gattsuru
19hr ago
I am not sure why we'd want to draw a bright line between "emulating preferences" and "making sufficiently enjoyable decisions".
I don't want to conflate shrinks and life coaches, but to point toward Henry The Fifth-style patients, there seem at minimum to be toy examples of people who make absolutely atrocious major decisions, could get a Magic Eight Ball, would absolutely refuse to follow its advice, and then would regret doing it. That doesn't scale up to controlling every micro-muscular movement, and maybe there's be occasional cases where their preferences are genuinely weird enough that the Iso Standard Don't Let Crazy Stick It In You wouldn't work, but at the same time it seems meaningful that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit that exists without, or even despite, of the immediate preferences.
But I'm... fine? The situations where this might seriously bite me in the ass instead of mildly inconvenience me are very rare.
What are the consequences of that logic, taken to scale? Learning To Be Me focuses its horror on ways things could go wrong, but let's assume it goes right: you are the jewel, will endure a billion years, and short of a nuclear fireball, can't be destroyed. Let's go further: in that story, the jewel at least needs to keep its flesh body intact, and plan for the end of the world. If we had perfect mind uploads, or an unending diamondroid body, such that no skill could be genuinely needed, would you be fine with every capability you have becoming moot, so long as you weren't inconvenienced? What about a world where nothing Seriously Wrong could ever happen? How about one where you could not, as a matter of physics, face even as small a minor inconvenience as to stub your toe?
What happens when there are no skills you require?
... I dunno.
May not be a solvable question. May be a hilariously easy solvable question. I fear Caelum Est Conterrens, but it's ultimately an argument to fiction. Maybe the result for the real post-nihilistic world is people making themselves to make themselves, in the same way that I write knowing I can't write to compete with the greats or in the way normal people get bored, or at least enough survivors do to count, and it's not even a plausible problem. Maybe there's no answer but how nice the happy pudding has it; whether we're at a techless 1984, The Matrix, or a full wireheaded world.
The earring doesn't do this (at least not in the story as far as I can tell).
Yeah, apologies. I was proposing a different AGI/ASI-like system that would obviate a number of my concerns with the Whispering Earring, and in doing so try to examine what parts of the Whispering Earring made me uncomfortable, but it wasn't a great way of doing that clearly.
gattsuru
21hr ago
Not to be a pedant, but I think you mean cues, not queues.
Thanks, yeah, that's right.
Oh, like the IQ test pattern blocks, or something else?
The Kohs Blocks (or some descendant) were one, and there was also a simple test involving wood blocks with cubic outlines and a challenge to guess how many cubes the whole contained that I can't the name of.
gattsuru
1d ago
Cory Doctorow has lots of interesting arguments, and I really admire and support his crusade against IP and enshittification, but his views are very extreme and some of his ideas go too far.
I'd give a different issue: regardless of how good or bad his ideas are, they're clearly unrelated to the actual goals he's claiming to champion. Twitter and YouTube and Discord and almost every company of relevance here are not market leaders due to the strength of their intellectual property; it's trivial to implement one-off examples of their functionality, and building a decent many-to-many implementation is a small business, not a large one. Their strengths come from their scaling capabilities and, to a far greater extent, the absolutely massive network advantages. The division from LibreOffice or GIMP to MSOffice and Photoshop isn't a massive, deep moat of algorithmic design or CPU optimizations, but a shallow one of user interface and user training. Individual people can build cell phones. It's just only a rounding error of people wants that done, to fund it, or to use it once manufactured.
It might be more relevant for specialized software (operating systems, CAD work, simulation software), but notably none of these spaces are things Doctorow focuses on. He talks about iOS in the sense of jailbreaking iPhones, a matter where legal constraints have never been the primary limit. He never mentions Linux, and only mentions Microsoft to say they "bricked" the International Criminal Court's outlook server due to sanctions (real world: cut access to Karim Khan's e-mail account). The ICC's moving to openDesk (also not mentioned, wouldn't have been my first choice)... and having it run by B1 Systems GmbH, a contractor in Germany. A quick google estimates <150 IT staff; having tried OpenDesk, I'd expect <20 full-time staff equivalent for the ICC, mostly tech support.
That is not a moonshot. It's definitely not the moonshot Doctorow's theory would need.
The only place they might be relevant is AI models (hmmm), and then only to the point where there are closed-source, high-capability models that could be cloned and run from EU services. That's not coherent to Doctorow's whole view - "Because even though the AI can't do the 's job, an AI salesman can convince the 's boss to fire them and replace them with an AI that can't do their job", that's the text - but he's not pretending to be coherent so much as tell his readers what he needs to get his goals, so whatever.
((Presumably they only ignore the copyright requests Doctorow dislikes, not artist and writer intellectual property, but to be fair, it's not like anyone without a hundred million dollar business can get an inter_state_ copyright lawsuit, nevermind an international one.))
How's that supposed to work? Okay, the model leaks, quickly. That I can buy, I've been a proponent of the theory that 'the leak always gets through' even if it hasn't always applied in practice. The EU companies are able to clone the graphics cards or ASICs, probably. Can they make them? The current best fab is 18nm, and while they're planning to build a 2nm-ish plant, the current timeline is 2030 and also kinda a joke. Okay, well, over long enough the hardware and training costs get amortized, it's the landscape and inference cost. Is EU power going to be cheap? Regulatory compliance? Legal overhead?
What's the business plan, here? Be annoying?
Mistral makes local models (as opposed to locked-down cloud ones), so I want them to succeed. However, even with full EU backing, they'd be outcompeted by OpenAI and Anthropic, who can release local models themselves, making all their effort and work seem wasted
Mistral's been suffering for a while. It had some sizable influence in low-parameter models a year ago - and to an extent, still has: Cydonia is a Mistral-3.1-24B-derived model that's popular for roleplay, even if it introduces a lot of world consistency issues as context scale - but it's ranged from middling to actively bad since.
One complication here is that there are clear spaces that OpenAI and Anthropic are unlikely to want to explore, that would leave a niche for not-quite-frontier models that don't excel at things like coding but do focus well on other career spaces ... but that is likely to be more regulated in the EU, in ways that impact the ability of providers to provide decent models. And that's particularly overt for Mistral: one of the suspected causes for (some of the many) problems in Mistral 4 was the repeated 'safety' failures in Mistral3 variants. Ideally, they'd be able to avoid regulatory failures without harming core capabilities, but so far the degree models seem to suffer from overcorrection correlates pretty heavily with regulatory exposure.
