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User ID: 2225
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7mo ago
So is "you know someone who works there" pretty much the only way to signal general competence? I suppose the question, then, is: how does anyone get hired any other way even if their resume ticks all the boxes? If a resume doing X well doesn't signal general competence enough to be hired to do Y absent having someone on the inside who can vouch for you... then why would it be a sufficient signal to get hired to do X? (Maybe the answer is, it isn't, which is why the whole search process is terrible on both sides?)
Not going into too much detail to avoid self-doxxing but I was hired directly into a senior role from academia with no industry experience... I did have a personal recommendation then, and I guess I didn't give enough credit to how important that was for getting my foot in the door.
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9mo ago
Mere Christianity has a lot of good content, but if you end up finding it a bit simplistic in places, it's good to remember that it was originally a bunch of general-audience radio talks, so that kind of comes with the territory. As far as C.S. Lewis goes I recommend The Problem of Pain and Miracles for deeper treatments of their titular matters. They aren't perfect, but they are very good.
Lewis also has a number of good shorter essays (often adapted from talks) that are maybe not apologetics as such, but are also high quality and in the same vein. I remember finding "On Obstinacy in Belief" insightful, for instance. I can try to dig up a more complete list (I'll need to skim and remind myself from my collection) if you are interested.
Another poster has already recommended Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man by Chesterton, which are very good but have quite a different tone and approach (and are much less recent). Lewis is more philosophical but also chattier; Chesterton has a better prose style as well as much more of a flair for melodrama and wordplay -- he often presents his ideas in a way optimized for emotional and/or intellectual punch rather than for clarity or airtight logic. (That doesn't mean his ideas aren't good -- they usually are -- but it rubs some people the wrong way.)
On the flip side, I anti-recommend... most pop-apologetics, frankly, and that means most of the recent stuff. Pretty much all of it (that I've seen, at least, though I haven't been paying careful attention to the space) is more or less in Lewis's shadow and is either just dishonest or a worse version of Lewis.
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1yr ago
Yep, I just saw @urquan's post with the same thing, and I think you are right that they are copying that icon. It seems that interpretations of the symbolism differ, which possibly accounts for the difference in red-over-blue (the majority of Orthodox icons) vs blue-over-red (the majority of Catholic icons (?), plus a handful of Orthodox ones).
I have no idea what the artist was thinking.
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1yr ago
Nope, not that one. I was thinking of this one which was posted on /r/rational some years back.
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1yr ago
Not that I can recall. I got a little of the usual crap from peers about being a nerd instead of a masculine/athletic type, but that's not at all the same thing, and they didn't know about any of my more feminine interests (I only had a few -- overall I was within normal "nerd" range). My family didn't care, but then I never did anything like cross-dressing, it was all stuff like "interested in cooking and sewing and likes pretty colors" which hardly counts when there's also "interested in math and computers and likes video games" going on even more prominently.
I just don't get forced feminization fantasies, so maybe the reason I don't find plausible is actually correct but I just don't understand other people's psychology. My fantasy was always either undergoing a magical transformation willingly, or having been female all along (i.e. including imagining a different childhood/puberty). I didn't think the thing I wanted was shameful (although wanting it was, hence why I didn't share it), just impossible. And why would I imagine something unpleasant if there was a pleasant version?
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1yr ago
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6mo ago
I don't know why you chose to try to eliminate that desire in yourself, but much respect. It's really difficult, in our culture, to reject seeing that kind of desire as part of one's identity, both because of how these desires present themselves and because of the way that the culture insists on talking about them. You did a difficult -- and IMO praiseworthy -- thing.
I'd also love to see an effortpost on this if you are comfortable with it. In particular I'd like to hear why you think it worked so well for you, when a lot of people, including many who sincerely tried, seem to have met with less success. (I have some theories but they are not particularly well founded.)
I'm skeptical of the strength of the autism connection, but I don't find that in particular much of a mystery:
- Autism (also let's be real, we're talking about what used to be called Asperger's here, not all autism) is only "extreme maleness" along one dimension: a focus on systems/things rather than people. I've never heard of autistic people being more athletic, more competitive, etc. than typical men (though disabuse me if I'm wrong!).
- One typical characteristic of being male is finding feminine characteristics attractive and valuable. It's not too far a jump -- for a certain kind of mind -- to feel that those things would be valuable in oneself.
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27d ago
I think I mostly agree with you, but I do want to emphasize that
some of these men will choose to undergo transition
is not the only difference in outcome between the "pro-trans" and "trans naive" environments being discussed.
Having the ready-made answers, social encouragement, etc. on offer can not just affect what sorts of actionable options they have available, but also the trajectory of the desires themselves.
