vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
I think that the terminology problem that arises here is the difference between social truths and mind-independent truths about reality.
If I was speaking colloquially, I would allow social truths to be called "objective" in some sense. But I think there is a difference between a sentence like "The speed limit here is 75 miles per hour", and "The sun is mostly made of hydrogen and helium." The first is referring to an intersubjective agreement about a rule in society, and the second is a fact that even Martians could discover about the universe.
In most everyday conversations, we do not make a distinction between social truths (intersubjective), matters of personal taste or opinion (subjective), and mind-independeng facts about reality (objective.)
I think these sentences are mind-independent truths:
- Adoptive children are not the biological offspring of their adoptive parents. Augustus is not the son of Caesar.
- Trans women belong to the class of people who produce small, mobile gametes. Trans women are biological men.
But they are completely compatible with the social truths:
- Adoptive children are the children of their adoptive parents. Augustus is the son of Caesar.
- Trans people are honorary members of their identified sex. Trans women are women.
I agree that social truths lend themselves to falsification. If I make a move in chess, it is either legal or it is not. But chess is not a mind-independent part of the universe that a Martian scientist could just discover "out there." It exists as a set of intersubjective agreements between humans, who agree to abide by the rules of chess.
So too, every society decides the rules by which they judge the validity of adoption and honorary sex transition. The Islamic world rejects the concept of "adoption", replacing it with a legal construct of "guardianship" with different implications for inheritance, for example. "Adoption" is not a legal move in the game of Islamic jurisprudence.
Right now, honorary sex transition is in a state of flux - finding acceptance among some in the Western world, and rejection among others. People are playing different games, and may or may not converge on a single game some day.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
There already are laws passed in various European countries that literally allow this, the only limit that I'm aware of being frequency.
Could you point me in the direction of these laws? Do they allow you to self-ID without letting anyone know until you're called on it, or do they require you to file paperwork with the government still? Because filing paperwork is still a form of social proof in my book.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Is it, though? Howcome when Trump passes his EO's the response from the mainstream media isn't "Trump Being Obtuse: Fails To Realize Trans Identity Is A Social Role, Not A Medical Claim", but "Trump'S Definition Of 'Male,' 'Female' Criticized By Medical And Legal Experts"?
I'm not responsible for the silly things other people claim, even if they come to conclusions that superficially resemble my own. Before I answer your question, let me touch on my feelings about Trump's EO.
On one level, I'm basically fine with the definitions of biological sex in Trump's EO, and I disagree with the critics that say they're malformed.
(d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
(e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.
Gametic sex always felt like the best way to define biological sex to me, and I think that the people criticizing the "at conception" part of the definition are a bit wrong-headed. It makes sense that you can belong to a category (the sex that produces large or small gametes) even if you don't yet have the mature ability to do the thing characteristic of that category. A caterpillar is still a juvenile butterfly, even if it doesn't have wings.
I could quibble about the fact that at conception a fertilized egg can become one person, two people (twins) or half of a person (chimeras), and that this can technically lead to weird cases like this fertile chimera woman who was a fusion of two beings who, at conception, arguably belonged to the male sex, and the female sex - unless we count her conception as starting at the point where the chimera was formed, in which case it is not clear to me that we knew what sex she belonged to (based on the EO's definition) until she finally developed. Can a person's sex technically remain in limbo for more than a decade by this definition?
I could also quibble about people I would describe not as "intersex" but "nullsex." If sex is defined by gametes, what about people who don't naturally produce gametes? I always find it a bit odd that people with Turner syndrome (X0-karyotype) are considered "biolgical women." While they have gynomorphic anatomy, they typically do not naturally go through puberty, and do not have functional ovaries. If given hormone therapy, they'll go through a female puberty, and they can get pregnant through IVF with donor eggs, but under a gametic definition of sex they'd surely represent a third sex (a null sex.)
But I'm not inclined to such quibbling here. Law is an example of practical philosophy. Those corner cases will be dealt with by courts interpreting the definitions used. That chimera woman would likely be considered "female" by any competent court. So too, they'd likely class people with Turner syndrome as women, regardless of how the law defines "female."
To actually answer your question. I think the article you're talking about is pulling a bit of a motte and bailey. I read it, and what it claims is technically true. The director of the health institute they interviewed did indeed claim that the cluster definition of sex was a better model, and thought that EO ignored intersex people. The lawyer they interviewed did indeed worry that trans people and intersex people would be hurt by the order. Nowhere did the article actually try to defend "gender" (what I would call "honorary sex"), and there's actually a weird disconnect in the middle of the article. The cluster definition is certainly a defensible alternative definition of sex, but it's not one that seems to easily cohere with the issue of trans people (who would likely still be classed in their biological sex, even with a cluster definition.)