(Caveat: they could have also just found some local minima. Things are moving so fast in these spaces that they could well turn around quick.)
If the earring-plus-human system comes to contain a high fidelity continuation of me, perhaps with upgrades, perhaps with some functions migrated off wet tissue and onto magical jewelry, why is the natural reaction horror rather than transhumanist interest?
Oh boy. I'll condone the perspective that the Earring doesn't need to actively evil or malicious (and maybe isn't intended to be read that way: Scott notably does not have it destroyed). That said:
Trivially, even if the Earring does emulate you, the original brain is still being reduced in capability. You compare this to Learning To Be Me, and a lot of rationalists reject the brain upload problem, but it's worth spelling out that a lot of real-world people do see it as, at best, letting someone else have an excellent life while you die, and at worst, having a philosophical zombie that pretends to be a person take your place.
It's not clear that the Earring needs to emulate your preferences, rather than simply make sufficiently enjoyable decisions. It always makes decisions that the subject prefers, after they're executed, and those who refuse it always regret that. You can, trivially, today, find static models that are capable of exceeding your own judgement in a variety of environments. These aren't emulating and can't be emulating you, or maintaining persistence of your identity, and I'd like to think that a 30B param model and nvidia 3090 isn't capable of holding a real person anyway.
((Claudebots right now are an extreme version; they're often independent enough that they're off doing their own thing even where the owner would actively hate it and want it to stop before it drains their bank account. But that's an implementation problem, not a philosophical one.))
The myth-making of friction is difficult to make work with this story - after all, the Lotus-Eaters Earring-Wearers do mostly end up happy pillars of the community - but I'm cautiously willing to endorse it even in the Earring's context. There's a lot of short-term unhappiness and bad decision-making that, in net, is still useful to receive and grow from, even as someone regrets it happening to start with. The Earring gives an example of telling someone to half-ass it at work and goon fantasize at night, and that's probably intended more in the sense of 'the demon isn't replacing your values with its own', but even for people who want to maximize their fantasy-time, there's a lot of ways people could end up changing their values as a result of everything being unregrettable.
That's simplest with small direct skills: the historical non-computer example here is phone numbers. Ma Bell did a whole lot of work to make them readily memorizable and organized. In the 1970s and 1980s, people would hold rolodexes or phonebooks, but they would regularly have 20 or 30 phone numbers memorized. With the advent of computerized phones, such as cell phones, that just doesn't happen; few people can remember anyone else's phone number, and I'd expect in twenty years many people don't even know their own. Which is trivial, but then you notice the pattern in things like following maps, coordinating large social gatherings, mental arithmetic.
In twenty years, will people have outsourced the ability to identify other people by faces? You could do it, today; the tech's been around for a while (Google Glass lived and died and was reborn by Facebook and Chinese knockoffs years ago, yolo almost as old). That would be easier and avoid a lot of unpleasant mistakes, and at each and every step of the process you'd be happier if you didn't goof. But there are plausible downstream impacts on socialization and emotional processing that would not be so readily distinguished.
And that goes on past skills to other matters. I didn't realize that comic used the words "I've regretted it" until I went to look it up, by the way.
Your obvious counterargument that we don't glorify all friction, is correct, but I don't think it proves much. It's hard to distinguish every single case of friction-that-skills from friction-that-deskills, nevermind those cases where we care about the resulting skill or deskill. It's not hard to distinguish so many easy cases that the remainder are little more than rounding errors. They're good questions, but they're ultimately not determinative ones.
There's a more subtle and stronger counter-argument that a smart enough Earring could determine what mistakes would, in the long run, make someone better. The parable here cautions about a machine that always makes a single decision at a time that is never regrettable, but that doesn't preclude a machine that always makes decisions-as-a-whole that are always better, in the sense of a genie who is safe to ask to Do The Right Thing. And that's a harder problem.
But it's also a problem of its own: if people are faced with a choice between Doing The Right Thing and Doing The Pleasant-Enough Thing, they will go with the latter far more often. But that's also just the wireheading question in a fancy wrapper, so a lot less interesting.
((This doesn't caution against the use of LLMs, or the use of LLMs to do decision-work, so much as they way of interacting. It's quite possible to talk with an LLM without outsourcing your ability to evaluate correctness or regret-making, so long as you actually want that, in the same way a fantasy wizard might talk with summoned demon carefully kept behind a ring of salt, and checked at every moment for lies.
Unfortunately, my most impressive examples here are... on topics that are unlikely to be of appeal to normal readers here.))
Not strictly.
I'd had a couple traumatic medical experiences in an environment that Strongly Encourage Therapy for them, and the specific office my parents went with had checks through a variety of classically under-diagnosed conditions. Some of them were perfunctory - two or three questions involving a wooden puzzle cube stick in my mind that I've since learned were developmental disability tests, for example - but the autism-adjacent stuff ended up going into more thorough testing. This was back when Asperger's was still a diagnostic option, so not unreasonable, but I was just a standoffish kid that didn't pay attention to social queues cues, rather than being unable to notice them.
gattsuru
3d ago
The Indian Justice asking whether current day Native Americans are 14A citizens? This was the weirdest thing, as Sauer said that now they probably were (which makes no sense to me).
There’s a really boring answer where they’re all children of citizens at this point, but if Sauer was trying to establish that, didn’t do a great job.
gattsuru
4d ago
40% German, 60% autistic. I'd quibble that I've been specifically tested and found not, but like Corporal Nobby Nobb's "I Am A Human, probably" certificate, that doesn't really help. And given that I've already Wittgenstein'd at other posters here, I can't complain too much about being called Wittgenstein.
gattsuru
4d ago
California has requested an injunction against the Gatalog :
The People respectfully request that this Court enter the requested preliminary injunction enjoining Defendants from distributing or causing to be distributed digital firearm manufacturing code into California; aiding, abetting, promoting, or facilitating the unlawful manufacture of firearms in California by distributing or causing to be distributed digital firearm manufacturing code and/or accompanying instructions into California that may be used to produce the firearm-related products identified in Penal Code § 29186.
