vorpa-glavo
No bio...
User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
While I agree materialism was rare in the past, there are still groups like the ancient Greek Atomists (such as the school of Epicurus) and the Charvaka school in India that believed in it. I'm more familiar with the Epicurean philosophy, but they are remarkably similar to contemporary materialists in their beliefs (except with a strange insistence on a "swerve" in atoms that is supposedly the foundation of a form of free will.) That said, Epicurus didn't deny the existence of the gods - he just asserted that they were made of atoms and didn't intervene in human affairs.
That aside, I'm actually curious what makes you think "mind" or "soul" or whatever it is you think explains and unifies ESP, free will and supernatural beings wouldn't be "material" in some relevant sense? Like, the material world already has radio waves and magnetism and many other forces that we can't see, but which we see the effects of in our everyday lives. What makes you so sure that ESP, if it exists, wouldn't just be one more invisible force that operates in our material world?
And if you believe in angels or demons or spiritual beings of that kind, why do you think that they wouldn't work in fundamentally similar ways to how we do? Maybe they wouldn't have bodies and brains exactly like ours, but if angels can "see", then surely their sight would rely on "spiritual atoms" bouncing off of their "spiritual eyes"? Otherwise, I'm curious what you think would be happening when an angel sees something? How do they come to a knowledge of what is happening in their surroundings, if not in a fundamentally pseudo-materialist way?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I don't think this has ever been anyone's position in the history of getting things banned by a government. A far more consistent way of understanding bans is that they are used as a way of hurting or disadvantaging people that they don't like, or social engineering attempts at removing undesirable behaviors.
I mean are you talking about those actually wielding power, like legislators, or the ordinary citizens? Because, while I disagree with you somewhat on both counts, my strongest disagreements come on the topic of non-politicians. I'm sure that politics is an unreflective team sport for many (most?) people, but I do think that one of the "advantages" of being a non-politician is the theoretical (if rarely exercised) ability to have truly consistent principals, since you don't actually have the ability to implement your proposed political program in the real world, and thus never have to deal with the complexities that real world implementation entail.
I do think your theory likely does explain some of why a given politician decides to vote a particular way, but do you really believe that no one has ever wanted to ban something just because they thought society would be better without it? Like, what outgroup did the drunk driving ban target? What outgroup does the FDA target?
I really feel like your theory is a little undercooked.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
In my ideal for a medical system, we'd do an old fashioned meeting-of-the-minds type contract (not the modern unread "terms and conditions" type contract), where the two parties involved (patient and doctor) would discuss all of the ins and outs of the medical intervention until both parties were happy that all risks have been properly communicated and they both have an understanding of what things the doctor would be liable for, and which things the doctor wouldn't be liable for. Then they would both sign the resulting document, and the patient would live with what they got.
However, I realize my proposal is a stillborn one. Standardized contracts and bureaucracies are the easy way of dealing with massive amounts of patients and procedures, and my proposed system would put an undue burden on doctors.
Barring that, I'd at least like doctors to make a good faith effort to communicate all major known risks, as well as known unknowns and unknown unknowns to the patient before they get them to sign the unreadable legalese that they likely have to do before a procedure.
Overall though, I'm in favor of a system that treats adults as adults, responsible for their good and bad outcomes. If somebody with, say, a mobility issue signs up to a procedure which has a 99% chance of completely curing them and a 1% chance of leaving them worse off than they were before, they should be allowed to make the choice to undergo that procedure, and they have to own and live with the results if they end up in the 1% chance world.
I agree that there's a weird disconnect between how the medical system treats sterilization as a primary effect, and as a side effect (in the case of trans people.) My preference would be to resolve things so that childless adult women could make an informed choice to have themselves sterilized regardless, but I get that many doctors are squeamish about such things.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
In order to know if this is true, we would need to look at a country that has a similar racial mix to America, but no anti-discrimination laws, then compare the life outcomes of Africans or other historically oppressed groups in America to their life outcomes in that country.
Finding such a country would be suggestive, but it kind of assumes you're going to be comparing apples to apples when you find such a country, and I'm not sure that that would be the case. There might be additional factors you'd want to control for, like: wealth, Protestant Christian majority, former anglo majority, representative liberal democracy, etc.
If you don't control for some of those, I fear that any comparison you make is going to be pointless. And unfortunately, I think you're unlikely to find a good peer to compare America to in this regard. If you want more data points, maybe try comparing cities, and controlling for as many of these as you can? At the very least it would give you more data points than the 200 or so countries there are in the world.
