stoatherd
3d ago
Yeah but people do this about everything!
True, but also: no!
@FtttG's description resonated with me a lot (thanks for putting it to words).
I think you (rae) are right that the median person does feel a compulsion to push back on things they think are wrong. But... does the typical pushback on social media look anything like the Motte (in its best, idealised form)? Most popular pushback takes the form "your political bloc is dumb and stupid and evil, here's why".
Everyone (including people like me, and presumably FtttG) probably feels an urge to drop zingers on people who say dumb/evil things, and to push back against our tribal enemies. Call this "Pushback Type 1". PT1 lets us feel smart and good, and signal to our tribe that we are smart and good, and to enjoy the schadenfreude of our enemy getting squished. This is probably a universal thing that people are predisposed to like.
I think the thing FtttG is referring to is distinct. Call it "Pushback Type 2". PT2 is about criticising what we think is false even if (a) it can't be done in a crisp, devastating zinger, (b) it doesn't help some tribe we're aligned with, and (c) we don't get to enjoy having put someone down a peg. It's the obsessiveness of going: "This person is wrong, I don't care if the whole world is behind them; I need to explain why!"
The Motte is fuelled by a proprietary blend of PT2 spiked by PT1 (the exact formula is a closely-guarded secret).
There's still the question of why trans stuff specifically has captured FtttG. Obviously that's not for me to say, but a general explanation would be: people with PT2 inclinations can get sniped by any particular instance of falsehoods; it's a crapshoot.
... but I'd also then say: to me, trans stuff is the quintessential example of people "proudly, confidently asserting things I know to be false". I can't think of a stronger example. It's as ontologically broken as transubstantiation.
(I'm very sympathetic to your position of trans people basically wanting to be left alone, btw.)
stoatherd
3d ago
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?
Yeah, that's the flipside of what I was gesturing towards with "[making statistical corrections for] dangerous occupations like being a sex worker". I'd say that, in your hypothetical, that would indeed count! It would be a real problem.
... but it's not true. I know you said it was a "random number", but the "random numbers" we choose are typically representative of what we think are reasonable values. Trans people being 2x times for likely to be murdered for walking down the street isn't a reasonable random number. Again: cis men are more likely to be murdered than trans women! Assuming that you're a trans woman, then you are literally safer as a trans woman than your other option (i.e. being a cis man). We can discuss the hypothetical world where you receive a 2x multiplier to being randomly murdered, as long as it's on the record that this is utterly non-representative of the world we live in.
I do know that I feel more uncomfortable in many situations now than before (...) Maybe I’m just being paranoid. It’s hard to tell.
Yeah, sorry about that; that sucks.
For most trans people I know, I'd try and (incredibly carefully) gesture towards something like: "You live in a catastrophically damaged epistemic environment. The people around you take anything less than complete submission to their religion as being literally genocide. Even if you personally don't express stuff like that, the people who say these things are contributing (negatively) to the general epistemic structure around you, and it's fucking with your ability to calibrate. Even high-decoupling, disagreeable humans aren't really built to completely ignore this kind of endemic social messaging -- it's going to seep in and cause you stress, anxiety, and a constant sense of being at war."
I think that's not quite the right message for you (but I'm still going to sneak it into evidence via quotation). I have no idea what kind of environment you're in; and obviously you're, y'know, actually thinking about this stuff already. I guess I'd suggest that your impression of things like trans-related discomfort, rudeness, or social difficulties are probably picking up on a real signal -- but when you hit the threshold of violence/murder etc, there's a good chance you're massively overestimating that stuff for whatever reason. (I stress again that I don't know you or your environment; if you're in a place with atypically high violence against trans people compared to the rest of the West, probably disregard my comment.)
stoatherd
3d ago
The great thing about AI is that you get impartiality on demand if you make a completely unconnected instance and ask an impartial question
It's possible I'm failing a sarcasm check here or something, but: do you actually believe this?
Like, this is an extremely untrue thing to say. I don't want to put a low-effort comment here saying "this is wrong", but I also don't want to waste time on a long comment explaining it, if it turns out that this was a joke or some kind of unserious comment. So I'm going to flag up that, if you sincerely believe "AI gives you impartial answers", that this is an extremely broken part of your epistemic model, which I can substantiate if it needs to be substantiated.
stoatherd
3d ago
Not the OP, but a couple of points here. I could very easily say:
in the West, being [male] can lead to discrimination (...) and make you more at risk of low level violence and hate crimes
(I've omitted the ostracisation part, as I don't think that's supported in my parallel; but I don't think omitting it fundamentally changes the idea.)
The above is just true. But if men then had a culture of saying there was a "male genocide", and that their society was "androphobic" because of this, I'd get very annoyed, because -- as @WandererintheWilderness says -- it's an attempt to parlay a weaker, true claim ("men are more likely to be victims of violence") into a hysterical false one ("society is systemically murdering men!!")