What's more, they've requested that injunction be issued without waiting for the defendants to reply:
Based on the allegations contained in the People’s complaint, the People’s motion for preliminary injunction, and the declarations submitted in support of that motion and the instant application, the People are entitled to restrain the Defendants’ continued illegal acts that are causing great or irreparable injury to the People and the general public in California. (Code of Civil Procedure §§ 526(a)(1)-(2), 527(a); Civil Code §§ 3273.61(c)(2), 3273.625(c)(2); Business and Professions Code § 17203.) Pursuant to CRC 3.1150(a), an Order to Show Cause must be used to obtain the preliminary injunctive relief sought by the People, as Defendants have not yet appeared in this action. The People seek an Order to Show Cause on an ex parte basis.
There's some comedy available here -- the Gonzalez declaration starts by giving instructions on how to do this prohibited act, which I'm not going to link here because I don't want us getting a lawsuit, and then goes on to show how badly you can misunderstand statistics and basic math, and still work at the California DoJ (despite, or because?). Hell, there's some comedy just from California, 20 months after they first 'discovered' the 'illegal' and dangerous behavior of an enemy, several months after writing a law to make it harder for The Gatalog to defend themselves, deciding that there was an emergency now that could not wait a week.
It probably won't go very far.
There's some deep discussion that lawyers could get into about compliance with the exact rules in California, but they don't matter, because it's not like the state is going to get its wrists slapped if it doesn't comply with them. There's some deep discussion that academics being paid could write up, building new statistics about how often ex parte orders to show cause for a preliminary injunctions are allowed, and how often they're granted, and it won't mean anything since this is so far from a normal case, brought by such a different environment than the typical lawsuit.
It probably won't go very far.
That's not an encouraging thought, when 'it' is an unopposed motion to prevent California's opponents from showing a thing.
gattsuru
5d ago
I think the answers to all your questions is tumblr the show is tumblr personified and very feminine it's just shipping tumblr OCs in problematic relationships.
Yeah, there's a certain degree of the storylines matching whatever SuperWhoLock fandom would like best (aka Literally Lucifer In A Glass Ball). On the other hand, the show's increasingly put Everyone's Favorite Shipping Solution as explicitly a non-option, so there are some limits, and to an extent I think the writers have gotten the point where the characters have run away from just being vehicles for Tumblr OC Shenanigans.
I don't think the show really does highlight the flaws of traditional sexual norms... Stolas and Stella have an arranged marriage because of rule of cool by girl norms.
True, to an extent, but they're also just two pressured into marrying and having a kid by their family (as a conduit for society), and they're not the only ones. Moxxie's parents relationship was even worse than Stolas/Stella, with his father literally murdering his mother for encouraging Moxxie's morality. Blitzo's mom was good, and we don't know much about her relationship with Blitzo's dad before the fire, but given how much a piece of work he is in every scene we see him, that relationship probably wasn't a healthy one, either.
They're not 'real-world' relationships (Mafia don, circus owners, respectively), any more than the non-traditional relationships are (demon/cyborg clown, bee royalty party hound/bodyguard), but they're still about real-world problems: Crimson is very explicitly the homophobic parent that sees his children as extensions of his will and body, Cash is a neglectful boozehound who trades his son for a fiver and a condom (and is heavily implied to beat him), Fizz and Asmo's situation is a parallel for coming out, .
One of the only healthy relationships is Millie and Moxxie's which is also basically the only monogamous heterosexual one.
Beelzebub and Vortex is... probably not strictly monogamous, given the ending to Spring Break, but the episode actually focusing on the two present it as monogamous enough for Loona to be jealous and excluded, and for it to be healthy, and it's also straight. That said, it's a mirror to Asmodeus and Fizz's relationship, which is overtly gay and, to the extent there's anything but maximally uwu loving tender care, it's just because Asmodeus isn't willing to be out (... about loving, rather than just fucking, an imp) at first. In Hazbin Hotel, you've also got Sir Pentious/Cherri Bomb (heterosexual, not-strictly-speaking-consumated except with explosive fights) and Charlie/Vaggi (lesbians) as healthy relationships.
((Millie's parents aren't awful people, but their expectations and Moxxie's inability to compare to them are as much the opposing force in their episode as Stryker is. I think they're intended to be a generic parents rather than a healthy relationship, but we see little enough of it I don't know if it's really possible to put into a category.))
And while Millie and Moxxie's relationship is monogamous (barring an invite from Michael Crawford) and heterosexual (ditto), it's very far from traditional norms (as is Pentious/Cherri). There's the pegging jokes, of course, but there's the time she literally wears the pants in the relationship, the love song, so on. They're how progressives see the ideal New Relationship, once you remove the trapping of the show from it. To the extent they have problems, those problems (the summer camp episode, Moxxie's inferiority complex, Pentious/Cherri's Love Song) exist to explore and resolve them within progressive understandings.
That is, as you say, girl gooner bait. Indeed, these sorta analysis wouldn't be unusual in Omegaverse fic, and the sort where the plot is little more than Oh No Stepbro Alpha, I'm Stuck.
But while it doesn't mirror directly to how the world works, it does still reflect what people want to see as changes, and do see as problems to be fixed, in the real world.
I also realize I'm replying to a two year old comment but I was curious if there had been talk about either of here shows on here as they seem a prime culture war topic.
I got a PM about it a while back (on reddit?), and from a search there's a couple off-hand mentions but beyond that, not much really. Hazbin does say a lot about broader philosophy, as you'd expect from a show more directly about damnation and redemption, but I'm not sure how much the culture war touchpoints would be unusually specific to it.
gattsuru
5d ago
JTarrou isn't seriously entertaining the idea that Trump could be wrong...
Hm.
Personally, I can't make heads nor tails of the Iran operation, and I doubt anyone else is doing much better. We'll find out in a year or ten whether it was a success.
I don't think so.
gattsuru
5d ago
This seems hard to tease apart. But I guess it's genuinely an open question how someone actually "discovers" what turns them on, and what the difference is between "being comfortable with it" and "being it sexual."
Yeah. There's a handful of clear-ish cases (eg, latex kink seems like one of those things that's either an instant love or meh, with very few people changing opinions afterward) but even some stuff that seems like it should be less mutable acts weird, too (eg, foot fetishism seems like some neurological mismatch would be the best explanation... but it's really common for artists to pick up a taste for it, organically).
Really? In terms of being attracted to people of a very different kind than before, not just being more attracted to the same kind of people?