I might be misinterpreting you, but given the above I don't know how to interpret statements like that other than "unless the issue affects a statistically significant portion of society (or abolishes the current economic system, I suppose), you should not oppose it". If this is the argument you're making, I want to point out that it's symmetrical. You should have no problem with a complete ban on gender affirming therapies for minors, because the issue is exactly as tiny as those therapies being prescribed to them.
You are misinterpreting. A better construction of my position is a more classical liberal position along the lines of, "We should consider the amount of harm done to unrelated parties before we consider banning a practice." There are plenty of things that are legal that I think are best avoided such as getting a face tattoo, but I recognize that I don't have access to the One True Way of living life or organizing society, and I think that it is best to keep a diversity of experimenting viewpoints within society for the following reasons:
- New technologies have cropped up so quickly that we've barely had time to adapt to them as a culture. I think that cancel culture and victim culture are two maladaptive social technologies that have come up in that environment, and I think legally allowing a greater variety of viewpoint and lifestyle diversity makes it more likely that some group will through experimentation create social norms that make for a functional human society alongside modern technologies.
- Even without considerations of us adapting socially to new technology, I think that the economic effects of new technologies have also created a need for considering a wider variety of approaches in order to weather the coming storm from automation and a thousand other disruptive technologies. I welcome the idea of dominionist Catholics choosing Exit over Voice in order to form their own small scale societies that might outlast the collapse of society, I welcome the idea of Mormons creating granaries to outlast an ecological disaster, I welcome the idea of young LGBT people attempting to create fulfilling communities and found families within an individualist framework, etc. etc. I might have my bets on which ones are more likely to be around in 100 or 1000 years, but I'm open to the idea that I'm wrong.
At the federal level (speaking in a US context), all I advocate for is that adult trans people have the ability to use public accommodations of their adopted sex, except where that would be biologically impracticable. I get that even this position is controversial, but it makes no metaphysical or scientific commitments that can't be justified, and it leaves the more controversial issues of trans minors and things like trans participation in sports to be dealt with as each state wishes.
For me, it is simply a recognition that if any form our society or species is going to survive, then we can't put all of our eggs in one basket when it comes to how we organize society, and allowing trans people to use their preferred public accommodation is a part of making something like what Scott calls Archipelago a more practicable reality.
I fully appreciate that someone who believes strongly in the social contagion hypothesis might consider the mere idea of trans people to be a form of harm being done to people. Personally, I don't know if the social contagion hypothesis is true, and I don't know if I've seen any evidence that makes it particularly more likely than the:
- Social Acceptance/Medical Advancement Hypothesis: As social acceptance of trans people has increased, and likelihood of passing has gotten better for people who medically transition, the number of people who already would have had relatively strong, consistent and fixed desires to live as a member of the opposite sex has stayed the same, but appeared to grow since more people are willing to take the risk of being open about it.
Heck, there's nothing stopping some form of both being true. The number of detransitioners is only evidence of us being bad at doing differential diagnoses, and not really evidence of social contagion as the major driving force of the uptick. There will always be hypochondriacs, or people with OCD who obsessively fear they might have some disease or condition, or teenagers learning a bunch of new medical or psychological terms and wondering if one of those explains the trouble they've been having in life.
My response to this is that the scale of the issue is not small at all. The numbers you cited eclipse the number of unarmed black men dying at the hands of the police, they dwarf unethical medical experiments like Tuskagee, and unlike the campus rape epidemic, they are actually happening.
I tend to think most of the other things you listed are also a bit overblown, and in our efforts to "learn from" them and create rules for avoiding them we might have done more harm than good. Do you disagree?
Even then I'm aware of 3 separate clinics - Jaime Reed's, Tamara Pietzke's, and Diane Ehrensaft's. The claim isn't that the children weren't vetted "hard enough", the issue is that they made no attempt to rule out gender dysphoria at all. People running these clinics either belong in jail, or at the very least should have their license to practice medicine stripped from them.
I'm not so naive as to believe doctors will always do the right thing, or that current best practices will always be good for the health and well-being of patients. Lobotomies are the perfect example of a medical scandal that I think we should strive to avoid in the future.
If there are bad clinics, I'm not against the idea of shutting them down, stripping a bunch of people of licensees, and letting families affected sue. I have acknowledged in other posts that I think the replication crisis has undermined the basic trust we might place in medicine, and so I don't find it unreasonable for a given person to weigh the evidence and come out against large portions of trans medicine and healthcare.
However, my basic position is a separate one to almost every other part of the trans debate. I think we could allow trans women to use women's restrooms even in a legal regime where cross-sex hormones and surgeries were 100% illegal. There is no contradiction there at all.
Let the best practices in medicine evolve how they will as more, higher quality evidence emerges. We're always making judgements under uncertainty anyways.
Sure, just like I'm not impressed with claims that there is an ongoing transgender genocide. Now, do you want to take a wild guess which claim is actually being made by activists, and which isn't?
