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User ID: 2225
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1mo ago
Thank you for the kind words and the mention (I wouldn't have seen this otherwise). I'm sorry you are going through such a tough time. Feel free to PM me again if you ever want to talk.
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8mo ago
LOL. I regret that I have but one upvote to give for this comment.
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9mo ago
I recommend staying off of social media and away from any other places where people argue about things you care about in ways that you have a bad reaction to. Change your passwords, log out, delete your browser history if you have to. Yes, there are ways to try to deal with it (I think dark is giving good advice) but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
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1yr ago
I guess I don't see how this has much to do with what I'm saying. The post I was originally responding to suggested:
And somebody have the backbone to stand up to those for whom it is a sexual fetish, identify it as such, and tell them they're not transgender, they're perverts
as a way to dissuade these people from transitioning. In other words, tell people with autogynephilia that they are disgusting and should go away, which seems both cruel and unlikely to work. I'm proposing compassion instead, because I don't want these people to end up deciding they are trans, I want them to get help.
For whatever it's worth I have little love for the trans lobby and am pretty incensed at all the propagandizing and abuse of state power to enforce their ideology. I just happen to think that many, probably most, trans individuals are also victims here, in much the same way that lonely people who get targeted by lovebombing and join a cult are.
To be fair, the notions of simplicity at play here are two different ones, so Divine Simplicity is, while not entirely irrelevant, a bit beside the point.
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6mo ago
For what it's worth, I don't disagree that there are other options that don't deny consciousness -- my "I'm a Christian because of the Hard Problem" line is certainly a simplification, and my reasons for being Christian in particular are not a clear-cut, single line of reasoning but a bunch of reasons, intuitions, and experiences, many of which could easily be criticized individually and some of which are not really communicable, that together point me in that direction. The Hard Problem of Consciousness (together with a deep-seated conviction that solipsism, the elephant in the room here, is false) is just the biggest piece.
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8mo ago
If you like self-reference and logic (and who doesn't, really?) Gödel, Escher, Bach is a lot of fun.
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1yr ago
Are you referring to trans activists, the "visible perverts", or to the "disordered desires" group? Granted there is overlap, of course, but I think it's the first two groups who are doing the damage. A lot of the third group doesn't (or doesn't yet) even consider themselves trans! If you want them to not get eaten by the trans meme, you've got to provide some kind of compassionate support. Because when the options are suffer in solitude, get shamed and ridiculed, or listen to the seductive whispers telling them that they can satisfy their desires and join a group that will continually affirm them, it takes a pretty strong will to not pick the third option.
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1yr ago
I confess that I am confused by this response. Who is being officially deputized by whom to kill whom? And how does any of this make sense in the context of @FarNearEverywhere's parent comment, which already posits a massive change in how the official parts of society deal with trans stuff?
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2d ago
Roti Prata is delicious. Go to a hawker center get some.
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7mo ago
Is this about divorce (the relevant difference here is not actually moral but ontological; the official Catholic line being that divorce is impossible)? About economia in general? Something else? I don't think there are any major differences in moral teaching, so this has got to be about how the teaching is applied, but that comparison doesn't seem to come out with Catholicism-as-actually-practiced (as opposed to in theory) being notably stricter.
So I am kind of confused by this and would like you to elaborate.
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1yr ago
Lawrence's book has a "terminology and definitions" section
You are absolutely right and I should have referred to that first. My bad.
May I ask why not?
Because many of these people are doing things (cross-dressing, usually) which are already seen as shameful, with no pretense of being forced to; plus, doing feminine things is only socially shameful for men, but the desire in question is to be/become a woman. But I've gotten some firsthand pushback on this so probably I was typical-minding here.
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1yr ago
I don't understand this. In my mind, the entire point of the forced feminization fantasy is avoiding the shame in wanting it rather than it being itself shameful, while you seem to be claiming the opposite?
I am either slightly confused or expressed myself confusingly (or both). I'll get back to you if I think of a better way of explaining what I meant.
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6mo ago
I have, of course, a lot of disagreements with this comment, but in the spirit of explaining things rather than re-waging the Great Internet Atheism-vs-Religion Wars (I was a teenager 20 years ago; I ought to know better now) I wanted to focus on two things that are a bit more meta-level and more relevant specifically to rationality.
All else being equal, a simple hypothesis or prior should be privileged over a more complex one when they are equally as good at explaining the evidence, or predicting the future. That is a basic consequence of probability theory, complexity needs to be justified.
