vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
13hr ago
Nothing that I said contradicts your clarification. Hyperdulia is still less than latria.
It goes: latria > hyperdulia > protodulia > dulia. (Or more accurately, latria is qualitatively different than dulia, and not on the same track at all.)
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
The framework spawned by therapy culture in the west is particularly bad, mental health awareness is bad, stoicism is probably correct.
I get that you are making a distinction between "therapy culture" and "therapy" proper, but it is worth pointing out that Stoicism's DNA is in CBT by way of REBT's influence on it, with REBT's founder Albert Ellis being influenced by (among other sources) the Stoic philosophers. So Stoicism's influence is part of modern therapy, even if it is not part of modern therapy culture.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
Like there is no tactic that makes me instinctively hate someone more than a leftist who wants to mandate outcome B telling people that they shouldn't mandate outcome not-B because "mandates are wrong". It's pure "Darwin says whatever words make the meat puppets do what he wants," with zero respect for the target as a thinking human being.
This seems like a very strange thing to say. A vegetarian leftist who wants to mandate the end of animal slaughter wants to do so because they think it is unjustified violence, comparable to murder. But they understand that their values aren't universally shared, so they come up with more limited animal welfare arguments grounded in more commonly held values in the wider society they belong to. That's not demonstrating "zero respect for the target as a thinking human being" - it's being pragmatic about how to achieve some limited version of their goals and build a coalition in a representative liberal democracy.
Like, if a pro-choice person A is talking to a morally pro-life, politically libertarian person B, of course A is going to appeal to B's political libertarianism when it comes to discussing how the government should legislate around abortion, regardless of what other disagreements they might have. This isn't trying to turn other people into meat puppets to do your bidding, it's respecting and understanding other people enough to try and meet them where they're at in order to achieve a compromise outcome both of you can accept.
I mean, you could probably make a similarly complicated chart for Christianity to be fair. Make branching paths for Arianism, Nestorianism, Filoque, Transubstantiation, Marian and Saintly devotions, Apostolic Succession, Mormonism, etc.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
I mean, sure, people are pragmatic and meta-pragmatic all the time. I don't really see the point of this anti-lab grown meat bill, since I think meat eating is so culturally dominant that it won't be wiped out within our life times just because lab grown meat becomes affordable and widely available. More likely, vegetarianism will remain a costly social signal of a minority of people until the diet becomes indistinguishable from meat eating in terms of price and flavor, and then when it is practically effortless a law might eventually pass that bans animal slaughter altogether.
It's going to be exactly what happened with slavery. Banning slavery when an entire regional economy depends on it is difficult to accomplish, and probably requires a war and imposition of force. Living in a world where everyone has 200 to 8000 energy slaves thanks to electricity and industrialization makes being anti-slavery very easy, basically without cost to the individual. I think I would be more likely to see the point of slavery if I had to fetch my own water, grow, prepare and cook my own food from scratch, clean my clothes by hand, wash my dishes by hand, etc.
vorpa-glavo
12d ago
I prefer Diogenes the Cynic to C.S. Lewis on this count:
[While masturbating] in public, he wished "it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly."
While Diogenes is a little intense as an example, I think it's much healthier to think of the sex drive as something natural which needs attention from time to time, rather than making it the central focus of your life, or something shameful. I prefer moderate indulgence to sanctimony.
Well, the final report of the Cass Review just dropped. It's getting coverage in mainstream publications like the BBC. Surprising no one who paid attention to the interim report, it concludes that there is insufficient evidence in the realm of trans healthcare for children:
Cass told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that clinicians had been worried about having "no guidance, no evidence, no training".
She said "we don't have good evidence" that puberty blockers are safe to use to "arrest puberty", adding that what started out as a clinical trial had been expanded to a wider group of young people before the results of that trial were available.
"It is unusual for us to give a potentially life-changing treatment to young people and not know what happens to them in adulthood, and that's been a particular problem that we haven't had the follow-up into adulthood to know what the results of this are," she said.
