sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Not a reaction of someone who is not even slightly worried.
Sure it is. Yudkowsky is exactly the sort of person who would be outraged at the idea of someone sharing what that person claims is a basilisk, regardless of whether he thinks the specific argument makes any sense. He is also exactly the sort of person who would approach internet moderation with hyper-abstract ideas like "anything which claims to be a basilisk should be censored like one" rather than in terms of PR.
Speaking or writing in a way where it's difficult to use your statements to smear you even after combing through decades of remarks is hard. It's why politicians use every question as a jumping off point to launch into prepared talking-points. Part of Yudkowsky's appeal is that he's a very talented writer who doesn't tend to do that, instead you get the weirdness of his actual thought-processes. When presented with Roko's dumb argument his thoughts were about "correct procedure to handle things claiming to be basilisks", rather than "since the argument claims it should be censored, censoring it could be used to argue I believe it, so I should focus on presenting minimum attack-surface against someone trying to smear me that way".
Again, I deleted that post not because I had decided that this thing probably presented a real hazard, but because I was afraid some unknown variant of it might, and because it seemed to me like the obvious General Procedure For Handling Things That Might Be Infohazards said you shouldn't post them to the Internet. If you look at the original SF story where the term "basilisk" was coined, it's about a mind-erasing image and the.... trolls, I guess, though the story predates modern trolling, who go around spraypainting the Basilisk on walls, using computer guidance so they don't know themselves what the Basilisk looks like, in hopes the Basilisk will erase some innocent mind, for the lulz. These people are the villains of the story. The good guys, of course, try to erase the Basilisk from the walls. Painting Basilisks on walls is a crap thing to do. Since there was no upside to being exposed to Roko's Basilisk, its probability of being true was irrelevant. And Roko himself had thought this was a thing that might actually work. So I yelled at Roko for violating basic sanity about infohazards for stupid reasons, and then deleted the post. He, by his own lights, had violated the obvious code for the ethical handling of infohazards, conditional on such things existing, and I was indignant about this.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Then the argument moves to, well isn't puberty blockers irrecoverable harm to the child because of sterilization just like cutting off an arm? I'd say no, the issue isn't the loss of tissue it's the loss of capabilities.
There is good reason to believe that puberty blockers permanently hinder brain development, which hormones during puberty play an important role in. Unfortunately there are zero randomized control trials examining this, and even less evidence regarding using them to prevent puberty entirely rather than to delay precocious puberty a few years, but they have that effect in animal trials:
The long-term spatial memory performance of GnRHa-Recovery rams remained reduced (P < 0.05, 1.5-fold slower) after discontinuation of GnRHa, compared to Controls. This result suggests that the time at which puberty normally occurs may represent a critical period of hippocampal plasticity. Perturbing normal hippocampal formation in this peripubertal period may also have long lasting effects on other brain areas and aspects of cognitive function.
That study also cites this study in humans which found a 3-year course of puberty blockers to treat precocious puberty was associated with a 7% reduction in IQ, but since it doesn't have a control group I wouldn't put much weight on it.