At least in self-reporting, it's pretty common but neither universal nor especially predictable in direction. The Blanchard faction claims up to 40% have some change over their lives (and I have no idea how that's supposed to fit the AGP theory), though they definitely merge in some unrelated to hormone therapy when doing so. Unfortunately, they seem the only people trying to actually run a survey on it.
The data is a hell of a mess, so I can't be too confident: at least some MTFs report a drop in libido as making gynophilic relationships more viable, which isn't of interest to most people, and some new-found FTM attraction is probably 'just' a general libido increase (and some loss of attraction might be downstream of sexual function problems), and of course there's the social identity effects for any self-reports.
(To be clear, I don't think men actually have strong opinions about the size of a woman's labia, and it is sad, I guess, if women feel bad because they think their genitals look ugly. This is a kind of body positivity I can support.)
Agreed. There's a lot of weird hangups that people develop because of indirectly absorbed beliefs, that it seems like there's a lot of revealed preferences as not existing, available pretty widely? I know there's a lot of 'intrasexual competition' as an explanation, and maybe that's a thing for shoes, but there seems a lot of low-hanging fruit if only the genders could more comfortably talk between each other.
((Admittedly, there's also a lot of weird hangups that might develop as a result. The average straight guy probably doesn't go out of his way to look at testes, given self_made_human's complaint at the end of this post, but even androphilic women tend to find them funny-looking in ways that are vaguely sacrilegious to my perspective.))
I am used to you linking comics with a very... creative set of descriptions for genitals, so I suppose I was linking that terminology to that pattern.
That's fair. And apologies for the squick.
I think using positive punishment in order to create a conditioned response is just a very, very bad idea to do to people and can mess them up in ways that we don't fully understand. #JusticeForLittleAlbert
Yeah. There's still some small groups trying it for smoking cessation and addiction therapy, but even in that specific context it's controversial, and for a reason. When using it with sexual arousal, it seems like giving people really unpleasant BDSM kinks is kinda the best-case scenario, and broad hangups or extreme social discomfort more likely. But like the lobotomy, it was popular for a time.
Ok, this is one of your sentences I had to read thrice before I got it... It took me longer than I care to admit to understand you meant "repress" and not "keep a full stomach on", which are very much the opposite thing.
My apologies. This last interpretation is the correct one: of the small group of gay men who actively search out therapy to become less gay or more straight, a large majority either only find themselves 'less gay' in that they're able to go more time without a strong hunger for gay sex, or 'more straight' in the sense of having the ability to have sex with women but not the ability to enjoy it or to find it preferential to sex with men, and in both cases not being any more comfortable with their same-sex attraction.
This is separate from bihackers (mostly straight-to-bisexual-seeking), where there are a small number of unequivocal success stories who aren't sure if they became bisexual or just became comfortable being bisexual, a tiny number who had organic changes cause overt and undeniable differences in attraction (mostly trans people on hormones, kontextmashine's brain tumor), and then a large majority where it couldn't change their likely romantic (or grindr) focuses even as they became comfortable.
Wait, is the point that the 'most gay lite guy available' is a trans man with a vagina?
Uh... I was kinda trying to motion around really-really-feminine guys, regardless of the anatomical side; that's just a comic that's really explicit about it without being actual porn on the same page.
But it does apply there, too. I'd kinda naively expected trans men with vaginas to maybe be less psychologically difficult for a 'straight' man trying out gay sex, (and a lot of trans guys reasonably don't like being seen as training wheels), if only in a 'it's nothing you haven't seen fucked before' sorta way, but your specific reactions seem fairly common for guys who strongly prefer women. Even well before male pattern baldness or mastectomy, most normally-straight guys, no matter how much they've gotten used to the idea of men having sex, aren't into a bit of even soft and downy chest hair. Go figure on that one!
For that specific comic, with the warning that it's almost certainly too much information :
I mean, this doesn't not sound like someone's kink. We already live in a world in which gay hypnosis pornography exists.
Fair. And since I do have an actual orientation play kink, if one that doesn't overlap much with conversion therapy or orientation change (or mind control), so that also makes this whole matter complicated to talk about. I definitely don't want to mix real-world advice and smut-world logic, or pretend that pulling psychoanalysis from smut is going to give some broad and consistent view of human thought.
But I also have to recognize the limits of my introspection, so I can't just say I'm looking at the topic completely dispassionately, either for or against.
I never heard discussion of aversive practices, I didn't get the impression it was common or normal, or even really part of the same world.
Most of the information I've seen suggests that formal use of 'hard' aversive stimuli (eg, electric shocks, physical impacts, harsh chemicals) fell out of favor by the mid 1980s. There's claims of it since, but they tend to revolve around extremely marginal cults and/or really sketchy political activist backstories. Even before it was marginalized in the social conservative sphere, it was considered (probably reasonably!) as likely to backfire, end up with asexual or otherwise less-sexually-functional-than-before outcomes, or trigger even weirder behaviors in the Nicholas Cummings side of the sphere.
(Although I was under the impression van den Aardweg himself was prone to flirting closer than most talk therapy-focused groups: there's always some fuzzy edges between exercise as process versus exercise and punishment, but the whole Failed Male and Failed Social Relationship framework seemed prone to leaping off that edge, in addition to just being hilariously wrong in a number of cases I know firsthand.)
I should note that it did, factually, work in my case. I not only lost disordered urges but also became more stereotypically masculine, developed a greater interest in sports and the like. I'm happier for it.
Yeah, that's not unprecedented or unbelievable. I was trying to keep to the legal arguments above, but the factual side of this is an ungodly mess.
My impression is that there's a small portion of people (either bisexual or malleable for other reasons like their approach to sexuality or very pressing in the 'every hole is a goal' sense sex drives) for whom even the 'standard' form of Man Up works, or could probably even work themselves into a pretty wide variety of results in the Dodo Bird Verdict sense. There have been a few bihackers that were successful going the other direction, and happy with it, and I kinda do have to mention that there's a ton of guys who were perfectly straight and then spent some time in the furry fandom and discovered Oh No He's Hot.
But the flip side is that a lot don't, even within the small group who seek this out the hardest: a large portion who try are only able to shove down same-sex interests for short periods, or they're able to function with women but still crave men in ways that they're not really comfortable with. Likewise, you get bihackers that aren't grossed out by gay sex anymore, but wouldn't actually look out for the stuff, or might struggle to even top (or even top the 'most gay lite' guy available, cw: furry comic).