I think they think this is the strongest case they can make in an adversarial environment. Retreat to, "sex is more complex than this, what about intersex people?" and "it will hurt people" - not actually claim anything about the nature of trans people one way or the other.
What would it take to show that your view on trans identity isn't what is being imposed on society right now?
Cultural narratives that justify social change will do what they will, I have no control over that. LGB activists really enjoyed bringing up gay penguins and the like, even though it reeks of the naturalistic fallacy to me. But the "born this way" narrative really took off, and it was only natural that trans people would try the same rhetorical move. It's the same thing that happened with the anti-cryptocurrency people who recycled the environmental critique and used it against generative AI, even though the amount of energy being used is a drop in the bucket compared to things like airline travel, existing data centers' energy usage, etc.
I think it must always be weird to live through a decentralized social change. Sets of narratives will compete until one that finally wins the day and convinces people bubbles up to the top. The narrative that wins won't necessarily be "true" - just convincing.
I don't care that my "honorary sex" model isn't the one preferred by trans advocates. I think it is the most true model of the situation, until an artificial superintelligence studies humanity and fully explains every aspect of aberrant human psychology one way or the other.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
I don't think I've ever endorsed the view that trans people can choose their gender at any given moment, any more than I've endorsed the view that you can just adopt an orphaned child at any given moment. I think in most cases and with most social groups, honorary statuses will require some kind of "social proof" for a group to accept them. In the case of adoption, it might look like filling out a bunch of forms with the government. In the case of trans people, it might look like paying $50 at your DMV to get your sex indicators changed on your driver's license.
The "social proof" doesn't have to involve the government, though that is usually the "easiest" path since it means that the people with the ability to enforce contracts through their monopoly on force recognize your claim as legitimate. However, if a national disaster created a 10 year state of anarchy, I think people in a community that already believed in the basic legitimacy of child adoption could have informal adoption with enough social proof that most of the people in a community recognized the validity of the claim.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Sure, that kind of thing happens all the time. Light brown-skinned Hispanic people are increasingly identifying as just "white" in the United States and their voting behavior is becoming more correlated with assimilated white Americans, for example. There's a long history of things like blanqueamiento in the Latin American world.
I think there are a few basic levels of intersubjective truth claims:
- Tier 1: Things some group of people (perhaps as small as a single family, or a friend group) believe.
- Tier 2: Things a slightly larger group like a tribe or subculture believe.
- Tier 3: Things larger groups like a nation or civilization believe.
- Tier 4: Things that transcend tribe or nation in some way.
Trans people might arguably be at the level of Tier 2 - if one is willing to talk about "progressives" as a tribe. So far as I know, transracial people in the Rachel Dolezal style are still at Tier 1. These tiers aren't about making a thing "more true" - since I think social "truths" like "dollars have value", "The United States exists", or "So-and-so is the true king" are all operating more at the level of fiction. If you want to be nitpicky, I think they could all be called false in a strict sense, in the same way that saying something like, "Harry Potter is a wizard" is false - there is no such person as Harry Potter, and no such thing as wizards. But everyone who knows how to speak and use words also knows that "Harry Potter is a wizard" is a more felicitous sentence than "Harry Potter is a fire-breathing dragon."
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
It may not be a universally-accepted truth, but it is a scientific truth.
I think this is a category error. It would be a bit like saying, "Scientifically speaking, an in-law is not your relative." Like, sure, I have no biological relationship to my mother-in-law, but we have a societal convention that marriage creates kin relationships, to not just my wife, but her whole family.
Similarly, it would be obtuse to say something like, "Scientifically speaking, 'adopted children' do not exist." Again, we normally consider the parent-child relationship to be biological, but adopted children and adoptive parents are granted an honorary parent-child relationship as a societal convention.
I think transness is best explained as an honorary social status. It has a family resemblance to institutions like the sworn virgins of Albania, or Queen Hatshepsut's honorary maleness. It's just an emerging social role within some Anglo-European societies, where a person of one sex declares that they would like to live as the other sex, usually adopting as much of the appearance of the opposite sex as possible and requesting treatment appropriate to that adopted sex role. It's not "scientific" to say, "transwomen are women", but neither is saying, "Augustus was Julius Ceasar's son." But we shouldn't expect all "true" statements to be true in a scientific way, rather than in an intersubjective cultural way.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Many people find this to be their main sticking point with the pronoun stuff. Not only is somebody lying, they want everyone else to lie too.
I don't think this is truly people's objection, whatever else they may say.