Similar concerns were mentioned by the NHS's independent review:
A further concern is that adolescent sex hormone surges may trigger the opening of a critical period for experience-dependent rewiring of neural circuits underlying executive function (i.e. maturation of the part of the brain concerned with planning, decision making and judgement). If this is the case, brain maturation may be temporarily or permanently disrupted by puberty blockers, which could have significant impact on the ability to make complex risk-laden decisions, as well as possible longer-term neuropsychological consequences. To date, there has been very limited research on the short-, medium- or longer-term impact of puberty blockers on neurocognitive development.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
You're comparing diagnoses per year for those 6-17 to number of children. You have to multiply the yearly figure by 12 for the whole time period. The U.S. population 6-17 is apparently 49,466,485, which would put the percentage who end up with gender-dysphoria diagnoses before the age of 18 at 1.02%.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
If Bach did not have fans when he was alive that seems to have more to do with when he lived than anything, I know Beethoven had fans. Or is he specifically talking about The Well-Tempered Clavier and not including more general fans of Bach's work, or for that matter modern fans of classical music? Because it seems like there are better factors than "badness" to explain the distinction: one or more of whether a work is serialized, whether a work is long, and whether a work is well-suited to additions by fans and other third-parties. Factors like those mean there is more to discuss on an ongoing basis, rather than just reading a book or listening to a specific piece, saying it's good, and that's it. Notice how elsewhere he has to group together "Japanese kiddie-cartoons" - because anime and manga are mostly a lot of different creator-written works, rather than a handful of continually reused IPs, most individual anime don't have a fandom, or only have a miniature fandom/discussion-group in the form of some /a/ and /r/anime threads during the season they air. Anime movies have even less. Similarly in the era of sci-fi short-stories there was a sci-fi fandom but not fandoms for individual short stories and little for individual novels.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
I haven't followed him closely, I mostly just heard about how he has lost so many viewers and subscribers that he did a "Under 800k Subscriber Special" (and previously did a "Under 900k" one) in which he apparently blames transphobia and claims Youtube suppresses LGBT content. I also heard that his wife left him. (Supposedly he has said that she decided to leave him for another guy. I know they were already in an open relationship before the trans stuff but I don't know what role either that or the trans stuff might have played.) A quick search finds this thread discussing the channel decline. Hurting his Youtuber career and losing his wife isn't as bad as Cosmo/Narcissa's degeneration and he still makes good money on Patreon, so maybe saying "blow up" was going too far. But I remember when he was a big mainstream gaming personality who was incidentally a SJW, and now I get the impression that it has consumed his whole self-conception and narrative of his life while leading him to do self-destructive things.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Tiktok videos regarding something only tell you about the people who cared enough to make or watch Tiktok videos about that thing. Not only is counting Tiktok videos about some specific event much less rigorous than a poll, but it isn't even really trying to do the same thing as an opinion poll. I think the better explanation would be that, as my comment below suggests, there is greater polarization. India has more passionate anti-Hinduism than the vast majority of countries, a Youtube video about Hindu atrocities would presumably do better there than America. That doesn't call into question the statistics saying India is 80% Hindu.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
"Immunized" is taking it much too far given how the percentage of teenagers who identify as trans/non-binary/etc. has exploded. And I would guess that, by most measures, their net positions on trans issues are more pro-trans as well. Rather I would say that they are much more polarized due to the increased salience of transgenderism and transgender ideology.
If your contact with the concept of transgenderism is learning that the T in LGBT refers to crossdressers and once hearing a joke about thai ladyboys, you are likely to be tolerant and not care about weirdos doing weirdo things. If instead it is seeing a whole friend group at school trying to convince a member that he's trans/non-binary because he has long hair and isn't masculine enough, or seeing an attention-seeking person go trans and police "misgendering", or encountering the trans part of the online SJW community, or seeing public figures like Cosmo/Narcissa and Jim Sterling blow up their lives, or at least hearing about it in the media with the constant drumbeat of pro-trans rhetoric and with news stories like MTFs competing in women's sports, you are going to approach the issue in a different way.
require gas, which is a fossil fuel – do I need to explain why fossil fuels are bad?
Gas stoves are burning gas to produce heat. This is dramatically more efficient than burning gas to turn a turbine to produce electricity to send over the electric grid before turning into heat. (Even the couple percent of gas lost to leaks is less than the 6% loss on sending electricity over the grid.) It's not like an electric car where power plants are much more efficient than a portable gasoline engine (plus regenerative braking) so electric cars end up being more efficient. Making heat is inherently very efficient because you're not fighting thermodynamics, making electricity isn't. As a result, under the electricity-generation mix currently typical in the U.S., induction stoves cause more CO2 emissions than gas stoves.
https://home.howstuffworks.com/gas-vs-electric-stoves.htm
The clear winner in the energy efficiency battle between gas and electric is gas. It takes about three times as much energy to produce and deliver electricity to your stove. According to the California Energy Commission, a gas stove will cost you less than half as much to operate (provided that you have an electronic ignition--not a pilot light).