I don't control what bad arguments or bad tactics people broadly "on my side" make. Obviously, if I had my druthers such people would only ever use good, convincing arguments and honorable tactics, and never use bad, unconvincing arguments and dishonorable tactics. It is beyond my power to make that happen. All I can do is try my best to articulate what I think are the better reasons for this position.
I'm open to being convinced that I'm wrong, and I get that people who don't share some of my underlying commitments or values might validly arrive at different positions in spite of us looking at broadly the same evidence base.
That's just not true. We've had this conversation before, I responded to your points. In fact, you were the one that got quiet after that. I don't hold it against you, it's normal for interest in a conversation to drop off if it's going on for too long / you get responses from multiple people, but you shouldn't act like no one ever addressed your claims.
Fair enough. I understand I might not have responded to every point you raised in past posts. As you say, it is often hard to respond when I get too many responses.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
The social convention of a large part of society is that gender identity is nonsense, and transition is impossible. They reject your approach, and you definitions, and by imposing it on them you are doing the "point deer make horse" thing.
I'm okay with people saying the "wrong" thing, or believing "wrongthink" - whatever that may entail from my own point of view, or from anyone's point of view, really. I think there are many domains where it is undesirable for the government to enforce uniform speech or metaphysical ideologies, and this is one of them. If that means that in the world I propose, trans people will be treated with respect and acceptance in some parts of some big cities, but be in an iffy situation elsewhere, then so be it.
Just as a racist hotel owner is free to call a black man the N-word as he hands the purchased hotel keys over, a gas station attendant will be free to use whatever slurs they want while they let a trans woman use the women's restroom. Or to simply "misgender" her. If we already have the government forcing public accommodations to work a certain way for the public, then I see no reason why it shouldn't do this for trans people.
Now, I'm open to general arguments that the government should never have been involved in non-discrimination laws in the first place, but I tend to think this is one of the weakest planks of hardcore libertarians. Yes, in theory capitalist greed alone could be enough to not want to discriminate. But I think once you have a world with racially segregated hospitals and race-based banking discrimination, no matter how you got there, it kind of doesn't matter if there were technically no violations of the Non-Aggression Principle at any step in the process, you've ended up in a space where some people are meaningfully less free than other people, since bodily health and finance are basic components of freedom in a free market capitalist system. The free market is already not doing its job.
Even from the perspective of merely fixing a "market failure" I think whatever minimal form of government must exist would have a compelling interest to step in and regulate a handful of high-impact domains to preserve the freedoms of citizens living under such a system. Now, I'm definitely open to arguments that bathrooms would not be a part of this if we were building a society based on rational principles from the ground up, but when the precedence is already there as it is in our society I see no reason not to expand it.
I'm not sure who you thinking is fighting for the right to scream at strangers in supermarkets.
Surely you can't believe that the ecosystem of videos of "obviously trans woman does embarrassing and socially unacceptable things in public" is the totality of what exists online? I'm sure there are plenty of "red neck yells at butch cis woman for trying to use women's restroom" type videos as well. Neither side has a monopoly on embarrassing loud mouths.
And regardless of any of that, I think it's a form of "Chinese robber" fallacy. Most people (cis or trans, trans activist or anti-trans) are probably keeping their head down, and trying to use their best judgement with how to deal with any social situation they find themselves in. The government probably isn't the right tool to deal with breaches of social etiquette.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
There's just one problem, the legal document does not define a "parent" as "whoever is designated to be a parent by the document", it just formalizes a legal relationship with rights and duties, and it is those rights and duties that are the functional legal definition of being a parent.
Part of the problem is that from a purely legal perspective, there really isn't that much defining the rights and duties of a woman or man in contrast to one another. It's mostly trading one set of legal "privileges" for another. I think that an ultra-minimalist description of what legally changing your sex does could be something like:
- When sex-segregated spaces or services exist as part of public accommodations, then wherever their biology does not render that impracticable a person may use the spaces or services designated to the opposite sex.
Everything else could be handled by social convention, the same way we build up social expectations and etiquette around the legal contracts of marriage or the legal status of adoptive parenthood that go beyond the laws themselves.
I think this ultra-minimalist legal regime removes the need for new definitions of manhood or womanhood. A woman becomes "1. An adult human female. 2. Anyone who legally and socially adopts the role of the same." Mutatis mutandis for man.
Even then no one would begrudge a kid trying to find their real parents, and anyone screaming "They are your real parents! Adoptive parents are parents!" would be seen as completely deranged.
Sure, but by the same token people might disapprove of a rando at the supermarket harassing adoptive parents by screaming that they're not real parents at them. Even so, I don't think the government needs to get involved in matters of social etiquette.