As an example let's take the POV of a teenage boy with autogynephilia. Our protagonist finds that he has a recurring desire to be female. Sometimes (maybe most of the time, maybe not) this desire and fantasy is associated with sexual arousal. This is confusing and weird, what is he to make of this?
In an environment without the "trans" meme and social encouragement thereof, this remains a private quirk and fantasy. He knows that he can no more become female than he can become a bird or acquire superpowers (random side note: was Animorphs especially appealing to boys with autogynephilia? I strongly suspect so...). Maybe it wanes naturally over the course of years, or maybe his desire is an inner demon that he struggles with from time to time, or maybe it's just a recurring fantasy his whole life which he occasionally indulges in -- depending on the strength of his desire and his attitude toward it. A lot of things are possible, but probably he lives life as a normal man and most things are fine. (Of course there is the chance that he develops some delusions based on his desires and fantasies -- especially if they are unusually strong or he indulges them unusually much -- but this is not a very likely outcome.)
In an environment where the "trans" meme is present and positively reinforced, he is encouraged to interpret his desires as evidence (or even proof) of identity as a "trans girl". A ready-made, positive-valence identity that fits his experience, at a time when he's naturally (like most teens) going to be confused about his identity and place in the world? It's like catnip. He starts thinking of himself as trans. He talks about it on the internet. Maybe he tells his best friends and they affirm it, or maybe his new best friends are the people who affirm it. He indulges his fantasy, because it's just part of who he is. Maybe he even encourages it, as its presence is proof of his new identity. His ways of thinking of himself get solidified: "I am a trans girl": now each of his desires and every trait that is not stereotypically male is proof of that. He develops a female persona and acts it out; maybe he really believes the propaganda that, deep down, he is a girl, not just wants to be one. Now his identity is all bound up in this: he becomes more and more unsatisfied with the stubborn truth that he is not, in fact, a girl; that his body is stubbornly male. As an adult, maybe he does try to force his fantasy to become reality with hormones and surgery (of course this doesn't actually work, but maybe if he is lucky he can convince himself it does) -- or maybe he just ends up with a weird self-identification and way more unhappy with his life than if he'd never gone down that path.
Regardless of whether our protagonist ultimately undergoes medical transition, his whole life can be dramatically impacted by this difference in his environment.
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8mo ago
Software, actually.
And yeah, the things that are usually written as initialisms are even worse for this.
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9mo ago
Not a lot (then again, it's such a huge field that only a small fraction shows up in a PhD in mathematical logic), but in all likelihood, more than just boolean algebra.
In addition to the propositional calculus (effectively a subset of boolean algebra and probably equivalent to the part you are expecting EE students to learn) I'd expect any advanced student in analytic philosophy to be familiar with the basics of first-order logic as well as modal logic (in fact most research in modal logic is done in philosophy departments because of how essential it is in quite a few areas -- c.f. Saul Kripke).
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9mo ago
Is your question more along the lines of "How do I figure out what parishes are near me?" or "How do I figure out which parishes are healthy and suitable for me?"
For the first question, if you are in the United States and are looking for an Eastern Orthodox parish, the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops maintains a directory of all parishes here, and at least the larger jurisdictions maintain their own, which may or may not be more up to date (e.g. the OCA has one here). I imagine that your local Roman Catholic diocese will also have a directory.
For the second question, I can't speak at all for what Catholic parishes are or are not traditional, but every Orthodox church will use the same traditional Divine Liturgy, with differences mostly being minor cultural practices (e.g. which melodies are used for singing, whether people sit during part of the Liturgy or stand the whole time) and what language(s) are used. I converted to Orthodoxy not terribly long ago and have had a great experience in my local OCA mission parish (we use English). I'd recommend trying to find a church that serves Liturgy in a language you understand. It may be hard to tell without attending or poking around which parishes are healthy or not, so probably just try one that looks reasonable.
If you do decide to look into Orthodoxy, feel free to DM me if you feel like you need to ask someone random questions, There's lots of good resources available online (and in book form) but there's also a lot of weird/incorrect stuff online and sometimes it helps to ask a live person, even if it's only someone you barely, vaguely know from a niche internet forum.
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1yr ago
Ayn Rand and C.S. Lewis could have been fantastic collaborators
Admittedly I know much less about Ayn Rand than about C.S. Lewis, but given what I do know I'm having a hard time seeing this. I'd be quite interested to hear your reasoning.
