed by a psychologist, but "discovered" it themselves on the internet. I think the same thing happens with the trans kids.
I realized that any discussion I started on the motte would be pointless. It would just run the same circle of "noticing, denial, minimization, celebration, resigned acceptance" that literally all culture war events go through here.
I don't think so! I'd read it.
I think this is basically true. If you have today's American or modern values, most any particular thing cited in this thread has something 3x worse even 50 years ago, and worse farther back. If you value things like religion, chastity, the TFR, national pride, or even go further back and value conquest and racial purity (this is not intended to be snide) things are clearly going wrong. But dumb regulations, endorsing foreign violence, corruption ... all are actually better now than eg 100 years ago.
edit: Moldbug would claim this is technology masking political/civilizational decline. This is significantly true in many of the areas Moldbug claims it in (although I don't think we're going to descend into something like South America like moldbug claims), but the political 'progress' in the last century more than compensates for it for most peoples' values. If you're philosophically willing to 'die for your freedom' and conceive of freedom the way most to today, then (purely as a comparison, this is in no way a real tradeoff) being mugged a few times is more than worth homosexuality and free love being legal.
There are definitely exceptions, like "private actors being able to build things" or "government competence at large-scale projects" or "homeless people everywhere", but liberals are in fact noticing those. Especially the first two are the kind of thing Ezra Klein wold talk about on his podcast, they're not taboo like OP complains.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I don't liking making old arguments that didn't stick the last time I made them, but progressivism, trans 'ideology', being 'anti-white', all spread much more potently over the internet or through peers and popular media than through teachers. When you say that schools tell kids they're privileged or that they secretly transition kids, this gives off an extremely strong impression that the school's physical custody of or social power over the children is a significant force in actually causing the children to be trans. I am really confident this isn't true, just by observing the trans people (including kids) around me, and talking to trans adults and "might've decided to transition if my life had gone another way" types. The problem isn't that The State is using it's power to oppress you, the actual problem is that a lot of smart people are, without any particular malice or plotting, coming to severely incorrect conclusions and spreading them to others.
I often reflect how I could possibly explain to my child all the freedom we used to have. How easy air travel used to be. Or how fun it was to wait in the terminal to greet family as they stepped off the plane. How there didn't used to be security guards and metal detectors at theatres.
This does suck, but I think it's minor.
How there weren't transients destroying every public work constantly
This is less minor. Not civilization-destroying, but not minor either. I don't think this one is inevitable though. I don't know much about eg the "sf dems for change" and the recent win in SF, but that seems very positive for fixing the worst excesses within the progressive framework.
I think there's a difference between kicking a door out of anger to get someone's attention - what this guy did - and actually trying to break it down? I don't think the former is a situation allowing for self-defense shootings today, and it probably isn't something you want escalating to homicide, especially since some of the people evaluating when to shoot under the new standard will be the kind of person who would kick that door in the first place.
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