The social regime will be what it will be, and might differ from place to place. I don't think legally compelled speech is necessary to make everything function in my proposed minimalist legal regime.
That's a problem of course but it's secondary to the point deer make horse dynamics.
I know I'm going to sound like a broken record, but it's less "point deer make horse" and more "point guardian make adopted parent."
I maintain that you don't need any dubious metaphysics or unproven biological hypotheses to get a basic conception of trans-ness off the ground. I think if you accept that a legal document can "transform" an unrelated adult guardian into a parent in the eyes of the law and society, then it is possible for a legal document to "transform" a biologically male person into a woman in the eyes of the law and society.
There's nothing magical or spooky going on. There's no need to throw our old maps of reality away. We can fully acknowledge every true, scientifically verifiable fact about trans people, and still treat them like their adopted sex in as many contexts as it makes sense to do so, just as we can treat adoptive parents as biological parents in as many contexts as it makes sense to do so.
I understand that trans people and trans activists are often making stronger claims than I do in my posts on this topic. They'll advance metaphysical claims that they are "real" men or women, or that they have the "soul" of a man or woman. They'll advance unproven or irrelevant facts about biology to bolster their claims. I'm a metaphysical materialist, so I'm unimpressed by most of the metaphysical claims, and I'm willing to concede that the replication crisis and the lurking threat of a repeat of a lobotomy-sized science scandal casts sufficient doubt to make some level of skepticism basically reasonable, no matter what the current state of research is.
I just think it's important to point out that there's no necessary connection between a playbook of regressive social policies and trans activism. The legal and social questions can be settled completely separately from the metaphysical, medical and biological questions, and all of those are completely unrelated to the tactics that are currently being employed by some activists to get what they want.
There is a troubling kind of argumentation, where one is made out narratively to be a victim and then a huge chunk of the country will blindly support them while being not just immune to argumentation otherwise but actively against it. This feels like an autoimmune response, I don't know if a country can survive this kind of unreasoning in the long term. It's mildly terrifying to consider how easily nearly anyone can be framed as the oppressor against a new invented victim.
As I said above, I think cancel culture and victim culture are completely separate issues from what legal regime we decide to adopt with regards to trans people. I don't think any more "unreasoning" is required than for any other social "reality." And I don't think if you somehow definitively ended the trans debate in either a pro- or anti-trans way, that it would magically lead to cancel/victim culture disappearing as important social forces. They're symptoms, not causes in themselves.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I would argue that quite a few trans skeptical arguments are clearly utilitarian/consequentialist in nature: "irreversible damage", detransition woes, and bathroom/women's prison fears all seem to have their basis in a line of consequentialist reasoning.
I'll concede that many trans skeptical arguments are built on foundations of different conceptions of fairness, or metaphysical/epistemological commitments of some kind. But I do think that the "think of the children" type arguments veer into an implicit claim of existential threat. If we're supposed to take it seriously as a call to action, we must believe that more than 0.02%-2% of the population are going to be brainwashed by the trend of "trans ideology." Because "think of a tiny, insignificant minority of the children" is less of a rallying cry than, "it could be your kids next!"
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I generally agree with the AI CP has no victims line of thought. I think you see the same basic issue when it comes to writing fictional stories about unsavory topics as well.
I think it's a bit silly when you see erotica sites with stories about high school girls who happen to be exactly 18 years old. It feels like a strange purification ritual that has to be performed at the start of a story. Like saying "bless you" when someone sneezes. "You're about to read a story about a sexy young teenager, but don't worry - she's actually 18, so you have a fig leaf of plausible deniability!"
I don't think fictional stories about underage sex should be illegal, or impossible to host on appropriate sites, no matter how unsavory they may be. I'm honestly amazed that some countries punish those kinds of stories, and I'm saddened at the increasingly puritan regime that credit cards companies and sites like Amazon are creating around non-standard porn categories recently. First they came for the mind control erotica fetishists, and all that...
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
The issue is society needlessly and uncomfortably contorting itself to accommodate Lizardmen.
I think this phrase conceals a lot of different things, not all of which should be considered in the same breath. All of the following are different:
- A private software company deciding to include a pronoun prompt.
- A private Hollywood movie studio deciding to include a trans character in their next movie.
- The Federal government making discriminating against trans people in housing, public accommodation, employment, and banking illegal.
- Companies doing the bare minimum to comply with Federal laws.
- Companies going above and beyond to comply with Federal laws.
- Your local hobby community having enough scolds to make it difficult to talk about trans people the way you think is most accurate.