There are two points to be made here. The first is that Occam's razor, the simplicity prior, and the particular formal version based on Kolmogorov complexity, are all assumptions, not inevitable consequences of logic. Probability theory tells you how to update your prior based on evidence (....if, somehow, you can know the probabilities of all your observations conditional on each of the potential hypotheses, which in this context is an unrealistically big ask); it can't tell you what your prior should be. A simplicity prior is not an unreasonable choice in many contexts, but it's (a) not actually practical for many things (do you know all possible hypotheses and their exact complexity?) and (b) it's not the only possible choice.
The second is that it seems likely to be impossible to even evaluate simplicity or conditional probabilities when you are dealing with radically different ontologies, and it's not at all clear that e.g. the claim that physics and the existing physical universe is the brute fact of reality is in any way simpler than the claim that a Person is. Certainly I'll grant that "the physical universe, but also God/supernatural/nonphysical stuff tacked on" is more complicated than pure materialism, but that's explicitly not what the alternative is.
An analogy for those who know about the demoscene: a long, intricate demo certainly looks more complicated than a random short clip on Youtube, but it is much simpler in an information-theory sense, being generated from a small executable. Given that we don't know any real equivalent of "the shortest possible code" for either a materialist or Theistic account of the reality, I don't think it's even in principal possible to judge the complexity of either.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness is a sign that our existing knowledge and theories are insufficient for the task of explaining everything
This misses the point. There are certainly many problems that, when substituted for "the Hard Problem of Consciousness" here, would make this statement a valid criticism. For instance, if someone tried to argue that the fact that science can't account for Abiogenesis is a knock-down argument against materialism, this would be a good point. The fact that we have no good idea how abiogenesis could occur is some evidence against its occurring by natural means, but in the future new evidence or a better understanding of chemistry might turn things around, just as biochemistry did for the properties of organic life as it is now.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness is another matter. The problem is not that current science can't explain it; the problem is that ontological materialism excludes consciousness (in the sense those of us talking about the Hard Problem mean) entirely. There's no way to get an "I", a first-person perspective, in a materialist ontology, any more than it's possible to get moral realism. And I don't know about you, but I'm quite a bit more certain that I exist than I am that the external world exists, let alone of any laws of physics or theories about what other things might or might not exist, simply for the reason I have direct, unmediated observation of the fact of my existence, which I don't have of physical things. Not to go full #DescartesWasRight here, but he's a lot more right about this than many people give him credit for.
To get at something of my frustration here, let me present a fictional dialogue between a normal person "Matt" and a person with a rather odd ontology, "Noah":
Noah: "The whole universe is just a number. Everything is just some digits or properties of this number. All is number!"
Matt: "But this rock isn't a number! It's not even the same sort of thing as a number! It's stuff, matter, not something abstract like a number."
Noah: "What do you mean? How do you know that stuff isn't just properties of a number. After all, you know that atoms can be counted, mass can be measured, positions can be located, as numbers. Numbers are everywhere. We can express everything about your rock as some numbers, and thus, of course, as digits in one Great Number which is the whole universe."
Matt: "Sure, numbers are useful for measuring things. But a rock isn't just its measurements -- it's made of stuff; it has actual existence."
Noah: "I don't know what you mean by 'actual existence', or 'stuff' or 'matter', and I don't think you do either. Sure, I'll grant that there are things about a rock that we don't know how to measure yet, so we don't fully know how it is part of the Great Number. But it's just a matter of time."
Matt: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
Whenever I talk to materialists about consciousness, I feel just like Matt talking to Noah. If you actually don't get it, I don't know what to say to you.
And this leads into some final thoughts which are connected to both of these. The elephant in the room here, the simplest ontology that nobody wants no believe -- maybe that nobody can believe: Solipsism. Why believe in the existence of anything external to yourself at all? A universe with just one thing is simpler than any hypothesis other than one with nothing (not tenable for the obvious reason). It can easily account for all your putative observations (i.e. they are not actually observations of anything at all). And yet, despite the talk of Boltzmann brains, which is functionally the same thing (if you are just a brain in the void, why do you think your observations of the laws of physics have any meaning -- and thus why is the fact that QM may permit Boltzmann brains any evidence whatsoever about whether you might be one?), I don't think I've heard people insist that solipsism is the only rational position. Frankly, the reason I'm not a solipsist is not that I have a good argument that it's false; rather, I just can't believe it -- I have an arational certainty -- generously, direct apprehension of a truth -- that solipsism is false and I'm not the only thing that exists.