Now, maybe the higher CO2 emissions to power induction stoves is worthwhile for whatever indoor air quality benefits there are. And maybe power-generation will change so that generating marginal electricity rarely involves spinning up a gas turbine. But remember stoves don't last forever, if this change doesn't happen for a while then the induction stove will emit more CO2 over its lifespan regardless. I get the sense that a lot of people are vaguely anti-gas-stove because they assume it causes more CO2 emissions due to directly burning a fossil fuel, even though this is the opposite of the case.
Regarding the indoor air quality aspect, it would be nice if there was a decent literature review of the issue, like Scott's "Much more than you wanted to know" series. As a matter of common-sense, it seems like gas stoves must be at least marginally worse. But from what I've read this doesn't seem dramatic enough to show up in aggregate health outcomes for more rigorous studies. The main difference is only in terms of nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, not the particulate matter you might expect. Most particulate matter comes from the food, so it's plausible that consistently using a range hood that vents to the outside is actually much more important than gas vs. induction. But it's hard to synthesize the available information into a general sense of how much of an issue it is.
Elections are a bad gauge because, if sufficiently democratic, they are close to being public-opinion polls. When people talk about wokeness being powerful, they usually mean it is disproportionately powerful compared to its popularity (or at least compared to its success, if they think public opinion on something is being driven by dishonest media coverage). It routinely gets institutions to act as if its dictates are universally popular, just the way society has decided things are done nowadays, even when they are unpopular or at least highly controversial. By comparison, essentially nobody talks about how pro-agriculture ideology is influential. When a public opinion poll finds that colleges discriminating against white/asian people is unpopular, but they do it anyway, that isn't cited as evidence that wokeness is weak. Now, it is true that elections have more direct impact than public-opinion polls. But lots of sources of power aren't elections - corporate policies, sympathetic media coverage, unelected government bureaucrats, etc. It didn't take an election for hospitals to ration healthcare based on racial "equity" or for the CDC/ACIP to recommend a COVID-19 vaccine-distribution plan that they estimated would result in thousands of additional deaths so that a larger fraction of those deaths would be white. So long as wokeness holds such a disproportionate influence over unelected institutions, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to assume it is waning just because it is unpopular with the general public and thus sometimes loses elections.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
An obvious but unmentioned reason for 4900 people to text the number is that they wanted to see if doing so would provide a continuation of the joke. Texting the message didn't provide an automated response, but it easily could have, and trying it out lets you see if it does. The same way that, for example, when Grand Theft Auto marketers spread around phone numbers of in-game business/characters, the vast majority of the people calling those numbers did so because they wanted to hear a funny answering-machine message, not because they thought they were real.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
He mentioned Soros, who is Jewish. Anti-semitic conspiracy theorists on /pol/ also don't like Soros, so complaining about him must mean DeSantis is dogwhistling to them. Unlike when people complain about the Koch brothers or Peter Thiel, which is just expressing justifiable anger at billionaires subverting our democracy.