I'm sure I could split out thousands of more specific scenarios, but you get the idea. My overall response would be that where "society" is doing something you don't like, it is important to distinguish between private individuals, groups of private individuals, private companies, or the government. If your complaints are about the first three, then I don't really know what to say. Society is allowed to drift from social norms you would find preferable. I don't like tipping culture in the United States, but I do participate in it in spite of that. You have to choose how much you're willing to interface with larger society, and dealing with the consequences if you step away from the most common social norms around you. You can make the choice to be the guy who never tips anyone out of some principle, but you'll deal with the social fall out of that choice.
If it's the government's actions, or their follow on effects then the answer is "simple", but not "easy." Organize, win over the hearts and minds of the voters, convince the Supreme Court to undo all the laws you hate. There are plenty of laws I don't love in their current form, but if they're relatively small burdens on me I don't spend a ton of time worrying about them. If Federal trans legislation is hurting you personally, then find specific places you can move the legal regime in your favor and work to make it happen.
There weren't that many more gay people than that, and we were asked to rearrenge society for them, and were assured that any claim there will be further demands was a fallacy.
Gay people didn't present a major restructuring of society. By and large the same people are in power, the same economic system is in place, and the only major difference is that two people of the same sex can sign a contract they couldn't before. Gay marriage did nothing to weaken globalist neoliberal capitalism - since that system is relatively egalitarian and doesn't care if the person at the top is a man or a woman, gay or straight, etc. You can have capitalists and laborers regardless of how you treat gay people.
We now have further demands just as predicted, therefore the slipperyslope claim was correct.
I seem to recall the specific claims I encountered pre-Obergefell being more along the lines of, "people will want to marry cats and dogs!" or "what if people make pedophilia or incest legal?" While I'm sure there are fringe weirdos advocating even those, I think the fact that the "slippery slope" ended up mostly being people asking for trans people to be legally and socially recognized and to have access to medical interventions is rather less alarming and catastrophic than interspecies marriage or pro-pedophilia/incest claim would have been. I think there were good arguments against these kinds of concerns, and the pro-gay marriage people tended to be right on these specific issues.
I don't recall anyone pre-Obergerfell saying, "If we legalize gay marriage, then we'll have 4,780 adolescents starting on puberty blockers after a gender dysphoria diagnosis over a 5 year period and 14,726 minors will have hormone therapies, and annually around 300 13-17 year old girls will have breast reductions a year in a nation of approximately 73 million total children, accounting (all numbers together) for approximately 0.02% of children." My complaint here is not that no one got the exact numbers, since that would have been unreasonable to expect, but that no one got remotely close to the (relatively small!) scope of the issue, even if I'm sure you could dig up someone pre-Obergerfell making emotive claims that gay marriage will break down the idea of man- and woman-hood, and plunge our youth into a deep spiritual crisis around gender.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the error bars on some of those numbers I'm quoting are high enough to make your average person worry more about the number of trans people. But I think there's a basic motte-and-bailley happening here all the time. When people want to be alarmist, they'll quote the "30% of Gen Alpha is LGBTQ" type of surveys, or point to a 400% increase of referrals to a gender clinic of the last 5 years, or bring up a single clinic in a single country that didn't vet children hard enough. But when people point out that, as far as we know the actual numbers of kids receiving breast reductions or hormones or puberty blockers is relatively low, it's crickets.
I'm generally not impressed with claims that the trans issue somehow poses an existential threat to our society. The numbers just don't add up to that. Even if society evolved to the point where trans people became our palace eunuchs, our celibate priests, our castrati, or our skoptsy, I tend to think that otherwise healthy societies tend to have ways to route around such issues. This article claims 20% American women born between 1885 and 1915 never had children. WWI killed 6% of the adult male population in Britain.
We're regularly producing large populations of people who will never have children, and a healthy society would be able to bounce back, route around and deal with this problem. If that's not happening, then the trans issue is just the straw that broke the camel's back, because we couldn't get enough of our other societal structures functioning right.
Also, if the low numbers of trans people mean their demands aren't a big deal, does that mean you'd be ok with rejecting them entirely?
I don't think society needs internal scapegoats to function. That's just a strong tendency humans like to indulge in.
I don't believe in the perfectibility of human nature via education, but I want to believe that we can set up society in such a way that alarmist claims about a tiny minority of the population aren't a necessary glue to hold everything together. We could channel those instincts in more productive ways than taking 1/1000th of the population and throwing them under the bus to make the rest of us more comfortable.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
The problem is that the aftermath of that win was not declaring victory and slapping a Mission Accomplished sticker on the Pride flag, it was moving onto trans politics, leading up to the modern day "trans kids", trans "women" in women's sports, and so on. At this point, I've basically been convinced that I was wrong, the slippery slope people were completely right, and that simply winning on the one cause and then moving on with normalcy was never an option.