I'm not kidding when I say Cumming's 14% number seems really optimistic.
The flip side to that is that we've got a lot more tooling available, now. At the moderate level, there was a long-standing theory that gay guys just needed to have a couple good rounds of 'healthy' sex with a woman to Become A Man, and contra the invasive therapies and wireheading from erwgv3g34's older example, these days some gay guys can do it with a Little Blue Pill and a weekend in Vegas. It doesn't work -- a few still can't get it up or keep it up, and a much larger number can pump away and just don't really feel satiated at the end -- but it seems like it should be something that redefines how a lot of frameworks around everything here should go, and it really hasn't.
People having widespread changes to their sexuality as a result of hormonal supplementation is common, if not universal.
(At the more extreme, I'd expect rTMS to have some impact, and while I think experimenting like that is a terrible idea regardless of what you're trying to change your mind on, it's far from the most terrible idea to get massive support and grants. On the flip side, I can understand why both social conservatives and LGBT advocates think it's a really dumb weapon to invent and then leave around for someone else to mandate!)
On the flipside, with the possible exclusion of the Kaiser SF program, it's weird how messy "improved somewhat" is as a term of art. Does that mean they were still gay, just got perceived hypersexuality under control? Still gay, but could run on the masc4masc side of grindr? Still gay, but less conflicted about it? Could they now have sex with their wives, and if so did they enjoy it or see it as a chore? Or did they have reduced same-sex attraction, in the sense that they jorked it to gay porn instead of cheating on their significant other? Because some of these endpoints -- even and maybe especially if they are desirable for the patients in question -- seem like they could be confronted in ways that don't revolve around 'changing orientation' as the central result, rather than a rare side effect.
Even assuming as a given the whole progressive mainstream philosophy as true, there’s a lot of this stuff that could be relevant and interesting and important, completely divorced from sexual orientation change, and they’re not looking into it deeply either.
gattsuru
6d ago
Do you see any more interesting cases on the horizon for this term?
Absolute biggest is the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara. Probably drops last day of the term, between the late sitting and its controversial nature win or lose. The Trump EO is less obviously crazy than it seems at first glance, and Native Americans needing a separate statute for automatic citizenship is both a good argument in Trump's favor and what should be the correct solution here, but it's literally unprecedented stare decisis issues and I think it ends up with Roberts punting to Congress if anything is gonna change, maybe two dissenters. Other immigration cases are pretty well-known and not hugely likely to be ground-shaking. Noem v. Al Oltro Lado is gonna blow up and also be just embarassingly stupid.
Trump v. Slaughter is the big independent agencies question, and it's kinda a fact-specific mess, but whatever lines it draws are going to be weird and novel and probably impactful, if for stupid reasons. And the media's gonna love the name.
There's a Voting Rights Act case, it's going to Alito unless he pissed multiple other justices off in the last couple weeks (possible; he was trying to throw Robinson to overboard, and with some cause), and it's going to be a massive culture war touchpoint. I'll admit I don't pay a lot of attention to that caselaw, though, and it's possible it vanishes into paroxysms of technicalities. Bost, already released, falls into a similar boat - it's a good thing and important that questionable laws re: voting processes can be challenged, but I don't think the specifics of that case matter much.
For already-argued gun cases, the two big ones are Wolford (Hawaii's "vampire rule") and Hemani ("possession by drug addict" with a ton of other background stuff). Wolford's a gimme and unfortunately also likely to be extremely limited to its four corners as a result -- it's the exact type of law Bruen specifically said not to do, and SCOTUS only granted on the tightest limits of that question -- but Hemani (to my surprise!) is looking like it could be closer or even favorable rather than the pro-gun-control shutout I expected.
Do you see anything that's likely to get granted cert this term? Especially any gun cases?
Likely? Hard to say.
Trans stuff: Foote v Ludlow is getting a lot of relists; it's basically the question in Mirabelli, squarely presented (if in the most culture-war-heavy loading), the lower court decisions were a charlie foxtrot, there's a messy circuit split. But the facts are contested (and not just whether the kid is genderqueer: the school argues that the 'secret transition' policies might not exist, kinda?), and 303 Creative seems to have given SCOTUS more caution on that. But
There's a few qualified immunity / excessive force cases that are popping up, though I'm pretty convinced that's the libertarian equivalent of Lucy with the football, even compared to gun stuff. I think there's a few cert petitions up around voting policies, but I follow those very loosely.
For gun stuff, there's a bunch of them all scheduled for 4/17 now, but that's not really much info. From most to least likely cert (or GVR)...
Hardware cases: Grok has Duncan v. Bonta around 40%, and it's gotten GVR'd before. I'm... not quite so optimistic, given Snope. Still, Duncan (and Gators and Viramontes and Lamont and Higgins, all getting constantly relisted) are in many ways the last real chance to handle this case as a matter of first impression: every circuit that's going to have a hardware ban has something on final judgement coming up or resolved. Anything after this will get much more circumscribed legal and factual analysis, not to mention how much it would radicalize even the moderates post-Snope. Benson in D.C.'s left a circuit split, technically, even if it's certain to get en banc'd? But Benson's ultimately an as-applied challenge, significantly more controversial than any Safe Professional Nice Guy that SAF and such have brought for their carefully farmed cases, and it's DC. As ironic as it would be for Heller's Gun Question to end up before SCOTUS again over a decade later after Heller II, it just would be a weird case to wait for. But Roberts and Kavanaugh may just want to punt forever.
Concealed carry permits: Gardner is a potential sleeper: critical and strictly federal question, extremely gun-friendly facts, and ultimately is trying to throw an innocent woman in prison for not having a license she couldn't even apply to get. But the facts are hugely specific, it's something that could be thrown as requiring a futile expression and remanded, and SCOTUS has ducked on variants of this question before. It's also a major underdog: Gardner had to file in forma pauperis before the normal gunnie sphere even heard about the case, though she thankfully has real representation now.
Public transportation carry: Schoenthal's also up for cert, but it's an even longer shot. The lower circuit opinion cut an absolute hole in Bruen, but it's not even unusually bad on that at this point, and while public transportation is important, it's important in a way that the justices are near-certain to flinch from.
