deluxev2
3mo ago
What is ego but your perception of your status? Oxford Dictionary: Ego: a person's sense of self-esteem or self-importance. Self Esteem: confidence in one's own worth or abilities. Self Importance: an exaggerated sense of one's own value or importance.
I think your response to 2rafa clearly shows it is a status thing, but it may be best to drop the status framing even if it is accurate because a lot of people lose the ability to cooperate when thinking directly about status. They can only see villains maneuvering and thus act that part. WalterODim and FiveHourMarathon have some great advice in my opinion, so if my model of relationships grinds with you I'd recommend trying out theirs.
deluxev2
3mo ago
Sounds to me like you're hoping for your relationship to bestow status upon you which isn't happening because of her (apparent) low standards. Thus the need for verification that you're better than her past encounters. If she chose them and you, you must have something alike.
So the obvious prescriptions (pick your poison as appropriate to the details of the situation and what you can stomach):
a) get your status from something else, your relationship is something you extract resources from/trade with, not something you are proud of
b) realize that nobody else is going to know about her past, they'll just see you with this hot and successful gf. Doll her up and show her off.
c) convince yourself that her past encounters were actually high status. Get to know and respect her exes.
c) convince yourself that she has changed, made mistakes in the past, but now recognized her value. Help her find God/Self Confidence/her talents.
d) find someone choosier or more conventionally attractive.
deluxev2
9mo ago
I'm not really trying to convince anyone that trans women meet the category "men" or "women" I am trying to express that most people I've encountered seem to believe that the actions of trans women are going to much more closely meet the category "female" then the category "male". That might be false, but stating that it is a "fact that trans women are males" disregards even the possibility of examining categories. It isn't an argument or a fact, it is a statement about categories that may be true or false and needs much more detail, namely which features of the categories trans women meet in "men" and not in "women". I think public opinion is swayed by the fact that most trans leaders are very passing where passing is having a large number of visible physical characteristics from the category "women".
deluxev2
9mo ago
I have a lot to say about your post, thanks for posting it.
Anecdotal Engagement to Blanchard Hypothesis/Autoandrophelia
I find this issue very interesting and go out of my way to engage with it because in some ways I think that I am a bit like you in how I see my gender/sex/(dysmorphia? where part of the problem is there isn't a sufficient word for what to put here). I am a.f.a.b. that definitely has some form of gender dysphoria and sometimes I think I might just be a closeted trans man, but that doesn't seem like the complete truth. I really enjoyed the first part about your post because as someone who doesn't engage in rationalists spaces often, I hadn't really heard of the Blanchard hypothesis. I spent a good part of that post trying that on for myself to see how it fit my own experience of life and at first glance it felt right. I do definitely have some autoandrophilia, and perhaps this was the reason I felt I didn't fit into the mainstream ideal of transgenderism. I often tell people that the existence of "tomboy" serves me well enough as a gender role that I am definitely not transgender but actually transsexual is a much more accurate term because I would just like penis. Upon my estimation, my body dysphoria is at max of 30% autoandrophilia. Perhaps I am the first camp, of having been trans minded before puberty (there is a fair bit of evidence here) however I'm also not an Lesbian.
I think there is a lot of value in being able to discuss alternative explanations for gender dysmorphia because the standard explanation just doesn't fit everyone. Here I would say the value is so that people have more hypothesis to pull from when trying to figure themselves out, but my husband (whose account I am stealing to post this) would say it is because having many hypothesis helps us find an accurate one or one close to reality. However there seems no group willing to engage with multiple hypothesis because it all devolves into "for or against", where either you support the current model only or you want to completely deny transition and force people into strict assigned at birth roles with no other allowances. I'm sure if there is an explanation for why all politics seem to devolve this way with a complete inability to understand that something is a nuance, or perhaps the moment something devolves this way is the moment it becomes "politics".
Thoughts on Philosophy of Language as Pertaining to Gender
I have to caveat my following thoughts with the admittance that I don't care much about the specificity of language. I'm easy to change words if I get the sense that the connotation of that word meant something different to someone else. I'll never die on a hill of the true meaning of a word, but change my words to try to communicate my meaning. That said I had some thoughts that might perhaps influence further discussion of your Philosophy of Language.