I feel like this is a weak sauce slippery slope, if it is one. It's hard to find good numbers, but this article claims around 2% of Gen Z and 1% of Millenials identify as trans. And I would wager a large portion of those are just non-binary with no plans for any medical interventions, but even if we assume that all of those people identifying as trans are all chasing medical interventions like surgery and hormone treatment this is hardly enough to destroy a society.
In pre-revolutionary France, the First Estate of clergy made up 0.5% of the population, and theoretically all of those people were supposed to be celibate. Even acknowledging the hypocrisy and non-compliance of some of those clergy, you're still looking at a social institution that causes large swathes of people to be childless if it is strictly adhered to. And yet the biggest issue people had with that institution were things like the Catholic Church owning 6-10% of the land in France, and having an outsized influence on French politics. It was not a widely feared thing that people's sons or daughters would become priests or nuns and be forced to live a life of celibacy.
I think that 1 or 2% of trans youth is not the main ill our society faces, and if we had other working social institutions, structures and norms, we could easily deal with 1-2% of the population becoming sterilized. Our low birth rates are not because of decisions that 1-2% of people feel emboldened to make because of greater social acceptance. I think general social atomization, and an emphasis of comfort over duty are greater issues facing our society than whether a tiny minority choose to sterilize themselves.
All of the other issues like trans women in sports are minor distractions barely worthy of serious discussion. If professional weight-lifting can self-regulate and have de facto anti-doping and pro-doping leagues, then I'm sure that left to their own devices sports organizations running women's sporting events will figure out ways to deal with trans women without the need for outside intervention or pressure on anyone's part. Far more serious are questions of women's prisons and violent trans offenders, and I feel like that only becomes an issue because it is the tip of the iceberg of suffering in prison. Violent trans women prisoners are a useful prop, but do most people shed tears for prisoners (men or women) and their bad living conditions the rest of the time?
We were talking about just Philadelphia.
I agree, but I think it is worth taking a step back and asking at the meta level why we were talking about just Philadelphia.
A newspaper report saying, "Some people think it's suspicious that 59 voting divisions in Philadelphia went 100% to Obama" doesn't just come from nowhere.
If I imagine Joe the Reporter, trying to craft a story of this kind (perhaps even for noble reasons!), I have to wonder about adjacently possible worlds. Imagine the counterfactual world where the 2012 presidential election as a whole was a sufficiently fair election on the whole, with whatever meaning you assign to that idea. However, even in a fair election, just by random chance, we would expect there to be voting patterns that were "suspicious" for one reason or another.
Assuming Joe the Reporter's methodology isn't far off from:
- Open up a spread sheet of the US election by voting division and play around with the numbers, until he finds something that feels "suspicious" to his gut.
- Report about the most strikingly suspicious thing he finds.
Then I just think that if we weren't talking about Philadelphia having 59 voting divisions going 100% to Obama, we'd be talking about some other state or city or whatever that had "odd" voting patterns of some kind, even if it could well be completely innocent, and we just happened to end up in the world where a very unlikely happened by chance, because something had to happen.
I think a very similar thing happened with 2020, and the people who claim it's strange that some states were counting ballots and Republicans were in the lead as they counted the in person votes, but at some point in the night they counted the mail in votes and suddenly Democrats jumped to a decisive lead when all the votes were tallied. I admit this could be suspicious, but you have to realize that nobody pre-registered the opinion that Democrats would stuff the ballot on the back end by faking a bunch of mail in votes in the specific counties where that was the reporting pattern. I just have the intuition that if things had gone slightly differently and the mail in votes in those counties had somehow been counted before the in person ballots, then people wanting to call the election fake would have found some equally hard to explain thing halfway across the country that might have any number of innocent explanations.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I'm not sure you're thinking about it correctly.
First, the math you're doing implicitly assumes who any two people vote for is an independent event. But there might be social, political and economic reasons why the people in a single small subsection of a city all vote a particular way. If the type of people who live in a single neighborhood isn't completely random, and the type of political messaging that appeal to a person aren't randomly distributed throughout a state, then you might completely be wrong to treat the voting events as independent.
In addition, even if you assume that the events are independent, then the real comparison you're making is all of the votes cast in the entire United States. You might be right to say that there's a generous 3.5% chance of a single voting division of poor black people going for Obama. But the question really is, how many of this kind of black voting division are there in the entire United States? How many degrees of freedom did the people looking for claimed irregularities have? If they hadn't found 59 majority black voting divisions in Philadelphia going to Obama, are there similarly striking "irregularities" that might occur entirely by chance that they might have looked for instead?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I do think it is hard to design public debates that function as a genuine meeting of minds and not just a spectacle for good rhetoricians to flex their skills. But even so, I think ymeskhout's proposed format is a good faith effort to make something that will lean more towards the former than the latter.