Critics are already jumping on the fact that the report used the GRADE approach to categorize evidence, which only allows randomized control studies to be classified as "high quality of evidence" and which can drop non-blinded studies one level in assessed quality, thus preventing many non-blinded studies from qualifying as high quality evidence. (Bold is edit added later. See ArjinFerman's response below, and my response - original GRADE standards can be found here.) The critics point out that double-blinded randomized control studies just aren't possible in some areas of medicine. For a simple example, if the intervention is something like "cosmetic breast augmentation", then there's logically no sensible control group - since there's no placebo that can make people believe they got bigger breasts when they didn't. (It's worth pointing out that this criticism of GRADE isn't unique to trans activists. The Wikipedia page for GRADE mentions it is criticized in general when it comes to slowly progressing diseases like atherosclerosis, where observational studies are easier to perform than RCTs.)
As a result of the GRADE approach, we read things like this in the report:
Understanding intended benefits and risks of puberty blockers
[...]
There was one high quality study, 25 moderate quality studies and 24 low quality studies. The low quality studies were excluded from the synthesis of results.
My own opinion is that I can partially agree with Cass that I want to see higher quality studies around trans healthcare for children in general, but I think that her methodology (using GRADE) is of the sort that will always say we "don't have enough high quality studies", and so her arguments don't have legs to stand on. A problem I see a lot in studies is using some "industry standard" for investigating a topic, and coming to a result of some kind, but failing to justify why the "industry standard" was the best thing to use here. In a better version of the Cass Review, I would have liked to see a few paragraphs justifying the use of GRADE, and explaining why they used this standard and not some other standard.
I mean, isn't that a thing good scientific reports in general do at all steps of the process? Think of what a critic would claim about your model and methodology, and then explain why your model or methodology is the best one to use in this particular instance. Show that your findings are robust even if you used some slightly different model or methodology, and explain what conditions are necessary for your model or methodology to fail. A quick search through the Cass Review shows that it doesn't seem to have done this. It just used GRADE, didn't really justify the decision, and didn't discuss alternatives or why its arguments are robust under alternative assumptions about the data.
It's a bit circular to arbitrarily use a standard that will say, "there are basically no high quality studies in this medical field" no matter what, and then to conclude in your recommendations to the government, "We need more high quality studies before we do anything more in this medical field!"
vorpa-glavo
15d ago
It's not like Jeremy Bentham was pulling ideas out of thin air at random, he was trying to formalize something that was already informally present in the zeitgeist.
While there might be some truth to that, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill both came to conclusions that were very unpopular in their day. Jeremy Bentham's idea of decriminalizing gay sex was way ahead of its time, but a very natural consequence of utilitarian reasoning. And John Stuart Mill's arguments for the political equality of women and men was a natural enough idea coming from utilitarianism's universality, but had not yet found widespread acceptance in society. (Reading "The Subjection of Women" is an interesting exercise, because the positions John Stuart Mill has to argue against are often things that basically no one today believes. I think it's hard for a modern person to truly put themselves in the mindset of the kind of positions Mill was arguing against.)
I think we swim in fairly utilitarian waters, and much language around things like victimless crimes and harm reduction come originally from Mill and Bentham.
Utilitarianism is a stance for reaching moral conclusions, not conclusions of cause and effect. I do not believe economists or political scientists make are in much the business of making assertions of this sort in their academic work -- though you can prove me wrong by citing cases where they do.
I think there's arguably a "descriptive" version of utilitarianism, and a "prescriptive" one.
For an analogy, look at medicine. Medicine as a field of investigation concerns itself with health, and to complete that investigation it tries to find causal relationships between various activities and bodily states of health. There's a descriptive and a prescriptive component to medicine. We pour money into medicine because, broadly speaking, the aggregate demands of humans for health are enough to fund the investigations, but many of the descriptive discoveries could be used to make people healthy or unhealthy.
In the same way, economics as a field of the social sciences is "merely" the descriptive study of how economies work, but the reason we study economies is because we want stable, functioning economies that do a good job of allocating resources and have positive effects on well-being.