I think there are a ton of cases where a fuzzy boundary, usually corresponding to some biological reality, gets bridged with an honorary status. Whether it is adoption of children creating honorary blood relations, or conversion to ethnoreligions like the ex-Muslim Vaishnavite convert Haridasa Thakur or the Biblical Ruth's adoption of Jewish customs and ways.
I think the "adoption" model (which I've sometimes called the "socio-legal sex" model) of trans people is the closest to being an accurate statement of the reality of trans people, and it has the advantage of not requiring any dubious metaphysics. A transwoman is a woman in the same way and to the same degree that an adopted child is their adoptive parent's child. Obviously, neither adoption nor transness are objective facts about reality - they are intersubjective facts about human social relationships and (potentially) associated legal structures
There is no lie in saying, "Augustus was Julius Ceasar's son" any more than there is a lie in saying "The United States has 50 states" or any number of other intersubjective human-created "truths." Of course, with these kinds of truths, there will always be room for rivalrous claims. If I say, "There is no King of England", then depending on what I mean by that, I could be saying a perfectly "true" fact. (For example, if I was an anarchist, and didn't regard any monarchical claim as valid.)
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
contrapoints
I wouldn't really consider Contrapoints to be within the rationalist sphere. She's just an ex-academic socialist who became a Youtuber, and who accidentally became a part of the "Breadtube" coalition of progressive content creators. Correct me if I'm wrong though - Google didn't turn up much connection between Contrapoints and the rationalist diaspora.
Point of order. LessWrong was banning people for "mis-gendering" and "dead-naming" as far back as 2012.
To be fair, I think this is consistent with the rationalist flirtation with transhumanism. If you believe people should have the right to experiment with their bodies and subject themselves to far more radical technological transformations, then someone coming to you saying, "I was born male, but I want to use science and technology to make my body as similar to a natal female's as possible, and then I want to be treated like a woman as far as possible", then you're more likely to just shrug and say, "Sure, why not?"
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
My impression is that she's a trans woman. Things like putting "and no I am not a man" in her bio, and talking explicitly online about her UTI, and the proportion of posts about gender vs everything else.
Funny, my reading was just that she was a troll, especially because her bio has "[...] you can call me a troll until your throat hurts." My money would be on "cis male troll" before it would be on "good faith trans woman", but only because a username like "just a woman" feels like something neither a cis nor trans woman would make, and certainly not in this space.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
No AI has ever passed a Turing Test. Is AI very impressive and can it do a lot of things that people used to imagine it would only be able to do once it became generally intelligent? Yes. But has anyone actually conducted a test where they were unable to distinguish between an AI and a human being? No. This never happend and therefore the Turing Test hasn't been passed.
The Turing test has been performed with GPT-4, and it passed 54% of the time (compared to humans being suspected as human 67% of the time.)
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
If the POTUS has the power to bootstrap the executive branch to dominating the other branches of government merely through an executive order, then that seems like a major loophole in the Constitution, which makes me think I'm missing something.
The thing you're missing is that Congress kept delegating rule-making authority to "independent agencies" under the executive, while also creating rules the executive branch had to follow while exercising the delegated authority. The fear from those who are concerned by this move is that Trump will keep the delegated rule-making authority, while ignoring the rules for exercising that delegated authority.
In theory, if Congress wanted to, they could seize power back with unvetoable majorities in the House and Senate, and remove both the delegated authority and the rules for exercising it. But with the split between MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans, and Democrats, that is unlikely to happen. So the end result is a massive power grab for the executive branch because of unwillingness to act on the part of Congress and the Courts.
I don't think what you said connects. The following two statements can both be true:
- A time period was the height of print culture, when every town and village worthy of the name had at least one circular paper and most cities have four.
- In the same time period, mobs destroying printing presses that circulated ideas people didn't like had a chilling effect on the way people chose to exercise free speech.
Put another way, do you think that when Elijah Lovejoy's printing press was destroyed multiple times and he was eventually murdered over his abolitionist position, that this was good for free speech culture or bad for free speech culture? Do you think, on the margins, that people were more likely to want to speak out in support of abolition or less likely? Of course, there's no accounting for the martyr effect, but I assume the goals of Elijah's killers should be obvious and repudiated.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
I agree wholeheartedly. Copyright in its current shape is a travesty.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Well Im glad that youre so principled, but... calling for literal, legal-definition murder is not the same as saying that e.g. men and women are different.
I think there's a big difference between wishing someone's death, and calling for someone's murder. Don't get me wrong, both are ugly, but saying "I wish the assassin hadn't missed" isn't that different from saying, "I wish the private jet his plane came in on crashed" or "I wish someone had strangled him as a baby in his crib."
