rae
A linear combination of eigengenders
User ID: 2231
rae
3hr ago
First let me obligatorily clear my throat and say I appreciate your willingness to participate here in what I know is a fairly hostile environment for you despite our rules.
Thanks! Maybe I’m a bit oblivious but I don’t detect that much hostility towards me personally, in fact many times I’ve been disappointed that I can’t seem to get into a proper argument with a gender critical person.
See, even the moderate, normal, well behaved trans people will generally be reluctant to criticize the strident activists,.the cancel mobs, the social censure that falls on anyone who clears their throat and says maybe trans women shouldn't be put in women's prisons.
I’ve been happy to criticise them here I think, and I’m no different in real life.
If I were allowed to just admit "Look, I don't really think you're a woman and we can disagree about trans women in sports and JK Rowling, but I'll respect your pronouns and I honestly do want you to live your best life however you wish to," that would be fine.
I’m perfectly fine with you admitting that you don’t think I’m a woman. I might try to convince you that between “a woman is an adult female human that produces large gametes” and “a woman is anyone who says they are one”, there’s other definitions that have some usefulness.
Going back to this site’s rationalist roots, I feel like Big Yud’s classic post on bleggs and rubes applies here. Like what are you saying when you say you don’t think I’m a woman? Is it “for me, women refers to adult female humans, and you’re not in that category”, is it “I can’t override the part of my brain that sees you as a guy”, is it “I will not behave towards you the way I behave towards women because that goes against my beliefs”?
I feel like both the pro-trans and anti-trans camps are acting as if the debate is just about who gets to have the woman category and the man category, and then all the rest, prisons, sports, bathrooms, labelling sexual attraction, will magically get resolved.
Is a man gay for being attracted to a trans woman? No, because trans women are women! Yes, because trans women are biologically male! Well, both of those answers are kinda stupid, and are the result of ideologies trying to force reality into man-made categories instead of trying to find the actual question.
Because if you define gay as “person with XY chromosomes attracted to another person with XY chromosomes”, it’s not necessarily wrong, but it might not be useful. You’re going to get into scenarios just as absurd as defining gay as “person who says they’re a man, attracted to a person that says they’re a man”, where you can be a man insisting he’s straight while enthusiastically sucking the dick of someone that looks just like a hairy bearded man because “Hey, she’s a pre-transition MtF and trans women are women!” or “Hey, she’s an adult female human, still a woman even if she got phalloplasty, top surgery, has been on testosterone for 20 years and is in the top 1st percentile of height for women!”
So whenever I am interacting with a trans person, besides having to suppress the occasional eye rolls at the inevitable water-testing declarations to claim ideological space (never met a trans person who didn't do this at least once), I have to be prepared for what happens if I am caught out.
Well, what does it mean for you to be caught out? Is it them flat out asking questions, like “do you think trans women belong in men’s prisons” or “what did you think of Lia Thomas?” and waiting expectantly for you to say the politically correct answer? That’s shitty behaviour and I’m sorry if that’s been your primary kind of interaction with trans people.
Maybe it’s a social circle difference, maybe it’s a European thing, but the trans people I know, myself included, don’t do this. In real life, I never introduce myself with my pronouns or whatever, I don’t talk about being trans, or related political issues, unless I’m explicitly asked. In a perfect world I wouldn’t even be trans, and I’m immensely grateful that I have many relationships where it just does not come up, ever.
rae
15hr ago
Where we conveniently have no statistics or even informal obsevrations to back or contradtict your claims with.
You don’t notice the common theme here?
One of the issues being raised in this thread is that white middle class trans activists are claiming to be at risk of violence and murder when the stats show the victims are overwhelmingly Black, Hispanic and Middle Eastern. I don’t think you can deny the latter?
Or the whole "trans" fad, the entire social contagion and online trend, just dies out altogether, and the violence and discrimination go away with it.
And why would it die out? It might return to pre-2000s levels if the online trend goes down, but short of a global catastrophe I don’t see why people would stop wanting to transition. It might even increase in popularity with future improvements in biomedical technology.
rae
1d ago
To the extent that this is my hobby horse, all I mean is that I sometimes discuss it on a pseudonymous internet forum and on my blog. Frankly, I think I have my priorities in order.
That’s fine, again it was genuine curiosity, not me trying to discredit you.
Why?