On a largely unrelated note, it just occurred to me that the whole "vampire harvesting the blood of the young" smear directed at Peter Thiel (for the offense of investing in medical research companies that did longevity research investigating the thing where mice given blood transplants live longer) would 100% have been pattern-matched as "anti-semitic blood libel" if he was Jewish. Somehow I never made that connection before. Here's a list of articles I had saved for those unfamiliar:
Peter Thiel Is Interested in Harvesting the Blood of the Young - Gawker
Billionaire Peter Thiel thinks young people’s blood can keep him young forever - Raw Story
Peter Thiel Isn't the First to Think Young People's Blood Will Make Him Immortal - The Daily Beast
Peter Thiel is Very, Very Interested in Young People's Blood - Inc
The Blood of Young People Won’t Help Peter Thiel Fight Death - Vice
Hey, Silicon Valley: you might not want to inject yourself with the blood of the young just yet - Vox
Peter Thiel Wants to Inject Himself with Young People's Blood - Vanity Fair
Is Peter Thiel a Vampire? - New Republic
Non-state violence has essentially no possibility of indefinitely stopping all AI development worldwide. Even governmental violence stopping it would be incredibly unlikely, it seems politically impossible that governments would treat it with more seriousness than nuclear proliferation and continue doing so for a long period, but terrorists have no chance at all. Terrorists would also be particularly bad at stopping secret government AI development, and AI has made enough of a splash that such a thing seems inevitable even if you shut down all the private research. If at least one team somewhere in the world still develops superintelligence, then what improves the odds of survival is that they do a good enough job and are sufficiently careful that it doesn't wipe out humanity. Terrorism would cause conflict and alienation between AI researchers and people concerned about superintelligent AI, reducing the odds that they take AI risk seriously, making it profoundly counterproductive.
It's like asking why people who are worried about nuclear war don't try to stop it by picking up a gun and attacking the nearest nuclear silo. They're much better off trying to influence the policies of the U.S. and other nuclear states to make nuclear war less likely (a goal the U.S. government shares, even if they think it could be doing a much better job), and having the people you're trying to convince consider you a terrorist threat would be counterproductive to that goal.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
What would be accomplished during a "six-month-pause" that would make it worth the enormous difficulty of getting that sort of international cooperation, even if the petition had any chance of success at all? Why should people concerned about unaligned AI consider this the best thing to spend their credibility and effort on? It's not like "alignment research" is some separate thing with a clear path forward, where if only we pause the AI training runs we'll have the time for a supercomputer to finish computing the Alignment Solution. Alignment researchers are stumbling around in the dark trying to think of ideas that will eventually help the AI developers when they hit superintelligence. Far more important to make sure that the first people to create a superintelligence consider "the superintelligence exterminates humanity" a real threat and try to guide their work accordingly, which if anything this interferes with by weakening the alignment-concerned faction within AI research. (The petition also talks about irrelevant and controversial nonsense like misinformation and automation, the last thing we want is alignment to be bureaucratized into a checklist of requirements for primitive AI while sidelining the real concern, or politicized into a euphemism for left-wing censorship.) Right now the leading AI research organization is run by people who started off trying to help AI alignment, that seems a lot better than the alternative! To quote Microsoft's "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4" paper:
Equipping LLMs with agency and intrinsic motivations is a fascinating and important direction for future work.
Here is the baseline: if the first people to create superintelligence aren't concerned with alignment, there's a decent chance they will deliberately give it "agency and intrinsic motivations". (Not that I'm saying the Microsoft researchers necessarily would, maybe they only said that because LLMs are so far from superintelligence, but it isn't a promising sign.) Personally I'm inclined to believe that there's no reason a superintelligent AI needs to have goals, which would make "create a Tool AI and then ask it to suggest solutions to alignment" the most promising alignment method. But even if you think otherwise, surely the difference between having superintelligence developed by researchers who take alignment seriously and researchers who think "lets try giving the prospective superintelligence intrinsic motivations and write a paper about what happens!" matters a lot more than whatever "alignment researchers" are going to come up with in 6 months.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Your summary of the Grayson/Quinn conflict of interest is good, and illustrates some of the video's overt misrepresentations, but I'd note there is also dishonesty through omission. GG uncovered a lot of cases of game journalists engaging in undisclosed conflicts of interest, alongside other complaints like sensationalism and ideological witch-hunts against developers. For instance, very early on they discovered that Kotaku's Patricia Hernandez had repeatedly given coverage to both her friend and former roommate Anna Anthropy and to her former girlfriend Christine Love. Hernandez is now Kotaku's editor-in-chief. This image was circulating days before the Gamergate hashtag was even coined. (The expansion of the scandal beyond Grayson/Quinn is part of why people were eager to jump on the Gamergate hashtag when Baldwin coined it rather than continuing to use "Quinnspiracy", other hashtags were already being brainstormed and various strawpolls posted in the days prior to Baldwin's tweet.)