"To be clear, it's true that categories exist in our model of the world, rather than the world itself—categories are "map", not "territory"—and it's possible that trans women might be women with respect to some genuinely useful definition of the word "woman." However, Alexander goes much further, claiming that we can redefine gender categories to make trans people feel better"
Some of the pushback on Categorization of gendered words specifically is exactly because people can sense the sex based Categories do not fit. When someone argues that trans women aren't "women", like you do here:
" It's not that hard to get people to admit that trans women are different from cis women, but somehow they can't (in public, using words) follow the implication that trans women are different from cis women because trans women are male."
They often follow up with because trans women are men/male. However just in the same way that you are stating that the category "women" is made up of a group of features that doesn't match "trans women" and so including them in that category is inaccurate. So too is the category "male" and "male" made up of a group of features that doesn't match "trans women" and for many people when comparing the two, the features in the category "women" match much more closely to "trans women" than the features in the category "male" AND using the category "women" makes trans women's lives "better" as far as they understand. So it seems morally and linguistically correct for them to use the other. "Ennobling the answer that is right for society and not tyrannizing society with the right answer." -Edward Teach. Perhaps it is the case that the category "male" does much more closely match the category "trans women" but it isn't a perfect fit, and to me it seems an equally "wrong answer" to using the category "women". I feel that a lot of information has been lost in using that category. The argument has been framed as whether dolphins match "fish" or "mammal", but perhaps instead of dolphins we should be discussing platypuses.
The argument that most trans women is caused by autogynephilia makes it so that trans women are just men with a different fetish and because fetishes are masculine there is absolutely no difference between the category "trans women" and "male" but part of being a trans women is performing womanhood such that if someone were to try to predict your actions based off of a gender identifier, then you would try to act so that "women" was a better fit. Since categories are used for predictive modeling then perhaps the category "women" is more accurate. I personally think that there are enough failures of overlap e.g. strength in sports, that both are inaccurate. That said I am physically stronger than all the trans women I know (which is many now), and if we worked to be strong to the same degree they would be stronger but they don't because that's not what a woman would do, and likewise I do work at it, perhaps because that's what a man would do. In fact in general the category "male" matches my behavior enough to make people uncomfortable with category "female" despite my making no effort to push any external categorization of me verbally. When we get into gender arguments where I attribute behavior to other women based on my own behavior, my husband points out that I may genuinely be in that 99.5th that is stronger than the average male, I just point out that we are surrounded by programmers and they are likely in the 30th percentile and not average.
I doubt I will change your mind with any of this. I think you see trans women as completely matching the category of "male" because they are men with fetishes. However I am hoping to communicate that your discomfort with the categories being used incorrectly may actually be due to your underlying definition of what it is to be trans. Without that definition (so to most people), the category "women" is actually more accurate than the category "male" for predicting the action of trans women. The category "male" being more accurate is dependent on your definition of what causes trans women to be. So rather than all of these big name rationalists throwing out categories completely in the name of making a group feel a bit better, they have no category that fits completely but by their definition of trans women the category that fits best also happens to make a group feel better. It fits best and it makes them feel better, win win. Should they instead find a category that fits perfectly? No category fits any individual perfectly, we can only really hope for pretty good. Maybe they are wrong to think "women" is a pretty good fit, but I'd guess they genuinely believe that.
Disclaimer for anyone going through post history, I am not the owner of this account. I read rationalist blogs and this content in so much as the owner of this account makes me. This statement does not reflect the thoughts and opinions of the owner of this account :P
deluxev2
10mo ago
No legal prescribing power, totally agree that it is absurdly expensive compared to foreign care, but some cost comparisons of how messed up US healthcare costs without insurance:
$15.00/min Primary care
$7.00/min US based telehealth
$1.15/min Massage therapist
$0.90/min India based telehealth
deluxev2
10mo ago
I'd say probably the biggest benefit is cheaper access to a moderately trained medical professional. In the US, all but 5 states require about a year of training to become a licensed massage therapist culminating in a standardized test with a ~70% pass rate. For something like $70 an hour, you get pretty good combination of competency and attention per dollar compared to a doctor.