In my opinion, the increased attention, both positive and negative, has made things worse for trans people. I don’t want to have trans scissor statements in the media so that woke people can show their support, I don’t want pronouns in bio, I don’t want my medical condition to be in the spotlight and have it become politicised with everyone having to have a take on it. I want people who are indifferent, not allies who go out of their way to make me feel “accepted”.
rae
1d ago
In my defense, I’d have the same reaction to a westerner with no links to the topic regularly attending pro-Palestine marches or an Irish person attending BLM rallies.
But also, I personally want people to be less interested in trans issues, so it would be in my benefit to have you care less about this.
Caring about the people affected by an issue, even if it doesn't affect me personally? I thought we used to call that "empathy".
But your attention is limited and you have to pick your battles, so why this one? Effective altruist types will go by maximum impact/effort and end up donating 10% of their income to shrimp welfare, but most of us generally have to have a reason to care about a specific topic, and I think it’s important to look at why you’re invested in a specific cause.
Like if you’re an Irish person marching for BLM, it’s useful to realise whether you are actually doing it because you care about African Americans, or because it was the trendy thing to do.
rae
1d ago
Is your position that white Western trans women are at an elevated risk of murder -- possibly even a very high one -- but it just doesn't rise to the level of "extremely"?
I don’t have a strong position this to be honest. As @hydroacetylene said below, many white western trans women probably fit the “basement dweller” archetype which significantly reduces the risk of murder. If trans people are (random number) 2x more likely than cis people to get murdered walking a random street at night, but 5x less likely than cis people to take that kind of stroll where they’d be exposed to that risk, does that count?
Again, I don’t know. I do know that I feel more uncomfortable in many situations now than before, so I’m more cautious. Maybe my risk of murder/general violence actually went down because I was completely oblivious before and the increased precautions I take counterbalance the increased risk. Maybe I’m just being paranoid. It’s hard to tell.
It's also a bit of a motte and bailey: the bulk of trans activism focuses on white Western culture as performing some kind of trans genocide. Then when criticised, it becomes "Well, in this non-white, non-Western part of the world, these non-white-non-Western cultures are dangerous for trans people!" Again, you're not personally responsible for what other people are arguing; but you get how this is frustrating, right?
It’s equally frustrating for me, perhaps more so, because this kind of activitism is doing more harm than good. It’s unfortunately a common theme in identity politics, same thing happened with white middle class feminists.
rae
1d ago
when I see people proudly, confidently asserting things I know to be false (especially in a calculating, emotionally manipulative way), I feel this compulsion to push back and say no, that's not true, and I can prove it.
Yeah but people do this about everything! Covid affected everyone so it’s understandable, but trans people aren’t very common outside of a few specific scenes.
Mostly I’m curious because many gender critical people seem very invested in this issue, certainly more than I am, and it’s hard for me to understand why if you don’t have a personal link to it.
rae
1d ago
[Yes, it's my monthly post about my hobby horse.]
How did transgender issues become your hobby horse? Personal interactions with trans people (online or offline), gender issues of your own, workplace politics…? I’m generally curious as to why non-trans people get invested in this when it seems easy to ignore (especially now that it seems to be fading from the culture war issues du jour).
In any case I agree that white Western trans women probably aren’t at an extremely elevated risk of murder and that the trans genocide narrative is overblown, but even in the West, being trans can lead to discrimination, being ostracised by your friends and family, and make you more at risk of low level violence and hate crimes.
Likewise, many victims were murdered by friends, romantic partners or family members, which suggests that transphobic animus plays a minimal role in violence against trans people.
I’m not sure that follows. A romantic partner might commit murder because of the shame of being publically outed as being in a relationship with a trans gender person, and honour killings of trans people by their family members do occur. This is more common in cultures that do not accept trans people, which is why victims tend to be non-white or non-western. If transphobia becomes more widespread and accepted, it seems obvious that violence and discrimination will increase as a result.
The increased risk of violence and murder that trans people ostensibly face is sometimes used to justify other policy demands made by TRAs (e.g. trans women must be permitted to use ladies' bathrooms, because if they're forced to use the men's room they'll get beaten up).
As a trans woman, I don’t avoid the men’s room because of the risk of violence, but to avoid unnecessary attention and disruption when I’m in a public place. It’s not as dramatic and convincing as saying I need to use the men’s room or I’ll get punched, but eh, I don’t see why I should needlessly inconvenience myself, and a bathroom bill would just make things even worse due to false positives, enforcement issues, etc.
rae
1d ago
I’m not sure it’s a spectrum as opposed to two separate axes? You can have sex that’s steeped in power dynamics and extremely romantic, or get choked and then cuddle after.
rae
1d ago
BDSM offers a figleaf for that. Its culture is soaked in the language of consent, so it doesn't contradict feminism. Yep, wearing a collar and being your man's slave is empowering. BDSM offers a framework for picking and choosing what bits of power to keep and return. You can still have your own job, but do everything you husband says at home.