The articles on Deepfreeze are a decent summary from the GG perspective, with the one titled "Unfair advantage" being the one focused on personal conflicts of interest.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
He is an obvious crank (or troll pretending to be a crank) making terrible arguments, but your response is not a good one. I doubt there is anyone here who finds his arguments convincing, but if there was your post would not be a good reason to think otherwise. There are many people who believe that, for instance, they have lost a family member to the COVID-19 vaccine because he had a stroke months later or something. Many millions of people say they lost a family member to the vaccine if we go by the survey a while back and assume not all of them were people misreading the question (unfortunately I didn't save a link, it might have been posted here or somewhere else like Zvi's blog), implying numbers that are completely insane unless we assume that all the official studies and statistics are outright fake. For that matter, there are plenty of people who will tell you stories like "my father got the vaccine and had a heart-attack days later", something which is biologically plausible to attribute to the vaccine, and yet even then the statistics probably work out such that it is a coincidence most of the time. Their anger at vaccination-supporters for killing people they loved, though based on far weaker evidence, is in many cases just as sincere and wholehearted as yours. Those personal experiences and feelings aren't a convincing argument when they use them, and they don't become a convincing argument just because you are supporting a position that happens to actually be true.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Associating it with "violent homeless people" specifically is more plausible. Saying it had an "extraordinary effect on crime rates" doesn't seem plausible, and that is what I was mentioning Scott's post in response to. The majority of violent crime is from career criminals. It seems very difficult to argue that deinstitutionalization was responsible for the rise in the crime rate without evidence indicating most of those additional criminals are mentally ill (and seriously enough that they would have been institutionalized).
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Scott has a post arguing against this connection.
Reverse Voxsplaining: Prison and Mental Illness
What about that graph? It’s very suggestive. You see a sudden drop in the number of people in state mental hospitals. Then you see a corresponding sudden rise in the number of people in prison. It looks like there’s some sort of Law Of Conservation Of Institutionalization. Coincidence?
Yes. Absolutely. It is 100% a coincidence. Studies show that the majority of people let out of institutions during the deinstitutionalization process were not violent and that the rate of violent crime committed by the mentally ill did not change with deinstitutionalization. Even if we take the “15% of inmates are severely mentally ill” factoid at face value, that would mean that the severely mentally ill could explain at most 15%-ish of the big jump in prison population in the 1980s.
To render the argument statistically plausible it seems like you would need to both justify why the proportion of murderers who are mentally ill seems to have declined (the linked study is from Britain so you could try to see if it's different in the U.S.?) and why most of those in prison do not seem to be mentally ill according to screening surveys. Note that, though it isn't a significant part of his argument, Scott does cite the famous Rosenhan experiment which was very likely a fraud.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Like your prior posts about Chinese people, this amounts to you presenting a few anecdotes to make an argument so weak that it borders on incoherence. You seem to to saying a few cases where Jews were lawyers in supposedly important cases is proof of some sort of phenomenon, but what even is that phenomenon? Whatever it is, how could this incredibly meager evidence prove it, and shouldn't there be much better evidence available which would result in a more useful discussion?