You don't need to be a lawyer to take down a lawyer. Someone who did speech/debate or forensics in high school, who is a reasonably competent public speaker, and who has the weight of evidence on their side would probably do a reasonably good job arguing against a lawyer who is bullshitting all their points.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
(If one political side is fundamentally thwarting democracy, then in my humble opinion the other side can do the same. They can do this by, for instance, accusing them of technical election fraud or vampirical adenochrome or whatever they want. They are morally justified to defend themselves using the same weapon as their attacker.)
This is just silly. If you're saying you wouldn't look down on the other side for getting down in the mud with their opponents that's one thing, but I think setting things up so that if Side A suppresses even a single voter-relevant news story, then that gives Side B full moral license to claim actual election fraud without evidence or to make up conspiracy theories, then I think you've set up an insane and unworkable game.
I actually think this passes a basic sniff test.
A quick search reveals that Philadelphia has 1703 voting divisions, and that Obama and Romney combined had 5,670,708 votes in Pennsylvania as a whole in 2012 with the resulting map looking like this. Philadelphia is the bright blue part in the lower right part of the image, and it is obvious just looking at it that Obama's support in Pennsylvania is concentrated in a few highly populous municipalities, including Philadelphia. The claimed oddity is that 59 of the 1703 voting divisions in Philadelphia amounting to 19,605 votes all went 100% to Obama. But why is this strange?
Each voting division in Philadelphia seems to have about 332 voters, so all that needed to happen was around 332 voters in a single voting division all decided to cast a ballot for Obama 59 times in a city where around 560,000 total people were casting their vote, and 80-90% of the votes were going to Obama. With voter clustering, does this seem that unlikely of an outcome?
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
People do all sorts of weird things with words. To use two ancient examples: the Epicureans said that "pleasure" (hedone) was the highest good, and then said the height of pleasure was the absence of pain, and the Stoics said that the only truly good things were morally virtuous things and all other conventionally "good" things were really just "preferred indifferents."
The technical terminology of both of those philosophies differs quite a bit from standard usage in Greek, Latin and English. I think most people would say that "pleasure" and "absence of pain" are two different things entirely, and that having a wife and kids that you love isn't a "preferred indifferent" but a positive good in the life a person where it is desired. But I think in both cases, in redefining the terms (from a layman's perspective) the two philosophical schools are trying to make it psychologically easier to adopt each school's philosophical regimen.
I don't believe that some of your items would be accepted as a definition of a woman by anyone not in the lizardman constant.
My point was not that any of those was an unambiguous "best" definition, just that they were all possible definitions. I agree that in our society, as far as standard English usage goes, some of those are less plausible than others, but there's nothing in principle stopping us from having the following categories of sex: man, eunuch, woman, barreness (sic.) Eunuchs and barrenesses could be regarded as infertile males and females, and almost (but not quite) men and women. I think given the right society, those categories could easily be pertinent enough that they could emerge as real and strong divisions in people's minds. (Say, for example, a society where eunuchs are in widespread usage as singers, babysitters, escorts and government functionaries, and in which a girl is not considered a "woman" until she had born at least one child.)
There are possible constructions of those terms that would be bizarre to modern English speakers. For example, under Galen's single sex model almost 2000 years ago, women were "defective men with inverted sex organs", but no one in today's society would think that.
I think the shape of society often defines the limits of "plausible" word boundaries. Some Asian languages have single words for "older brother" and "younger brother" and "paternal uncle" and "maternal uncle" because the hierarchies of birth order and paternal vs maternal relatives is always important and pertinent information (at least historically.) It's not that English has no way of referring to those same distinctions, but for various historical and cultural reasons our language doesn't package those concepts as single words.
See some of the contemporary commentary surrounding "the categories were made for man" and the implications for the Trans community.
I don't think Scott is endorsing obscuring the truth or lying in "The Categories Were Made for Man..." - just look at the Israel/Palestine example in the essay itself (which he even called attention to in his edit of the article.) Scott's threefold point in the article was that the way we choose to draw category boundaries is not some natural feature of reality, that there are multiple non-false ways to draw category boundaries, and we should be prepared to accept the implications of where we choose to draw those boundaries.
As far as sex-related terminology goes, I think the following are all valid ways we could draw the boundaries of the category "woman":
- An adult human who produces ovum.
- An adult human with XX chromosomes.
- An adult human who lacks the SRY gene.
- An adult human who has a vagina.
- An adult human who doesn't have a penis.
- An adult human capable of becoming pregnant.