For whatever NIH's medical credibility is worth, their review(1) of (the reviews of) the literature finds massage is effective for short term treatment (2-3 days) of low back, neck and shoulder pain, osteoarthritis, and fibromyalgia generally halving or thirding severity of symptoms. Generally there hasn't been enough study of long term outcomes to reach statistical significance, and the short term data is middling quality. An RCT of dosage response(2) found no benefit from 30 minute sessions but a 3x reduction in pain from 60 minute sessions and quote:
Our findings also suggest that previously published studies of massage for neck pain may have not administered adequate doses. For example, the newest Cochrane review of massage for neck pain reported 9 trials of massage for subacute or chronic neck pain. Among the 7 trials with conceivably relevant designs, 4 trials included only a single session of a single massage technique applied for less than 5 minutes, 1 trial included only five 30-minute treatments over 2 weeks, 1 included five 45-minute treatments over 1 month, and the last was a series of weekly 60-minute massages. In addition, most trials lacked massage resembling conventional massage practice in the United States, where 60-minute treatments administered by licensed massage therapists are the norm, a wide range of massage techniques are used in a single session, and self-care recommendations are provided. This review notes that there is little information regarding optimal parameters for the massage, including the number of treatments per week and the length of each session.
From my understanding, a good 15 minutes at the start of a massage session is just preparing the flesh so it is workable. An hour session is going to have a lot more time to do actual work.
There is a plausible story that reduced pain allows for faster long term improvement by making it easier to follow through with physical therapy exercises (or literal exercises(3)). This requires some level of conscientiousness on the patient's part (and some lack of it on the provider's part, massage therapists in the US are not allowed to prescribe physical therapy), but seems plausible.
Regarding your (lack of) enjoyment of sports massage, it might be useful to think about what is happening as assisted stretching. Many of the deep pressure techniques are attempting to fool your nervous system into thinking the muscle is tighter than it really is, and thus relax it. Like normal stretching the feeling is an acquired taste, and those without it often "guard" by tightening all the nearby muscle groups making a frame to avoid injury and reject the outside force.
Footnotes
-I haven't interacted with any osteopaths, but from the looks of it they are an unlicensed profession and thus going to have a lot more variability.
-I'm pretty close with a licensed massage therapist so included is probably some second hand propaganda
(1)https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/providers/digest/massage-therapy-for-health-science
(2)https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3948757/
(3)https://today.uic.edu/massage-therapy-beneficial-after-injury-exercise/
deluxev2
10mo ago
I'm no expert but have some familiarity. The LLMs have a limited context window (gpt4 is 8000 tokens) so it can't hold all of that data at once. Probably the easiest way to get it to chew through that much is to ask it for code to do the things you want (directing it to write some pygraph or R code or something). It could plausibly do it inline if you asked it to summarize chunks of data, then fed the previous summary in with the next chunk. The code would act as a much more auditable and probably accurate tool though.
deluxev2
1yr ago
My general read on this stuff is that our moral framework including freedom of expression and thought imply that these things cannot be punishable moral transgressions, and the ick factor comes more from the way it changes our expectations of the phonography viewer.
They aren't causing real damages by doing this (except in the case of distribution and claims of authenticity which is covered by the moral frameworks around libel). Using your likeness moderately infringes your intellectual property but in my experience most people don't have that strong of moral reactions to IP violations. I think there is some sense of sexual property that is infringed in that you should be able to extract desserts from your sex appeal and reproductive potential, but I think there has been a lot of pushback against this moral precept as part of the sexual revolution. The pornography viewer hasn't done anything wrong yet but they have revealed that they want something from you (implicitly, that you don't want to give them).
Imagine you own a boat and your neighbor fantasizes about having your boat. I think it is clear that his fantasies don't constitute immoral action, but it brings into question every interaction you've had. When he gave you his old garden tools to help you get started was that genuine generosity of a lie to get in your good favor. If you leave on vacation can you trust him not to steal it. Some of these are resolved by disclosure, e.g. if your neighbor gives you the garden tools in exchange for lending him the boat for a fishing trip, but it doesn't resolve the unmatched value functions.
The rumors are true, but a they are particularly competent convection ovens. A lot of ovens are pretty shit and their size makes their job a lot harder.
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