Is the phenomenon that you are trying to prove that American Jewish people are more left-wing than the general public even when you control for "elite" status? Or more specifically, that they are more aligned with the sort of racial politics popular among the left in the U.S., perhaps because they were allied when discrimination against Jewish people was widespread and it became culturally self-perpetuating? Then why try to prove this with some random anecdotes about Jewish lawyers and support for Nixon rather than much stronger and more direct evidence like public opinion polls asking about those issues? And why treat "Jewish people are more left-wing" as some novel phenomenon you have to guess at from scratch, rather than demographic differences in politics being a well-known phenomenon that pollsters gather data on all the time? (Incidentally, left-wing "privilege" discourse and the assumption that differences in outcome reflect discrimination carries some unintended implications about Jewish success and arguably has similarities with some of the resentment that fueled historical anti-Jewish discrimination, not to mention specifics like Harvard admissions policies. A survey asking equality vs. equity questions might get some interesting results by seeing how much difference it makes to apply the same logic to Jewish people as part of the survey.)
Alternatively, is the proposed phenomenon something more specific or controversial than Jewish people having different political demographics for whatever reason? Are we talking about genetic differences, and if so what kind? E.g. if you propose Jewish people are genetically higher in Openness to Experience which got them allied with the left historically, wouldn't you again be better off with surveys rather than legal anecdotes? Are we talking about Jewish people (or some elite subset of them) getting secret nightly marching orders from the Elders of Zion, and if so shouldn't leaking or intercepting those orders be much better evidence? Are you even consciously thinking about the specifics of the phenomenon you are proposing, or are you just grouping together Jewish people as a unit and treating them as you would an individual? "I don't like George because look at these 3 cases of him doing something I dislike." might be a compelling argument about an individual, but when talking about groups of millions of people much better evidence is available and is required to determine anything meaningful.
The actual reason it was nominated was to mock If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love being a Hugo nominee in 2014. It's short so it's a quick read if you want to better understand why its nomination was mocked.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
I've never tried reading any "sympathetic to the monsters" Lovecraft-inspired fiction, but I would argue that Lovecraft himself was good at writing them in a way that was both alien/horrifying and understandable/sympathetic (in the cases where it served the purpose of the story), despite him writing horror in which it was almost never a primary emphasis. So if someone came away from Lovecraft wanting to write a sympathetic treatment without appreciating how Lovecraft himself did it, I strongly suspect they would be worse at it than he was. Most likely by revising Lovecraft antagonists until they are less alien or threatening than even cultures/political-factions/eras other than the author's own, let alone other species. Meanwhile, based on that description for The Litany of Earth, it sounds like the author gave the alien culture of "the 1920s U.S. government" less understandable and sympathetic motives than Lovecraft gave to most of his actual aliens.
Most obviously the protagonist of At the Mountains of Madness comes to appreciate the alien culture and history of the Elder Things through the art and other remnants they left behind and is outright sympathetic to them (which serves the narrative purpose of contrasting with the greater horror), but this applies to antagonists as well. The Great Race of Yith are scholars seeking after science/knowledge and their own survival, the Mi-go are also scientifically inclined and have the more mundane goal of mining resources, and ghouls mostly just want to eat/survive and sometimes serve the role of allies or neutral figures. The reader (and sometimes the characters) can appreciate the wonders and achievements of their civilizations even if they don't share the morality of the early 20th-century United States. (Something much more difficult for SJW writers and readers who tend to have a totalizing view of SJW dictates and taboos, creating a necessity to insert them into fiction where they don't fit.) When beings have goals that aren't understandable, like the godlike beings tend to, he conveys the sense that they have their own reasons for acting as they do, even if they are not reasons that humans understand or appreciate.