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1yr ago
I agree that the line is blurry. I think that Lawrence thinks of a sexual orientation as having emotional/romantic aspects, whereas a paraphilia would just have the facially-sexual ones; so sexual orientation is about love+lust, but paraphilia is just lust. In practice I think this is more a matter of respectability.
This is an interesting point about loss of agency. One thing I didn't touch on in this review but that came up in the book is that apparently a decent chunk of the sexual feminization fantasies of autogynephiles are forced feminization fantasies. That wasn't the case for me, and I just figured that it was an intersection with the (common) BDSM paraphilia, but you may be onto something about the attractiveness of passivity for someone who is always (expected to be) responsible. Or maybe it's more of a thing where lack of agency is seen as feminine, and therefore desired? (I don't think the common theory -- usually offered to explain rape fantasies -- that lack of agency gives the fantasizer an excuse to not be morally or socially culpable for their actions is at all plausible here.)
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8mo ago
Eros vs Venus, AGP, and MtF Trans
Apropos of the preamble to the latest ACX post. In part an evolution of / different angle on my previous post on the subject. (Tagging @zackmdavis as relevant to your interests.)
In the book The Four Loves, in the section on sexual love, C.S. Lewis draws a distinction between Eros and Venus. Eros is romantic love, or the state of "being in love"; Venus is sexual desire (one might say "lust", but without the connotation of immorality); as he writes, "I mean by Venus not what is sexual in some cryptic or rarefied sense [...] but in a perfectly obvious sense." Lewis is at pains to point out that the two are distinct (albeit closely connected) and that one can easily experience one without the other.
He allows that "to the evolutionist, Eros will be something that grows out of Venus" but points out that this is not, generally, "what happens within the consciousness of the individual." With Eros, the lover "is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned."
Conversely, that Venus can exist without any trace of Eros is almost too obvious (at least to most men) as to need mentioning.
Why is this relevant to the autogynephilia/trans/Blanchardianism controversy? Because AGP, framed as a fetish, is seen (by both sides) as being about (a misfiring of) Venus. This makes it disreputable, both in itself and especially as a motive for transition, but perhaps even more importantly this limited concept doesn't seem to fit with the introspective reports of many trans individuals, even those who admittedly have some element of AGP. Blanchardians tend to dismiss these reports as self-serving narratives (admittedly not without some justification, given the occasionally documented confabulations about historical femininity in MtF transitioners, and of course the obvious psychological pressure); anti-Blanchardians tend to take them as proof positive that the AGP->trans hypothesis is false. (Anne Lawrence, a Blanchardian, allows for some nuance with the "AGP as sexual orientation" framing, but this seems to be not quite right and is still a "Venus"-first explanation.)
My strong suspicion is that, while Venus-AGP is the most obvious (and, um, salacious) manifestation, the thing that mostly drives trans-feelings, and thus actual transition, is something of an Eros-AGP. This may or may not co-occur with Venus-AGP, and when it does, may either pre- or post- date it, and either may be the stronger -- just as in normal Eros and Venus.
Why do I think this? Because it is an explanation which seems to account better for reported experiences than the others on offer. "But I don't feel like I'm in love with being a woman, I feel like I am or should be a woman (in some deep sense)!" Yes... but this actually rhymes with an aspect of Eros! Lewis again:
Milton has expressed more when he fancies angelic creatures with bodies made of light who can achieve total interpenetration instead of our mere embraces. Charles Williams has said something of it in the words: "Love you? I am you."
And also, there is my own experience (as a sometime sufferer of AGP of both sorts): my first crush included the confusing and intense desire to be the girl I was crushing on. The purely sexual aspects of AGP -- the fetish part, what I'm calling Venus-AGP -- may be the most externally visible, but it seems likely to me that Eros-AGP, whether manifesting as an intense but nonsexual desire to be female or a sweetness and feeling of rightness in contemplation of oneself as such, as a much more powerful emotional experience, is more likely to lead to transition.
Again, this says little about which set of feelings precedes the other or of their causal relationship. I am pretty confident that they frequently feed each other, and that indulgence and encouragement strengthen them, which is why in many people they seem to intensify over time. (This is true of nearly every other mental and emotional disposition; it would be surprising if it were not the case.) Whether Eros-AGP is preceded by Venus-AGP or not; whether Venus-AGP is seen as important by the sufferer -- these things are maybe not so relevant. As strong as the urges of Venus are, it is Eros which is more powerful, which feels transcendent from the inside, which motivates truly extreme decisions. Perhaps in this case, too, it is the dominant proximate factor.
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27d ago
I don't think this is disagreement with my above post? (I mean, I do disagree on a value-level with the transhumanism, but that's another kettle of fish and not relevant here.)