Prohibited persons: there's an absolute mess of them, they're almost all ugly and controversial cases, so I'd love to say zero shot from a court that ducked questions like "are counterfeit cassettes signs of future violence". But there is Hemani. On the gripping hand, the feds have (temporarily) put an appeal and reversal process for federal prohibited persons, so there's even more reason to punt the question here.
gattsuru
6d ago
The statute provides for a fine, probation, or loss of license for a licensed therapist from practicing "conversion therapy", defined as:
... any practice or treatment by a licensed physician specializing in the practice of psychiatry that attempts or purports to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.
with exceptions for :
Acceptance, support, and understanding for the facilitation of an individual's coping, social support, and identity exploration and development, including sexual-orientation-neutral interventions to prevent or address unlawful conduct or unsafe sexual practices, as long as the counseling does not seek to change sexual orientation or gender identity; or [a]ssistance to a person undergoing gender transition
The state further argued, not very credibly, that the law only really would apply to specific changes to sexual orientation or gender identity, and not changes to gender expressions or sexual attraction despite the clear text of the statute. In theory, it would also prohibit trying to teach a straight man how to be gay? Since the law was never applied, it's hard to say much about either hypothetical.
The plaintiff here was only asking in regards to cases where the client asked for that specific assistance, so this decision could plausibly be read to apply only when the client is specifically asking for not-queer/trans advice, though that's going to depend on what the lower court does when (if) issuing the injunction.
gattsuru
6d ago
Essentially, if you were a social conservative considering a career in family or teen therapy, for almost a decade and a half, it's been open and common knowledge that these laws were present, informed a variety of professional accreditation bodies, and would be used as evaluation criteria during training and mentorship programs. The prospective therapist would be faced with patients who would want advise, the therapist want to give what they believed to be correct advise, and they would be required to give what they believed to be wrong advise or risk their entire future professional career. Depending on area of focus, local demographics, workload, and specific philosophy, a rough Fermi estimate gives a monthly or every-other-month basis?
((Assume 20 scheduled slots a week, an average of two clients per slot, gives 160 patients per month; demographic estimates for LGBT from 2012 was 3%, so five LGBT clients a month, but presumably not all of them will be having issues related to sexual orientation, and not all of those issues will be solved by 'calm down on the gay/gender' stuff even by the most social conservative perspective. The rate's a lot faster if you filter for specific fields or use more recent demographic numbers.))
Because there's a long training pipeline and a large monetary investment for therapists - Colorado requires a Master's degree and two thousand hours of post-graduate training for at least some categories - that can't be readily transferred, these incentives push people away very early in their career. There's a wide variety of other problems behind the pipeline issues, but it's still a cause for some of the pipeline issues, and many of them feed on themselves such that each marginal restriction makes the next more capable of dissuading potential outsiders.
gattsuru
6d ago
It's definitely possible. I've been wrong on that in Fulton, but the facts of this case are so open-ended and the potential impact so wide, there's more cause to do so.
gattsuru
7d ago
Trumpism doesn't even abide its own stated values and principles.
That's a fascinating retreat from "it is basically impossible to mount an intellectually respectable defense of him or his presidency" or ""Trump Derangement Syndrome" is overwhelmingly an intellectual escape hatch for Trump supporters."
Yes, political movements are vast, they contain multitudes, make dumb decisions or compromises. Jtarrou posted -- literally days before you nailed this jello 'thesis' to the wall -- that Trump could well be in the wrong here. Trumpists repeatedly point to how the administration has to be bullied into keeping to its claimed positions, especially in relation to immigration and sometimes at significant cost (though I think Vivek's eventual Ohio loss is overdetermined).
Neither of those facts support the original claim you made.
[disclaimer: I'll try to keep personal feelings and experiences out of this one, simply because I don't think most readers here are going to want to hear it, but it will inevitably color my takes.]
LGBT Talk / Conversion Therapy: Chiles v. Salazar
On matters of sexuality and gender, Ms. Chiles’s clients, including minors, come to her with different goals in mind. Some “are content with” their sexual orientation and gender identity and seek assistance only with “social issues, family relationships,” and the like. In cases like those, Ms. Chiles does not try to persuade her clients to “change their attractions, behavior, or identity,” but aims instead to help them address their stated goals. Other clients, however, come to her hoping to “reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with [their] bod[ies].” And in these cases, too, Ms. Chiles seeks to help her clients reach their own stated objectives. In doing so, she does not prescribe any medicines, perform any physical treatments, or engage in any coercive or aversive practices. All Ms. Chiles offers is talk therapy.
In 2019, Colorado adopted a law prohibiting licensed counselors from engaging in “conversion therapy” with minors. The State reports that it adopted the law “in response to a growing mental health crisis among Colorado teenagers and mounting evidence that conversion therapy is associated with increased depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts.” Any Coloradan who thinks a licensed counselor is engaging in conversion therapy may file a complaint with a regulatory board. A complaint, in turn, triggers a disciplinary review process that can yield a fine, probation, or the loss of a license.
Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy, as applied to Ms. Chiles’s talk therapy, regulates speech based on viewpoint, and the lower courts erred by failing to apply sufficiently rigorous First Amendment scrutiny.
The opinion, by Gorsuch and joined by a somewhat surprising seven other justices, is pretty standard free speech fare: the statute bans one view and not the other, the state offers little if any historical or legal support for its ban, and it's both an outlier and a recent outlier. The state tried to compare the ban here to requirements to disclose factual, noncontroversial speech during commercial activities, and ran into a brick wall when the case formalizing that standard did a Solomon-level splitting to start with.
The concurrence, by Kagan and joined by Sotomayor, tries to cabin this ruling to its four corners, and saying that viewpoint-neutral restrictions on medical speech would have a much lower bar to pass. Where the state here banned only one side of a controversial topic, but encouraged the other, a law that merely banned this topic in this context entirely could merely need evidence that the state's interests were significant enough and connected enough. Given that we're talking Colorado, here - home of Masterpiece Cakeshop - it's not impossible that the state will try to squeak a neutral-in-theory rule under this view.