As I see it, the "descriptive" part of utilitarianism is the aggregate conclusions of the "descriptive" parts of other fields like medicine, economics, sociology, and psychology, that allow us to answer questions like "If we take action X, what effect will that have on QALY's/preference fulfillment/etc." Those questions are in theory "value neutral" questions, but the reason we are asking the question, and the reason we care about the answer is because enough people think that it is worthwhile field of inquiry. That's the implicit "prescriptive" part - it is derived from the fact that we ask the questions to make a larger policy decision.
vorpa-glavo
15d ago
But I think it's unlikely that they truly feel a spontaneous, pre-reflective love for all of humanity.
As someone with consequentialist/utilitarian leanings, I cultivated my utilitarianism as a set of demanding ethical duties that correct the problems of humanity's natural inclinations. I basically think that emotional empathy is "flawed." I don't feel 100 times worse about 1000 strangers dying than I do about 10 strangers dying. And the fact that my emotional empathy is activated more by seeing a video of someone suffering, than reading about that same suffering feels like a flaw of human sociality.
One of the maxims I've tried to live by is to "act as I would if my emotions could accurately reflect differences in scale of suffering to the minute degree required by utilitarianism." It's not perfect by any means - I effectively have to have a set of rules or heuristics that will broadly lead to that result, because I don't have the ability to cognitively process all of the different ways society will go, and I'm still using flawed human hardware and interacting with humans and animals with flawed hardware, but I think it informs my Effective Altruism, and my larger political goals.
But I agree with you, that I don't actually feel a love for all of humanity. I just try to make my actions indistinguishable from the actions of someone who has a spontaneous, pre-reflective love for all of humanity.
On one hand, I am assured that no one is doing irreversible damage to children, but on the other hand, I am to understand that there is a distinct category of people that it would be hateful to not put on courses of hormone therapy to alter the development of their physiologic gender.
I don't think this is a hard circle to square at all. A person who believes this might believe that:
- Social transition for younger trans kids, and hormone blockers for trans kids entering puberty do an acceptably low amount of long-term damage to their bodies to serve as a first line treatment until they age into adulthood and decide whether they want to undergo hormone treatments and cosmetic surgeries.
Whether I personally accept that as true, I think that is a perfectly consistent thing to believe. I'm sure there's a doctor out there somewhere immediately jumping to hormone treatments and cosmetic surgery for so-called trans kids, but I think that deviates from what even most trans activists say is the ideal course of treatment for minors.
That highlighted phrase has become not just normalized, but sacralized on the left with the rise of "protect trans kids". Almost no one had heard of this term until a decade or so ago, then it suddenly started picking up around the time Trump took office, and now searches for it have increased sharply
I don't think this is surprising at all. I think one of the most rhetorically effective attacks on trans people on the right has been stopping kids from transitioning (especially in states where they can already do it without parental consent.)
Unfortunately, right or left "think of the children" always seems to be an effective tactic. I think this is just an example of Toxoplasma of Rage in action. The idea of "irreversible damage" to kids bodies complements the idea of "driving trans kids to suicide." Together they are a recipe for endless back and forth argument, since both sides can position themselves as the ones most concerned about children's well-being.
vorpa-glavo
25d ago
Addressing the other parts of your post:
That demand seems arbitrary to me, and "that's what we use for everything" is a perfectly fine justification.
I agree it's "fine" from a CYOA point of view, as in, no one will be able to blame you for using a standard tool used across the industry. But from the perspective of trying to perform a Bayesian update based on the final report, I'm not sure I agree.
A lot of the scientific method in general is a heuristic crystallization of Bayesian approaches, and so I have no doubt that a lot of what is present in GRADE is justifiable across a wide swath of evidence, and comes to largely the same answer as a Bayesian approach would. But I think that if GRADE systematically downgrades some kinds of evidence from being "high quality", which in a proper Bayesian approach wouldn't require any serious adjustment, that can lead to certain evidence being ignored or de-emphasized compared to where it should.
My opinion is that trans activists and researchers wildly oversold the scientific basis for the interventions they were promoting, and sometimes they were outright lying ("puberty blockers are reversible"). They could have just not done that, and tried to gradually accumulate stronger evidence. But the way things are, gender medicine should have never seen such widespread adoption, and people who allowed it should probably be punished.