Maybe I wasn't totally clear -- I was saying that your confusion about apparently normal men saying "it could have been me" mostly boils down to the fact that you can't empathize with those people on the subject because most of them have AGP. Despite the stereotype, most such people are normal men in almost all other respects except having, or at one point having had, a recurring desire to be female, and a lot of them are horrified that someone just like them could be ushered down what they see as a self-destructive path.
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3mo ago
Yeah, Christiano is absolutely right here. There are some sorts of problems which have significant components that are comparatively much simpler for machines than humans, for example:
- Problems that can proceed mostly by only a limited number of steps at any place, but where it's hard to figure out which sequence of steps to pursue and doing a large number of them of them is basically impossible for a human in any reasonable time. A computer can just try them a ton of them, so any improvements in ways to narrow the search space make them even better. A lot of geometry problems are like this.
- Problems that have a straightforward method of solution which is difficult for humans to execute properly without mistakes. "Just brute force it with Muirhead's Inequality" has been a thing for a long time now and a lot of competitors actually do this on contests even though it is frequently horribly messy. My recollection is that conventional wisdom in this was: if you try this, you'd better not make any mistakes because judges will not award partial credit to brute force solutions with errors. But of course a computer will not have these errors. (Christiano seems to indicate that inequalities that are doable this way don't show up as much anymore, which is a very good thing regardless of AI.)
- Problems that can be easily solved with a simple trick that is hard to find but easy to execute when you do. E.g. diophantine equations that fall apart with a particular modulus (or two). Humans need well-developed mathematical intuition to find the needle in the haystack; a computer can just try everything.
This is not to say that it's trivial to make a computer be superhuman at these problems. Despite there being aspects that are very machine-friendly, there's still a lot of difficult work to be done to actually get a machine do them. But it shouldn't make you update particularly much; this is not an "AI is now smarter than IMO medalists" moment.
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1yr ago
I thought the twist would be that Hilary transitioned at some point MTF later in life, hence the choice in name, rather than that Hilary and Sam were the same person.
That's funny; I didn't actually think of that interpretation at all. I chose the name "Hilary" (an ancient name, almost always male until the 20th century) because of its meaning, since "Hilary's" story had a happy ending.
it makes me wonder how many boys right now might be being pulled into transitioning when they would have grown up to be perfectly fine with being a cis male like me.
I suspect the answer is pretty large, and it's one of the things that frankly makes me most angry about trans activism. It's part of why I felt compelled to write my thoughts down.
Someone linked this blog post here about a week ago
I'm almost certain I read that blog post shortly after it was published, when it was linked back on Reddit. And yet somehow I missed this line:
as if my brain just doesn't draw that much of a distinction between people I want to be with and people I want to be like
which echoes my own experience so much (though the blog author's actions... don't) that I can't fathom how I didn't latch onto it the first time. Another data point for my theory, I guess?
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27d ago
I wouldn't expect you to be able to empathize with it, any more than... well... with people who want to have sex with men.
I can't be certain, but I strongly suspect that the vast majority of men saying this have at least a touch of autogynephilia. The sense of "it could have been me" is less "I, as a perfectly ordinary man, could have become socially hypnotized into wanting to be a women" and more "What if that part of me that already -- at least somewhat -- wanted to be a woman had been socially encouraged, been amplified, been given a (positive-valence) identity category; what if I'd been encouraged to indulge in this, been offered "specialness" and affirmation and a ready-made memeplex, all when I was young and socially and emotionally vulnerable? Then I could see myself having gone down that path."
It's so common because some degree of autogynephilia is probably about as common as homosexuality among men. (I remember -- I think it was in Men Trapped in Men's Bodies? -- seeing a reported study estimate of 1-3% of men for erotic cross-dressing alone, and that's almost certainly a substantial underestimate of the fraction of men with any amount of AGP.)
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6mo ago
6 Rituals and Sacraments
Finally we come to what might be the main point of @TheDag's original question, which is that, frankly, rituals seem irrational. Why should one make the sign of the cross here, or bow there? Why does the priest pray the epiclesis ("Make this bread the Precious Body of Thy Christ")? Doesn't that all seem...well...superstitious? Definitely not reasonable? Like, what is it doing?
There are two easy answers, both of them wrong. The first is that it is, or is attempting to be, magic. That the sign of the cross wards off evil for no particular reason, like a vampire. That the priest pronouncing the magic words is what makes the Eucharist transform. That would, indeed, be superstition, and the Church is at pains to make clear that, while miracles may occur in such rituals (reliably do, in the case of the Sacraments), it is not the ritual that effects a miracle, nor that a failure to pronounce the proper words exactly or make the proper motions nullifies it. These rituals are not enacted to do magic or to attempt to manipulate God. (This may not be true of all religions and rituals, but it is true of Christianity.)