- An adult human whose adolescent development was dominated by estrogen.
- An adult human whose adolescent development was naturally dominated by estrogen.
- An adult human who was classified as female shortly after birth.
- An adult human who passes enough tests in this list that the majority of people would call them a woman.
- Etc., etc.
No matter where we draw the boundaries, there will always be ways to pick out the features you care about for instrumental rationality to get off the ground. For example, if I lived in a world where most of the speaking community I belonged to used the "produces ovum" definition of womanhood, but what I actually cared about was whether someone was "capable of becoming pregnant" (say because I was planning on starting a family with my own biological children), then I would still have ways to get at the information I cared about using other terminology. And if I lived in a world where Group A used the "lacks the SRY gene" definition, and Group B used the "has XX chromosomes" definition, I would have to determine if I was talking to someone from Group A or Group B to get an accurate picture of reality when talking about someone being a "woman."
Depending on how you draw the boundaries "transwomen are women" and "transwomen are not women" are both true statements, and unfortunately the moment a single person has a slightly different definition than everyone else, you can't actually count on the boundaries of the word being exactly the same for everyone.
We've just experienced an episode of high inflation due to government stimulus. If anything, we've learned just how dangerous MMT can be.
I'm not sure the government stimulus is the best single explanation for the high inflation of the last few years. If you want to blame the government, then I think overreaction to COVID would be a better angle of attack, since a recent Indicator episode looked at why there is a disconnect between ordinary Americans, who claim to be miserable, and economists who say that despite what Americans say in polls they're spending more like they're happy (high spending on travel, etc.), and it concluded that a lot of indicators of Americans being happy with the economy are actually due to pent up COVID spending. Basically, people didn't get to go on vacations for a year or two and now that things have opened up they have a bunch of money saved up that they're still spending, in spite of inflation.
If this explanation is correct, it might mean the government stimulus is part of the saved up money that Americans are now spending, but I somehow doubt that one time payments of $600 per person in December of 2020, and $1000-$3000 in 2021 are the best explanation for a sustained increase of prices across the economy. That just doesn't seem like a parsimonious explanation of what we're observing.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
My local model of SDXL can make a lion-eagle hybrid, lion-dragon hybrids and even lion-refrigerator hybrids let alone DALLE.
Can it? I've been struggling to generate a few good-looking winged centaurs recently. The AI's keep wanting them to be horses.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Wat? How many men on Twitch do you think are currently using filters to become women to get people to watch and sub?
I doubt it's a large number, but it's getting easier by the year. I myself played around with Vtuber avatars, and voice changing apps and the results were surprisingly good. Sadly, the voice changing I was using only worked well in English, and I was trying to stream in another language.
It wouldn't surprise me if some successful Vtuber out there is already doing just this.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
I'm curious about where you draw the boundaries around "fascist." Are there any circumstances you would consider it acceptable to restrict freedom of movement of individuals or groups?
Would any of the following be acceptable circumstances to restrict freedoms, while qualifying as non-fascist:
- The government has credible intel that a terrorist attack is planned at a particular airport on a particular day.
- It is wartime, and the government is concerned about enemies entering the country, or traitors leaving the country to fight for the other side.
- The government of an island nation, like Australia, starts to hear reports about a new Black Death-like plague with a 40-60% mortality rate in Eurasia
Okay, but you didn't answer my question. Do you believe angels see? Or are angels blind in any meaningful sense of the word? (Perhaps they have other, completely non-analogous, ineffable senses of their own?)
I understand if you think my question is coming from an overly binary way of thinking, but I just think this is part of what unravels your entire project here. If angels have "senses" in the way we do, then those senses require an explanation of some kind. When a human being sees something, we can say it happens because light particles bounce off of objects and hit the human's eyes. You are asserting that angels can interact with the human sphere of experience, and are potentially the source of ESP. I'm open to the idea that both of those claims could be true.
However, when you remove angels and ESP from the realm of matter, I have difficulty understanding what exactly you are claiming. If angels are completely "immaterial" how do they interact with the world at all? How does a being that doesn't see, smell, hear, taste, or touch (since all of those rely on material processes as far as we know) interact with the material world at all? You say that angels might be the source of ESP, but how could an angel acquire information about, say, a squiggle on a card 50 miles away, if the card and the squiggle are all material objects that the angel should have no way of perceiving or interacting with?
If you're asserting that all material objects actually also exist and interact with the "spiritual" realm, and that there are spiritual analogues to all the traditional senses (spirit-sight, spirit-hearing, etc.) and that angels communicate with our astral bodies or whatever, then I would say that seems like an overly complicated theory. Why not just believe that angels are material beings made out of something like neutrinos or literal light that interact and communicate with us in the physical world?
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