The Deep Ones from The Shadow Over Innsmouth are some of his less sympathetic antagonists, in that activities like human sacrifice in service to alien gods seem irrational, but of course human sacrifice is a thing that even humans did, groups like the Aztecs are historical realities, so it is hardly cheating to impute it to a group of non-humans as well. Nor are such activities their only defining feature, just what brings them into conflict with humans. Instead attributing the conflict to "the United States’ motivation for destroying Innsmouth was a mixture of racism as well as hatred for the non-Christian religious practices of the townsfolk" is just flipping it around and having the U.S. government kill people in the name of religion instead, except that the 1920s U.S. government actually existed and not as the author depicts it. Naturally "The Innsmouth people are depicted as victims and the story ignores the Marsh family’s reign of terror over regular humans.", you can't give the "racists" understandable reasons for their actions, so conflicts must be cleanly divided between evil perpetrators and innocent victims. Meanwhile Lovecraft gave "monsters" glorious civilizations that the reader can appreciate even if the incidental consequences for humans produce horror. He was an enthusiast of science who often made his antagonists scientists, which makes sense with the instrumental utility it has for even deeply alien beings. (Compare to the above review for a book where 'non-binary gender identity", a highly specific and recent cultural concept, is immediately adopted by aliens once it is explained to them.) He was an atheist and intellectual who repeatedly wrote stories where the local superstitious traditions contain a kernel of truth that only intellectuals are arrogant enough to disregard (but without depicting science and modernity as having nothing to contribute). The roles of inhuman beings in his stories are shaped by the narrative requirements of primarily writing horror stories, but he could and did write them with complexity and compelling world-building anyway, and that was part of why his stories became so popular and influential to begin with.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
However, I don't see much indication of right-wing love for these tools, and most of the space is still fairly left-wing
Well, some of the earliest adopters have been 4chan's /g/ and I think their Stable Diffusion thread is still one of the more popular communities. 4chan posters may not qualify as right-wing per-se, but they do tend to be anti-SJW. The developer for Automatic1111, by far the most popular UI, attracted some controversy a couple months ago when people discovered his Rimworld mods included one mocking the George Floyd riots and others like White Only/Yellow Only/Black Only. And one of the up-and-coming UIs is the node-based ComfyUI, which is made by a /g/ poster.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
They know they're women because they remember looking at their body and they remember being taught that growing up, but do they think they have some internal sense of womanhood that is separate from those two things? Let alone one strong enough that they would make sacrifices on its behalf? As I mentioned in this comment, do you think the average person would turn down an offer like "everyone calls you the wrong pronoun for the rest of your life but you get $5,000", provided it didn't have any side-effects like messing up your romantic life?
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Most of the focus is on social stuff like "misgendering" though. Which combined with the "everyone has a deeply-rooted gender identity but cis people are just fortunate enough to match it" model makes some predictions that are noticeably false. For instance it seems pretty common for trans activists to try to use "How would you feel if people were referring to you with the wrong pronoun all the time?" as an argument. This makes sense from their perspective but doesn't really work because normal people don't care that much, certainly not enough to become suicidal or the like. Women on the internet sometimes correct people who assume they're men, but it's not a big deal. At worst someone might take it as an insult (e.g. in cultures where calling a man a woman is a way to call him a coward who is failing to live up to his martial responsibilities as a man, or feminists who think assuming people are men is reflective of sexism).
If someone could press a button saying "everyone calls you the wrong pronoun for the rest of your life but you get $5,000", I think most would be happy to take that option. (Provided this was some sort of mystical change that didn't have side-effects like messing up your romantic life or making your friends think you've gone crazy.) Indeed, even "everyone thinks you're the opposite sex" wouldn't be a big deal if it wasn't for side-effects like messing with your romantic life, and of course nontransitioning trans people don't have those side effects (on the contrary, quite a few trans people end up blowing up their marriages). Which doesn't fit with the "cis people are mirror images of trans people" model, since gender identity is presented as being more important than that.
I was going to point out that people who got the vaccine were older and had a higher base death rate than those who didn't, so there is selection bias in any comparison. But then I actually clicked your link, and it's way dumber than that! It isn't comparing to people who didn't get the vaccine, it's comparing VAERS reports by length of time since vaccination. Whether to make a VAERS report is an arbitrary decision, and obviously doctors will be more likely to do it the closer to vaccination it happened. If someone has a heart-attack a few hours after being vaccinated there will almost certainly be a VAERS report, if someone has a heart-attack months after being vaccinated there probably won't be, and that is true even if the risk of heart attack on day 0 and day 90 is exactly the same.
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