Part of why I'm raising the parallel: one way trans activists misrepresent this stuff is by comparing trans women to women rather than to men. IIRC, men have a higher rate of being victims of violence than trans women? (It might require some statistical stuff like "once you correct for dangerous occupations like being a sex worker", or it might just be outright; I don't remember.)
There's something kind of ridiculous about this world model:
- If you're born male, your options are basically cis man or trans woman -- you don't get "cis woman" as an option
- If a male person chooses to be a trans woman, they are now instantly statistically categorised as "some type of women"...
- ... and therefore, any male-propensity-to-get-stabbed is supposed to instantly vanish; and if its doesn't, there's a trans genocide.
Like... no? This isn't even epicycles; this is no model at all. The dangerous portion of being (1) trans and (2) biologically male... is not the trans part. If a soldier chooses to call themselves a "trans accountant", they don't get to go "My workplace death rate is higher than cis accountants -- this is discrimination".
I agree that white Western trans women probably aren’t at an extremely elevated risk of murder
I appreciate you saying so, but this does seem like a weaker formulation than what you should probably agree to. "extremely elevated risk"? 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"? Because I'm reasonably sure the accurate version of this would just be "they aren't at an elevated risk of murder". Similarly, I wouldn't say "the trans genocide is overblown", I'd say "the trans genocide is fictitious". We can certainly discuss different patterns of violence and how they interact with being trans, but framing that as "genocide" needs to be immediately met with "you are lying for political expediency". (The generalised "you", I mean; you're not lying.)
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?
stoatherd
10d ago
It's an argument against Utilitarianism only if you ignore 2nd-order effects. (This happens a lot with arguments against Utilitarianism.)
Take the extreme variant of the trolley problem, where a doctor has 5 sick patients who each need a different organ transplant. In the doctor's waiting room, there's a healthy patient. Should the doctor kill the healthy patient and use their organs to save the 5 sick people? After all, it'll be saving 5 lives at the cost of one; Utilitarianism demands that you kill the healthy person, right? It's exactly the same as pulling a lever on the train track to save 5 people, right?
... except no, because no one wants to live in a society where at any moment you can be righteously murdered for your organs. That's an insane way for a society to function. Everyone would be terrified all the time. No one would set foot in a hospital. There'd be constant revenge killings against doctors. Everyone who could afford bodyguards would hire them. Everyone would carry whatever weapons they could get their hands on. Society would collapse in about two days. The outcome is: you get no organ transplants, because you've destroyed the mechanisms that allowed for organ transplants in the first place.
Same thing with Nazi experimentation on live prisoners. The Utilitarian argument against it isn't just "the prisoners suffering is bad", it's that plus "if your society has a policy of experimenting on live prisoners, that generates a bunch of horrific problems", such as:
- Significantly increased terror among the population
- Dehumanisation of prisoners and any social group they're drawn from
- Slippery slope to even less humane treatment of people
- Slippery slope to expanding the number of valid targets
- General breaking of bright lines around things like bodily autonomy, torture, etc
... so it's very much not an "unalloyed good", even leaving the suffering of the prisoners aside. (For that matter, even if we ignore 2nd-order effects, I'm not sure that the medical advances necessarily do outweigh the suffering of the prisoners! Then there's also the fact that there's no single unambiguous way to add up "greatest utility for the greatest number". You can absolutely have a version of Utilitarianism that prioritises additional utils for people at the bottom. And then, on top of that, there's no single way to convert pain/pleasure/satisfaction/whatever into utility; pain might have a much stronger contribution than pleasure. The weakness of Utilitarianism IMO is that it's inherently flexible and ambiguous like this.)
It might well be possible to construct a situation where Utilitarianism does give an unacceptable answer. But I don't think this is it. And typically, when these arguments go "Utilitarian says we should do X, which we can all agree has bad consequences" -- that's almost intrinsically self-defeating, because Utiliarianism is all about weighing up the consequences and minimising the badness!
I don't think there's actually a coherent thing that "act utilitarianism" is pointing to. Its conceit seems to be that you can do some kind of causal surgery and ask: "Assuming that there are no downstream effects of this action (beyond some arbitrary cutoff?), and there are no implications of me being the kind of the person to have chosen this action... is it the best action?"
So there's two problems with this:
On point 2, the rule/act distinction is confused in a similar way that two-boxers in Newcomb are confused. If, in the organ scenario, you make the choice to kill an innocent person to take their organs... then you are the kind of person to do that. Which means you live in a society that generates people who choose to kill innocent people for their organs. You can't carve out the naive 1st-order utility calculation from the implications of people taking that choice, any more than in Newcomb you can go "I'm going be a one-boxer so I get the million dollars... and I'm going to take both boxes".
Act Utilitarianism seems to mostly exist as a strawman for people to say "utilitarians would kill you for your organs", which is silly, because they empirically don't.
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