There's plenty of colorful ways to say, "Boo X", and wishing their death is one of them. I do think after an assassination attempt we should ideally show more decorum, and hold off on such rhetoric, but again, I don't think it is worthy of firing if someone fails to show such decorum. And I definitely think it is a stretch to say that it is literally calling for murder.
If this is where you lost hope, you might as well never have hope - and I have my suspicions if you actually apply/ied that standard to the left in practice.
The woke left was the culturally ascendant group at the time. It was natural for me to look towards the anti-woke people on all sides of the aisle for the hope of a different set of cultural norms that encouraged engagement with ideas. In some ways the Motte really does model a lot of the discursive norms I wish existed in normie spaces, though I get that it is far too rarified and self-selected to truly serve as a model for society at large. Even so, I did have hopes of a more open society that embodied the virtues of frankness of speech on the one hand, and curiosity and charity on the other.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
It was the universal radicalizing event of the generation
It simply cannot have been, because I was of that generation and I was mostly put off by how much people cared about the whole thing on either side.
New Atheism and BLM are dead and gone but people are still mad that they got rid of Tracer's ass wiggle.
If I had to pin a name on what it seemed like from the outside, it was like "Asking Disney Corporation for a handjob." The nature of top tier media (AAA video games, blockbuster movies, etc.) is that only a small number of companies are able to marshal the resources in order to make them, and they can only make a few such releases a year, so if your tastes aren't represented in what they produce, you are left out in the cold. So people complain about the big corporations, and their failure to deliver what they want. Woke feminists want ugly, disabled women in the top tier media, and anti-woke coomers want sexy eye candy. Those desires are mutually exclusive, and so one or the other of them will be disappointed.
Some people have really started to invest in the idea of symbolic victories that can be provided by this or that big corporation kowtowing to their desires, and I'm sure I won't be able to dissuade anyone in that camp. But I really think people need a Diogenes and Alexander moment. When Alexander the Great comes up to your wine tub in the middle of the agora and asks if you want anything, you should be prepared to answer, "Stand a little out of my sun."
Nobody needs Blizzard. Nobody needs EA. Nobody needs Disney, or a thousand other big media corporations.
Either create your own stuff, or engage with enduring cultural artifacts that are 30+ years old, or support the smaller creators who are making things closer to your tastes. Like, the ancient Greeks made commentary after commentary about the Homeric epics and engaged with those stories on a deep level for centuries. But our culture is so temporally parochial, so obsessed with novelty, that we enslave our imaginations to big corporations and lose our souls in the process. Human flourishing is not merely to consoom. And it's certainly not to win pointless little cultural victories in a product you paid $60 on Steam.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
The United States was never a "real democracy," and that was by design. The United States is a republic with democratic elements.
There were founders like Thomas Jefferson who advocated for the democratic element to be more expansive, and amendments like the 13th, 17th and 19th have pushed the United States in a more democratic direction, but in theory we still retain most of our republican institutions, at least formally.
Personally, I would tend to be against destroying printing presses. Seems like it would have a chilling effect on free speech.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
I think pro- and anti-GamerGaters both tend to overestimate its impact. I tend to think GamerGate was just one instance of Toxoplasma of Rage that served as a political awakening for some people. I don't think it was more impactful than other Toxoplasma skirmishes, like New Atheism or BLM.
Though I must admit, GamerGate was also a conflict that almost entirely passed me by. I had one friend in college who I had one conversation about it with, and I was vaguely aware of Anita Sarkeesian, but neither side was salient to me (I play video games from time to time, but I'm not a "gamer", and I've never been an SJW or woke scold) and so I was never very invested in it. It would be like me trying to get involved in the "pro-shipper vs anti-shipper" debate in fan fiction communities. I have my principles, and they might align with one or the other side of that debate more than the other, but I'm also not fighting in that war because it seems dumb and fake to me.
The US doesn't work all that much like Rome; we have no dictator, and no consuls to appoint them.
I beg to differ. While we don't have the formal office, I would argue that both Abraham Lincoln and FDR both arguably fill the "dictator" role in American politics. Though of course, the American tradition is for the "dictator" to die or be killed in office, rather than to have them voluntarily cede power back to the republic.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I think Trump is definitively a dictator in the Roman style. I'm saying that one reading of his Napoleon tweet is that he's positioning himself as a Roman-style dictator, thus justifying the extra-legal way in which he had been advancing his agenda these past few weeks.