The other wrong answer is that rituals are there as a sort of human bonding experience, that the content is irrelevant and the impact purely social. This is, it seems, a common anthropological story, and it's true that there are a lot of purely social rituals in the world. But this is not the point of religious ritual, and if you are just seeking social bonding, you will miss something important.
The theology of sacraments in particular is a giant can of worms, so I'll leave that aside and focus on something smaller. In the course of the liturgy, the people will make the sign of the cross, bow, and (on weekdays and in Lent) make prostrations. Why? None of these is magic, and they seem... contingent, perhaps? Arbitrary? Why this ritual and not another, why now and not then?
To an extent there is something arbitrary about the specifics. But there is something more than that, and it comes down to symbolism. The sign of the cross is a symbol of prayer, and of faith in Christ (hence the sign of the cross), so for me it becomes prayer and an affirmation of that faith. Thus I make the sign of the cross during the litany to participate in the prayer, or even when I am alone, at home, to make a wordless prayer. Bowing is a sign of reverence; thus when I bow I not only display appropriate reverence, but orient my emotions and intentions toward reverence. That is, the point of the rituals is not how they affect God, but how they affect our attitude toward God and others.
When seen in this light, the rituals are not irrational behavior, but a deliberate way of orienting ourselves. And this is one reason they can be healing, because giving oneself the right attitudes influences everything else.
There's a part of the Liturgy, common in east and west, called the sursum corda, in which the following dialogue takes place between the priest and the people:
Priest: Lift up your hearts.
People: We lift them up to the Lord.
Priest: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
People: It is meet and right (in the Byzantine rite, this sentence continues "...to worship the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in essence and undivided." -- my understanding is that this is a later theological elaboration to the original rite)
Here there is a goal: to "lift up hearts" (i.e. to put oneself in a reverential and contemplative orientation to God), to give thanks to God, to worship God. And the means for that goal is this very call-and-response ritual that lays out the goal, and, as it says, this is appropriate ("meet and right"). The whole Liturgy is full of things like this -- the cherubic hymn with the words "[let us...] now lay aside all earthly cares", the litanies with "Let us pray to the Lord" -- "Lord have mercy".
Why does this work? That's a question about human psychology, and I don't know the answer, but it does, and in that light it's no less rational than talk therapy or being polite to dinner guests or any number of other things people do.
7 Final Thoughts
This turned out to be longer and more wide-ranging than I'd initially intended, and I'm sure will invite a lot of disagreement. I'm aware that I didn't do a lot of "prove this is rational/true" work above; even if that were possible to do to everyone's satisfaction, this essay is already long enough. I intend to interact with any comments in the same way -- to explain and lay out a way of thinking, not to argue that everyone else should accept it. I totally think they should, but, in line with my thoughts above, I don't believe that I've offered sufficient evidence to persuade most of you to become Christians, and I don't think that my words-on-a-screen could, unless you're most of the way there anyway.
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5mo ago
Yes. I started having wrist pain about 5 years ago in my right wrist, to the point where it was seriously impacting my work. I did some research and bought a cheap vertical mouse, and my pain went went away in about a week and never came back. Best $25 I ever spent.
If you have larger hands, make sure to get a larger mouse, though. They vary a lot in size and I find smaller ones not nearly as comfortable.
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6mo ago
@TheDag @KingOfTheBailey @coffee_enjoyer I, um, wrote a long thing. It's up as a top level post (...and a reply because I ran out of characters) now.
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8mo ago
Related and potentially even more controversial questions:
- To what extent does this analysis apply to homosexuality? Are there people who are "homoromantic" without being (significantly) sexually aroused by the same sex, or vice-versa?
- How about other fetishes? Are there many where an "Eros" aspect is reasonably common?
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1yr ago
Ah, good catch there -- it does seem to be an exact imitation of that icon.
In the East, the liturgical color for Marian feasts is blue, and it's definitely the color most associated with her. I'm not enough of an expert to speculate on the history, but while the red-over-blue in icons of Mary is standard in the East, it is not universal (I think the Hagia Sophia famously has some icons which just use blue -- and indeed the source icon is Byzantine) so I guess I was wrong on that being the artist's error. There's some relation with the fact that Christ is generally depicted with a blue outer garment and red inner garment. I was just now trying to verify about the symbolism and found that there's some... disagreement... on exactly what symbolizes what.
Essay now in progress, I'm up to about 1300 words already. It will definitely be a top level post.
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