And if we aren't rationally required to be solipsists, well, isn't that giving the whole game away in terms of trying to evaluate ontologies with the same tools one uses for day-to-day reasoning about more bounded questions?
(A more complete version of this comment would relate this to questions about model uncertainty and why, practically, 10^-9 is no more a "real" credence level than 0 is, but this comment is far too long already.)
dovetailing
1yr ago
Relatedly, I maintain that the left vs right spectrum are best understood as religious schism within the western enlightment, with the adhearants of Locke and Rousseau on one side and the adhearants of Hobbes on the other.
Which implies that left vs right politics are fundamentally post-Christian.
Drawing this out a bit further: I believe you are right that the alt-right and woke left are, in many ways, cut from the same cloth. But the "red tribe," even the overtly religious part, is just as much a product of modernity and is in many ways post-Christian in outlook, despite the Christian trappings.
I rather think this is a bad thing.
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1mo ago
I'd like to talk about Adderall.
A bit of background: I've had ADHD symptoms my whole life (though the hyperactive part greatly diminished in adulthood), but was never treated because I (a) won the lottery of fascinations (math and computers) and (b) have enough raw intelligence that I was able to excel academically through undergrad. Ever since I started grad school, however, my difficulty with focus has plagued my work, and though I managed to muddle through, I'm much less successful than you might otherwise expect, and my subpar (per my own standards, I guess) productivity at work has negatively impacted my mental health. I've been lucky if I can get a couple hours of productive work in a day -- and I don't mean "I had to go to meetings and that interrupted my flow state" (though there's that too) but "I got distracted by some math problem / thinking about a video game / reading a forum / etc and lost a couple hours with nothing to show for it". I've self-medicated a bit with coffee in the past, but I haven't used it as much recently as after a hiatus, I noticed that drinking enough to make any dent in my problem was also enough to cause me sleep trouble the following night (even if I only had it in the morning) and was very much not generally worth it. Somehow I'm still productive enough to keep a senior software engineer job without (many) complaints from management or coworkers, but I'm always feeling like I'm on the verge of failing to adequately do my job.
So my wife persuaded me that just maybe my persistent difficulty focusing on tasks is due to ADHD rather than being incorrigibly lazy. I saw a psychiatrist and she prescribed Adderall, 10mg up to 3 times daily. The pharmacy finally filled the prescription and I started taking it yesterday (Wednesday).
I took two doses yesterday: one at about 10:30 AM when I started work, and one at about 2:30 PM, about 20 minutes after I noticed the effects starting to wear off. The first dose was weird: it helped very noticeably with my ability to focus on a task, my ability to get started on a larger new task (previously I'd have to wait for the perfect moment psychologically for this), and my ability to maintain focus when switching tasks while waiting for a coworker to do code review. On the other hand, I got the jitters - as if I'd had too much coffee, or was very nervous about something, except that I wasn't nervous, I just had the somatic symptoms (this was really confusing). (Other than these jitters my fidgeting/pacing decreased.) The second dose had the same cognitive effects as the first, but without the jitters. I had as many productive hours in one day yesterday as I typically have in three (though it's worth noting that my usual distribution is highly uneven) and got a commensurate amount accomplished.
Miracle drug, right? Well, remember how drinking too much coffee would give me sleep troubles? Yeah, that. I had a hard time winding down last night (even though the mental effects had otherwise worn off), took longer than usual to fall asleep, and woke up in the wee hours of the morning and couldn't get back to sleep. This is not totally out of distribution for me (in fact it's similar to something I've had happen two or three times in the last month without any drugs) but it's suggestive. I'm pretty tired now, but not "I'm a zombie and can't function" tired, at least at the moment -- again, a bit unusual for how little sleep I got but not out of distribution. I really hope this goes away (or I can find a dosing regime that doesn't do this to me) because I really want to be consistently productive for once in my life.
My psychiatrist suggested when prescribing that I could cut the dose in half if I felt "high" or had significant side effects after the first few doses, or that I could try taking only one dose if it was effective enough to get me started on the right foot and I didn't crash after it wore off (which I didn't). I'm planning to take one or two 5mg doses today and see if it's still as effective; I don't want to screw up my currently fragile sleep even more.