There’s many kinds of BDSM frameworks but as far as I know, the “doing everything your husband says at home” 24/7 dynamic is not typical and the average BDSM relationship is more about having “sessions/scenes” with explicit boundaries. But in either case consent isn’t a figleaf, it’s absolutely essential and it’s extremely, extremely unadvisable to do a scene without safe words and having talked about your limits.
BDSM is basically role play. You’re not rolling anything back or contradicting feminism, you’re playing at being a slave and you can stop at any time. Same with CNC, it’s a way to live out a fantasy that would be extremely distressing if it happened for real and you had no way to stop it. I’m not sure “empowering” is the right word to use, but you have a certain kind of power by voluntarily entering a dynamic as submissive, because in a way, the dom is performing for your pleasure, the pressure is on them to do a good job, and if they don’t, you can just stop the entire scene.
I had an ex who I was keeping on a leash. She really liked being given orders. One day I asked her to fetch me food a few too many times and she said "I wanted to be your girlfriend, not your servant!" I learned then when girls want to be submissive it's more like they want to be your pet than your maid.
It’s obvious to me but the point is for the scenario to be kinky, not practical. Not many subs would be turned on by being ordered to do their dom’s tax returns, which is probably what would happen if the scenario was real instead of just a fantasy for their sexual gratification.
rae
2d ago
While objection 1 is understandable, I don’t see how objection 2 makes any sense. Tokens are basically just possible actions, and a system that outputs an action and is conditioned on its previous outputs + external inputs (e.g. user replies, tool calls, compiler errors, results from a program, etc) seems conceptually very similar to how any intelligent agent works. What’s the alternative?
Although don’t have to sample tokens one by one either, with speculative decoding using multi token prediction or diffusion, but sampling multiple tokens at once doesn’t make models smarter, just faster.
rae
2d ago
It’s getting bit into a semantic debate but in that case dismissing LLMs as next token predictors doesn’t make sense. Yes, the action the LLM takes is still outputting the next token, but it’s no longer trained on outputting the correct next token given a preceding text, which is the source of many criticisms of LLMs - that it’s just a statistical pattern matcher, that it regurgitates its training data, etc.
rae
3d ago
Akchually, modern agentic LLMs get their capabilities in large part through reinforcement learning, next token prediction is just the first phase (or two) of training. Next token prediction is indeed insufficient if you want an AI that can self correct effectively.
rae
3d ago
((Living things might have developed consciousness as a side effect of an effective pain response, which LLM doesn't need to have... except then we're assuming every organism with a complex pain response is 'conscious', which makes the word meaningless again unless you feel really bad setting down mousetraps.))
Are there people out there saying mice aren’t conscious? I would understand saying that about insects, but I can’t think of a sensible argument that would deny any mammal consciousness (a non-brain dead one that is).
rae
3d ago
This is the classic AI effect. I think even if we get super intelligent robots that can outclass humans at literally everything we do, there will still be Gary Marcus types saying they aren’t really intelligent because they don’t make mistakes like humans do, or some other excuse.
In another thread, I echoed the idea that LLMs don't model the universe. So for example, if you play chess with an LLM, there's no model of a chessboard in the system, which is why it sometimes makes illegal moves.
That’s because the LLM doesn’t “see” the board and is effectively playing correspondence chess. I bet most humans who aren’t very well trained would also make illegal moves if they had to keep the whole board state in their head.
If you ask the LLM to print out the board in ASCII before doing a move, the problem is essentially solved.
Visual/spatial intelligence in AI agents is lagging behind pure text based reasoning of course, but I don’t think the arguments will change once we have proof that they have very accurate world models.
rae
3d ago
The archive link wouldn’t load for me so I can’t go in-depth about Dawkin’s viewpoint, but Gary Marcus is a hack who has been saying deep learning can’t possibly work for years, and now pivoted to shallow dismissals of LLMs and continually moving the goalposts when they inevitably beat his test questions “proving” they don’t have X capability.