It's... somewhat difficult to imagine what that would look like, though. Kagan, during oral arguments, motioned toward a theoretical law that prohibited violating the standard of care, but that would be so wide as to revive the nondelegation doctrine, not least of all because that can range from a creature of statute to a PDF thrown together by randos to five competing and conflicting opposing philosophies. A genuine universal ban by counselors on LGBT-related talk therapy would impact the LGBT movement far more than it would social conservatives. The Colorado statute here specifically excluded "Assistance to a person undergoing gender transition" for several reasons, but the necessity for such therapy before most reasonable doctors would recommend surgical or serious chemical interventions is no small part of it. Restrictions on types of therapy might be more easily be tailored to only hit one side or the other, but while aversive- or confrontational-focused conversion therapy are common focuses for progressive outrage (whether the underlying incident was genuine or not), they're both little-used and little-liked even by social conservatives now, and a restriction that leaves sexual orientation change talk therapy on the table is likely to be seen as an unacceptable compromise.
The dissent is, no surprise, Jackson, and it's a doozy:
“[T]here is no right to practice medicine which is not subordinate to the police power of the States.”
There are steelmen to the Colorado law. Chiles does not contest it as applied to aversives, and even if they did work, they're well-within the bounds of behaviors that states have long-regulated (and which social-conservatives have argued for regulating as recently as Skrmeti). A lot of these programs don't work, don't seem to care that they don't work, and are unwilling to consider alternative approaches that would fit their goals or the goals of their patients but would not match expectations (caveat: not all of them, and some like the SF Kaiser clinic might have been a little more open-minded than the already-libertine-seeming publicly-disclosed records). There are a mass of complicated First Amendment caselaw, epicycle on epicycle, that have left too many opportunities for motivated justice to find outlier or non-representative historical support for hilariously unconstitutional arguments.
Jackson's dissent bulldozes them. She tries to draw the statute here as merely incidentally restricting speech coincidental to restrictions on conduct, by defining conduct to include wide varieties of speech so long as the regulators motivations were pure. Her view of the First Amendment and this statute do not merely condone prohibitions far broader than cruel or harmful ones. One note compares the law here to the speech requirements in Casey, where abortion providers were required to give 24-hour notice of the possible risks and complications of procedures - but the law in Casey specifically required providers to give both the risks of abortion and carrying the fetus to term (and other alternative procedures).
It's just a mess, and it's not just me saying that: Kagan and Jackson have dueling footnotes over it.
I'm genuinely confused what Jackson's goal is, here. Bulverism's a fun sin, and all, but for all I've been unimpressed by her Munsingwear asides, I'd at least expect some sort of deep strategic or tactical focus, and it's not just me finding it jank at best (cw: ai analysis of legal documents, aka worth about as much as you paid for it). If the best she's aiming for is to throw the First Amendment to the proverbial wolves of whatever third-party organization can define professional standards, it seems a dissent like this will only motivate people to burn those orgs down faster, and damn whatever happens to the commons in the process.
Some smaller notes:
- Colorado tried to moot this case at the last moment, again, and the law has (supposedly) never been actually brought to bear. Part of Chiles surmounting that particular barrier is clearly support from SCOTUS (and Colorado's defense not focusing much on the mootness argument), but it's also partly downstream of Colorado seemingly not knowing or understanding what they were trying to moot: the final briefs are entirely talking past each other.
- There's a more subtle problem that came up repeatedly in oral arguments, and in strangely absent in the final opinion: whether the law would apply to counselors, outside of the context of treatment. The state argued, at length, that it would not, just as it would not apply to non-licensed paid counselors (such as life coaches). I'm glad that SCOTUS didn't take it as an out -- there's a basically no coherent or consistent way to make the distinction work in practice -- but it's weird that it only gets mentioned as evidence that this regulated speech-qua-speech, because it doesn't really fit well there (indeed, this section of the opinion, pg 17, seems to conflate whether the state admitted that other people could give the same advise, with whether other people could lawfully act on the advise).
- "JUSTICE ALITO: Three generations of idiots are enough?" Bell is still pretty clearly on the minds of SCOTUS, even if no one else of importance puts it high on the list. Hard to tell how much it's genuinely left them worried about following consensus off a cliff, rather than a tool to say they think consensus has gone off a cliff, but still bizarre given the case's status.
- (As the mirror to Jackson's showboating, there's a section of the opinion that has Alito's fingerprints all over it, where the opinion points out that Colorado's idea of deference to medical consensus would have once permitted not just Bell-style eugenics, but specifically against recognizing homosexuality as acceptable. I'm... skeptical that this will be persuasive to anyone who's not already sold on the free speech arguments. The simple response of 'but my side isn't wrong' hits too hard, here.)
- I'm generally skeptical of the LGBminusT perspective where trans stuff is primarily or solely an anchor, but I think it's very unlikely that that this case ends up here without the specific context of original-gender affirmation therapy focusing on minors. Even strong advocates of sexual orientation change therapy don't argue for a sizable success rate -- Nicholas Cummings rather infamously claimed an 67% success rate, of which only 20% (aka <14% of total) actually changed orientation rather than calmed the fuck down about being gay, and that for a sample with heavy selection effects -- while the persistent rates for very young children and gender stuff are a lot more favorable to social conservatives.
- This isn't going to end everything, one way or the other. Trivially, this is just at the motion for preliminary injunction stage, and technically speaking it's just a remand for the lower court to issue a preliminary injunction. You'd think that would be a nitpick, but wouldn't be the first time.
- One of Jackson's mentions is to Mathew [sic] Shurka's past experiences with sexual orientation conversion therapy, which reading the full background happened under an organization then called JONAH. Emphasis on the past tense, though, since it's been defunct since 2015. Because it got sued into rubble, under a legal theory near-certain to survive the logic of this case. At the time, there were widespread ground preparation for similar lawsuits. In an ideal world, versions focused on the actually-scammy organizations would become prominent and leave better therapists and providers to more seriously consider and describe the limits of their capabilities and theories. I'm not optimistic that there will be good target selection: even at the time, the feds were already getting aimed at other orgs that, while near-certainly wrong, weren't so obviously lying about it. And, of course, this law wouldn't have applied to JONAH or People Can Change (now Brothers Road), either.
A bigger note: Even on the strict law-of-the-case matter, this is going to be a mess. There's been active lawsuits dating back to at least California's SB 1172 in 2012, which was upheld by the Ninth Circuit in 2013, in a case that SCOTUS named and shamed in 2017. There's been a circuit split since 2020's Otto v. City of Boca Raton; cases had reached SCOTUS as far back as 2014, and as recent as 2023, only to have cert denied. 23 states have laws that are near mirrors of this one, another 4 states have partial variants. One was overturned days after SCOTUS granted cert in this case. I... do not expect clarity from the First, Second, Third, or Ninth Circuit in the next year, outright. We might not know for the Tenth Circuit, or just the bounds of Colorado, specifically, in a year.