Does anyone else here have experience with Adderall for ADHD? With insomnia as a side effect? With dosing (looking online, 10 mg per dose is a bit higher than normal for an initial dose)? Obviously I'll bring all the details to my psychiatrist next week for my followup, but there's bound to be some people here with the right experiences and insight to get some initial feedback or suggestions.
dovetailing
5mo ago
Surely most of that (in the paper, I mean) is selection effects? I expect that there's a substantial barrier to entry for completing SRS at a university hospital (the selection criterion for that paper) and that the barriers are higher for AGPs since they don't match the stereotypical / ideologically acceptable profile. (I also suspect a similar effect causes these studies to underestimate AGP in that population. People who want a thing tend to say what gatekeepers want to hear, and those that don't... don't make it past the gatekeepers as much.)
Of course I'm also saying this as someone who suffers from AGP (though much, much less than I did in my teens / early 20s -- mental habits do make a difference) and also ticks many of the usual boxes: high intelligence, nerdy, family history both of mental illness and of joint hypermobility / connective tissue problems. So make of that what you will.
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1yr ago
I think it's a small proportion but I also think that unfortunately they are the loudest and most visible and most online.
It seems we differ in our estimates here. Maybe it would help to draw a distinction between, let's say, people with disordered sexual desires (in which group I would include any autogynephilia in natal males), and people who are "visible perverts" (you know about them because they do perverted things in public or are publicly loud about their proclivities). I agree that the latter group is rare and unrepresentative of trans people, and it's crazy that the trans lobby doesn't want to get rid of them (probably this is downstream of "pride" stuff). I think, though, that the former group includes probably the majority of MtF trans individuals as well as a decent percentage of men who don't transition. This is probably not usually acknowledged because it's perceived as unflattering to trans people, and to be fair the people loudly crowing about how "it's just a fetish" are being cruel and are not helping the matter.
I think we ought to have some charity even for the "visible perverts" crowd; they need it even if they don't deserve it -- but what I'm really referring to here is the other group. Right now all they are hearing is either total silence, "Eww, you pervert", or "That means you're really a woman deep down! You must be trans!" I think there is a need for counseling, along the lines of "So, you know how you really really want to be female? And how you find that idea sexually arousing, too? Yeah, that's a thing; it's something a bit wrong with you, but it doesn't mean either that you are disgusting or that you are 'really' a woman or should try to become one. Let's try to help you figure out how to deal with your feelings."
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1yr ago
And somebody have the backbone to stand up to those for whom it is a sexual fetish, identify it as such, and tell them they're not transgender, they're perverts
Perhaps I can prevail upon you to be kind to perverts? I encourage you to read my essay downthread; I believe the thing you are referring to is more common, and more complicated, than you think -- but that aside, surely having disordered desires should be treated as a mental illness, in much the same vein as the other things you describe?
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1mo ago
This was a great recommendation -- I'm enjoying it very much. It's like the game show version of a puzzle hunt.
Why aren't any American game shows even close to this good?
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1mo ago
I ordered an l-theanine supplement (green tea also has caffeine, I don't want to mix that in and I'm not a huge fan of the flavor anyway) on your advice; the palpitations and insomnia [edit: I think some of the insomnia is secondary to palpitations continuing way past the other effects] sucked (at least the serious jitters were only with the first dose). Would you recommend taking it with the Adderall or in the evening?
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5mo ago
Right, what I was also gesturing at above is that there is probably an additional selection effect, in the form of needing to work the system, for female attracted / AGP people, since their motivations are thought to be more "disreputable" (not sure the right word here).
However, on further reflection, 122 is an astounding mean, even for a combination of selection effects and real differences, and makes me wonder if there is something wrong here. That's a mean substantially larger than what you get pulling only from the population of 4-year college graduates. At this point I think I'll reserve any judgment about the explanation of these numbers.
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6mo ago
I think some sort of filter, like the new-user filter for comments (maybe there is a stricter filter for top-levels?). I can see it when logged in but not otherwise, so I assume it will show up as soon as a mod gets around to approving it.
dovetailing
6mo ago
Hm, I see that I can't see it when logged out. I must somehow still be subject to a filter/delay for top-level posts. Well, hopefully it will get approved soon.
To which the obvious solution is: let the people consist of those who embrace the idea. Which is exactly what the Christian Church did, by the way: "There is no Jew or Greek..."; and also "church fathers", "ancestors in the faith".
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