While I have expressed my concerns on the Motte about the health of our republic as a result of Trump's actions, I don't think the republic is quite dead yet. Our republic was already sick from an Imperial Presidency, and a cycle of Crisis and Leviathan, but the way Trump has chosen to carry out his agenda is increasingly worrying, and I'm someone who mostly lurked on the Motte during the Trump I years and agreed with the consensus about Trump Derangement Syndrome.
If Trump had just used his Republican majority in Congress and the Supreme Court to push through a legislative agenda through the usual means, I would have mostly just rolled with the punches and shrugged my shoulders. Republics, what can you do? But he's bypassed congress, and seems to be hell bent on doing as much as he can on his own. Even if the administrative state needed a serious culling, I would have been much happier if it had been done via Congress and the Courts, instead of by another executive embodying the worst aspects of the Imperial Presidency.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Scott wrote Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell which built on the ideas of Mencius Moldbug, and then wrote the The Anti-Reactionary FAQ in order to refute it. Many in the dissident right and neo-reaction thought Scott's initial presentation was the better of the two.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Worth noting that today (Feb 15) is Lupercalia. If the tweet isn't testing the waters for Trump as king, it is god-tier trolling.
Whether the quote is trolling or not, many in the X/Twitter replies were taking it at face value and affirming their support of the underlying sentiment. Someone in another thread said we need a "Kremlinology" of Trump that is attuned to knowing when to take what he says seriously or literally, and I agree in this case.
I would argue that if Trump is being literal with this tweet, then he is basically positioning himself as a "dictator" in the original Roman sense of the word. Someone imbued with emergency powers in order to save the republic in a crisis. The problem is that nobody actually appointed him to do that. Like, you could argue the American people did, but a 51/49 victory should not a Roman-style dictator make. 51/49 is "reform immigration, lower taxes, use the bully pulpit to get as much of your agenda through congress as possible" territory. It is not, "take all the power you need to save our republic, but please give it back when you're done" territory.
I simply do not share the belief that Trump couldn't have done most of what he wanted to do with the Republican majority congress and Supreme Court. He just chose to do it in a legally dubious method instead, and that's the main thing that concerns me.
EDIT: There's also the component where he's posting it on Lupercalia (Feb 15), the same day Mark Antony tried to crown Ceasar king. Even if it is god-tier trolling, then I've got to say I'm not amused. I actually care about my republic. (Thanks /u/SoonToBeBanned for reminding me of the Lupercalia connection.)
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Yes. I think such sentiments are ugly in anyone's mouth, but I also don't think they merit firing. In general, I would prefer a social norm that people only get fired for their public political opinions (even ugly ones), if being a mass media face of the company is part of their job, and it would violate the company's fiduciary duty to their shareholders to keep the person onboard.
Saying, "I wish the assassin hadn't missed" is not the kind of thing that should prevent you from working a low stakes retail job. The right would have forgotten about her in a week, and Home Depot acted as cowardly as any firm during an internet firestorm.
It might be copium, but maybe Trump and Musk will pull a Cincinnatus, and step down after they've "fixed" the Republic. Regardless, I'm with you in being disappointed with the current timeline. Under different circumstances, I could have been okay with a lot of the cuts, but this really does seem to be all the worst aspects of the Imperial Presidency finally come to roost.
I've been so disappointed in partisans the last few years. I lost a lot of hope when the left-leaning home depot employee lost her job, and many in the anti-woke right proved in their gleeful reactions afterwards that they had never had a principled opposition to cancel culture - they were always just angry that it wasn't their power to wield. As someone who is opposed to woke tactics like deplatforming and cancel culture because I do actually support free speech and a broader free speech culture, it was a real blow to me.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
I mean, anglophone people used to call Marcus Tullius Cicero "Tully" - leading to his most famous book, De Officiis, being known as "Tully's Offices", so there's plenty of underwhelming exonyms to go around.
I'm not sure that I've heard the objective, scientific meaning of "man" and "woman" that doesn't fall prey to the Diogenes-style "behold Plato's man" objection.
I think a gamete-based definition is a strong option (and Trump seems to agree, based on his EO) or a cluster-of-traits definition. But even those have their flaws.
And even aside from core definitions, I think this ignores the way words often operate at many levels. A "bear" is centrally an animal, but if I call a bear-shaped toy or a fictional bear character a "bear", I'm stretching and skewing the word in a way that is immediately intuitively understandable to an English speaker, even though in a real, literal sense I'm not actually talking about any kind of bear at all.
A "woman" could centrally be an "adult human of the sex that produces large gametes", and we could still allow for stretched usages like calling a particular type of game piece in a board game a "woman", or granting trans women the status of honorary "women."
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