From a legal realism perspective, it doesn't 'matter'. This specific law hadn't been enforced yet, and indeed (despite that decade-plus legal limbo and wide spread), I couldn't find any clear cases of legal enforcement. If a licensing board was going to pull a therapist's card over this sorta thing, they can readily and rapidly find other fig leafs causes, even while focusing on the exact same therapy.
From a more pragmatic one than even that, though, the court's intransigence seems likely to have a longer-term impact. At minimum, this points to a no-go-zone for a philosophy, and one that's been allowed to sit for well over a decade: whatever natural resistance the psychiatric world might have toward social conservatives, this one there on top of that, and coincidentally no one in good standing with the APA will ever argue in favor of these policies, a note that should be relevant even or especially if they are clearly wrong. Therapists are more law-abiding than average (at least on the job), and even a purely illusory law will lead the marginal therapists to be just that little bit more cautious, even if only in extreme outlier cases.
gattsuru
8d ago
There are people who genuinely gone off their gourd re: Trump, but he provides an incredible amount of "attack surface" to critics, to the point where it is basically impossible to mount an intellectually respectable defense of him or his presidency that still appeals to widely held ideas about how government ought to operate.
That's wrong for any definition of 'intellectually respectable' or 'how government ought to operate' that doesn't mean 'liked by progressives', and I say that as someone with no small number of frustrations with the administration from the right and left.
Washington Science Fiction Association. Along with the similarly-named World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) and Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA, no I don't know why), they were kinda on the other side of the Sad Puppies on the whole Hugo Award wars from a decade ago. Some stories are written 'for' a specific space, and just as you don't give a dog-lover a Newbery Medal-winning story, a lot of people who found Gentleman Jole annoying won't like The Tainted Cup.
Each of the three has a certain flavor of story that really glues into their particular social environment - WSFA tends heavily toward a lot of vaguely neuroatypical mystery stories with box-checking social awareness checks - whether because the author likes that sorta thing themselves or because they were trying to cater to their awards or both. I'd expect more the former here, since WSFA's mostly a short story place and The Tainted Cup isn't, but it's one of those things that pulls you away from the world-building when you see the pattern.
gattsuru
8d ago
Finished The Tainted Cup. Good, prose quality fell off a little toward the end, resolution was reasonably clever. It's got WSFA syndrome, but only to the extent it's obvious why it was written that way, rather than suffering from being written that way.
Bell's And We Are Not Saved. I bought it a few years ago when having a discussion with ymeskhout, as a crux example of how a lot of things that Rufo gets accused of being dishonest about actually happened, but largely left it on the shelf. Was going to try a deep crunch into how this sort of work smuggles false or misleading claims by clown-nose-on and clown-nose-off between academic work and 'popular writing', but my notes aren't really coming together in any real readable narrative, even presuming anyone else would care enough about it. There's some value to seeing what tools of persuasion are being used, here, to distinguish the honest from the malicious or misleading, but I could have done that with Rufo's writing for free.
For fun, Eldridge and Deveau's Game Over, from this discussion. It's so heavily and clearly written for women -- weirdly, despite a front cover that looks like standard male gaze smut -- that it's not that sorta 'fun', but looking at how the prose and social interactions work is still enjoyable.
gattsuru
8d ago
self_made questions the generalizability of what I describe but in my experience it's universal.
I wouldn't say universal: there's no few people who either don't feel it at all, only feel it to the sense that it's a fun psychological (or erotic) toy to play with, or actively enjoy the sense of being desired by someone 'better than them in all the ways that matter' or being able to support someone who's 'traditionally' masculine to do things that wouldn't work otherwise.
((And, conversely, I've absolutely known cisgender straight women who have complexes about their men being too much taller than them, and straight guys panicking about a prospective wife making more money than them, which is still seen as a masculine trait despite everything else going on.))
I understand it well enough that the stereotypical version can be a fun kink, but either it's transmuted into 'we're good at different things' - I'll do the home defense and house repair/troubleshooting, pretty much anyone else on the planet will do better than I can at spatial layout and almost any guy will beat me in an arm-wrestling contest - or I don't really grok it at the same level that most people do. And I sub for women, too, so not exactly representative for the gay ethos.
That said, I do recognize that a lot of people feel it, and a lot of more masc and masc-seeking gay guys feel it a lot more often.
This... gets complicated.
The standard process, right now, is that the surrogate gives birth, the baby and mother are immediately separated, and the surrogate spends the next 24-72 hours recovering in a separate room. Sometimes surrogates are willing to work with the fathers for some time afterward, but for commercial surrogates that's usually a (possibly virtual) meetup a couple times a year at best, and among compassionate surrogates the optimistic case is more often 'stranger who did daddies a favor' than getting six weeks with the kid and two dads to help during recovery before becoming an aunt.
((And then there's the coercive power of large amounts of money, the often-invasive genetic screening, the difficult hormonal supplements and common-place use of a separate donor egg.))
It's at least imaginable that there could be better processes. If I were writing things a utopia, a world where surrogacy and donors are appreciated and common, where they can become pillars of the community as connection points across varied families, and where they're seeing their kids on a monthly or weekly basis during childhood, would all be nice. You don't have to be Ursula Le Guin or a pregnancy fetishist prefer the aesthetics of it. Very rarely, it does happen.
But it's not clear that it could scale. It's not a coup-positive solution, it's a 'rebuild human psychology' solution.
The insistence that the surrogate have little contact with the child after birth is sometimes about greedy parents wanting to maximize bonding, but it's also a clear defense mechanism that surrogates very much want. (This can go to extremes that are a little surprising to me; many surrogates apparently won't pump milk even for significant compensation, and it's pretty common for gay parents to want more contact between the kid and the mother.) Compassionate surrogates often find themselves having to make hard decisions when their career, or a father's career, moves five hundred miles away. People just change, and in a world where 50% of marriages end in divorce, it's hard to complain that surrogates and fathers don't want face legal issues nearly as complicated as a divorce just because they were too close to the mom.
It's not a fun problem!
More options
Context Copy link