I don’t see any reason to dismiss the possibility that LLMs have a form of consciousness, albeit extremely different from our own. It’s not something you can really test, the only consciousness that I can be sure of exists is my own, but I’m not sophistic enough to believe in philosophical zombies. If humans are conscious, then so are chimpanzees, dogs, and all the way down to nematodes. And if C. elegans with its 302 neurons experiences (some form of) consciousness, why not a trillion parameter LLM?
rae
4d ago
The key phrase is “put up with”, there’s still a limit on what people will tolerate. Many men might tolerate occasional emotional outbursts from an attractive enough woman, but not threatening him with a knife or destroying all his possessions. Likewise, a liberal woman might stick with a hot guy with a few conservative opinions on immigration and welfare, but not a full-on white nationalist who believes women are second class citizens and that abortion should be illegal.
I matched with this guy on Tinder, but when I found out he was MAGA I ghosted him
For many leftists and liberals MAGA is sufficiently repellent that yes, it can justifiably be the sole reason to reject someone. American politics have become enormously polarised and MAGA isn’t the same as milquetoast conservative viewpoints.
rae
6d ago
Platonic male friends, at least the bunch I have, have no problem whatsoever talking about what they've needed to do to get to where they are as an attractive mate, or about female fertility and how that informs their family planning and mate selection strategies.
Your platonic male friends are likely similar to you in worldview and personality. I think the average person, male or female, would find anyone saying things like “mate selection strategy” off putting. I don’t know what words you use when talking about these subjects to women, but even if you’re being careful, you’re probably giving off an overly analytical, clinical, impersonal vibe that most people don’t like to see applied to human relationships.
rae
8d ago
Powered exoskeletons (sorry, physical assistance devices) are advancing quite rapidly already. A lack of cheap strong labourers might encourage that further, and even decrease injuries long term.
rae
10d ago
Oddly enough, D&D is becoming more and more popular among women and queer people. I know a surprising number of D&D groups where cis men are in the minority.
rae
10d ago
It’s also something I feel men could easily get into! It might be a hard ask to get Mottizens to be interested into crochet, but surely writing systematic colour coded checklists and buying fancy Japanese notebooks has to appeal to guys who are somewhat on the spectrum.
rae
10d ago
I feel like half of these critiques imply that the only type of women are the pretty but annoying ones on tiktok and instagram or the mid versions of the same.
If you’re a terminally online man, that’s the only kind of women you’ll be exposed to. You’re going to be checking out baddies on instagram, not some woman sharing her hobonichi setup and fountain pen reviews.
rae
11d ago
Every. single. day. I am faced with a loud cultural message that (unattractive) men are expendable, mostly unwanted, dangerous, useless, and generally deserve to be lonely, poor, and depressed. And, as a kicker, that 80% or so of men are unattractive to women, so its the majority of them who are marked for evolutionary failure.
And why are you faced with this cultural message? Because you’re in a social media bubble designed for maximum engagement, and judging by how often you post about this topic, they’ve found exactly what content causes the most outrage for you. A feminist would get the exact opposite impression and their feed would amp up all the threats, and violence women face - there’s no lack of misogynist outrage bait nowadays to make you think the majority of men are Andrew Tate supporters. If you’re an environmentalist, you’ll see constant panic on how it’s the warmest year on record and the sea levels are rising and yet we’re emitting more CO2 than ever. Right-wing populists will see news about how immigrants are flooding the country and taking all our jobs and grinding the healthcare system to a halt.
I’m part of a minority that faces much worse vitriol than what you see about unattractive men. I can read article after article, post after post, even on this forum, about how I’m mentally ill, worthless, predatory, dangerous, and the percentage of the opposite sex that wouldn’t date me is much higher than 80%. But I don’t, not anymore, I don’t engage with that kind of content even though I would be entirely justified to, wouldn’t I? But I realised the vast majority of articles I was reading were written by insane people, that most people didn’t have those viewpoints, and that the only thing engaging with this content was doing was make me depressed, angry and full of self hatred.
Just delete the stupid apps. Talk to people, read a book, find another, more constructive topic to obsess over.
rae
12d ago
Rat-adjacent communities are surprisingly full of cults. Zizians, the people freaking out over Roko’s Basilisk, down to Big Yud himself cultivating a cult-ish vibe. If you lean left, aligned artificial superintelligence will grant you eternal life, whereas if you lean right, Jesus will.
Transgender women could be housed with the female population only if they’ve had bottom surgery, otherwise they go into protective custody in the male wing. I believe that’s the law in many countries right now including the UK, and it seems quite reasonable to me. What would your objections be to that?
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