I think absent any other evidence, just the existence of the Replication Crisis is enough to call a lot of medicine into doubt, and I see no reason why this wouldn't apply to trans healthcare. That the evidence is weaker than often claimed, is almost certainly true. (I'm not sure that that isn't the case for a wide variety of healthcare fields as well though - is trans healthcare uniquely bad, or is it just as bad as medicine as a whole, and do we need to adopt a whole swath of reforms to deal with things like p-hacking, the file drawer effect, small sample sizes, etc.)
I agree with Cass' conclusion, even if I question her methodologies, because I want to see higher quality medical evidence around trans issues, and especially trans kids. I want the medical research to be beyond reproach, whatever conclusions it comes to.
The basic problem with medicine, across the board, is that we're routinely doing barbaric things to be people, and the only justification we can have is that the evidence shows it will have a better outcome for the patient. Chemotherapy involves poisoning a patient with the hope that the poison will kill the cancer faster than it kills the patient. Amputating a limb might be a tough decision sometimes, but it is most justified if a patient would likely die if you didn't do it.
I want the evidence we use in all instances, especially trans healthcare to be airtight so that no one can say we're poisoning people or removing functional limbs or organs for no reason. It'll still be "barbaric", but if it can be justified as much as chemotherapy, then I think trans healthcare will be in a good place.
vorpa-glavo
15d ago
If you ask me how many billion people I would rather die than my cat, my emotional response is I’m okay losing the three billion+ people in Africa and China and India and such. I don’t know those people. My cat loves me.
Logically though, there’s gotta be a better way to strike a balance between partiality and self-interest, alongside recognizing it’s pretty hard to justify a moral system that values my cat so much. If you recognize that other moral agents exist and that you should seek fair compromises as much as possible, then that seems better than any alternative I’m aware of.
Yeah, as someone who has long been roughly aligned with utilitarianism as an ethical philosophy, I've wondered if it's not better to think of it as one answer to what can happen when a lot of people with policy-making power come together, and want to justify their policy goals in a way that most people would consider "fair."
Basically, if a politician wants to build a road, and they're going to have to tear down your house to do it, it's easier to swallow if they justify their decision by saying they took everyone in the country's well-being into account, and they think the new road is going to do more good than your house in its current location is doing. (It is also easier to swallow if they try to be fair to you by giving you enough money to relocate, so you can reap the benefits of the new road as well.)
I've long wondered if "discounted utilitarianism" or "reflective equilibrium hedonism" would be a better philosophy for individuals to adopt instead. Basically, acknowledging that you don't value the life of 1 foreigner the same as 1 person from the same city, and you don't value that person as much as you do a family member or friend. So you just discount each circle of concern by the amount you don't care about them. You might say, "Well a person from China might make my phone, and that has some value to me, so I value their life at 0.001 times that of one my friends." And then you can do the utilitarian calculus with those decisions in mind. Let the 1-to-1 values be in the hands of politicians and diplomats who have to work out fair policies and justify them to their constituents.
And the critics are wrong. If you give a treatment to one group, and not give it to another to another, that's still an RCT. Or you can offer an alternative treatment to the control group. It's a plus when you can blind a patient to what they're getting, but it's not a strict necessity. In this case it's probably just as important to blind the researchers when they're assessing results as to blind the patients themselves.
You're right of course. I think the concerns are more nuanced in some areas of medicine.
I doubt it applies to trans medicine, but I have heard of cases where medicine has such obvious positive effects for the sample group early on, that it then becomes unconscionable to not provide it to the control group (mostly in cases involving terminal diseases with quick turn arounds.) This would be one instance where a study initially meant to be a RCT trial for a terminal disease, might turn into an observational study instead.
And I was clearly thinking of double-blinded RCTs being nearly impossible in some cases, which I believe is true in some areas of medicine, but I can admit that GRADE only requires RCTs period for evidence to be considered high quality. That said, reading through the actual GRADE hand book it does seem like Lack of Blinding is considered a risk for study bias, which can drop a piece of evidence one level:
Example 3: High Risk of Bias due to lack of blinding (Downgraded by One Level)
RCTs of the effects of Intervention A on acute spinal injury measured both all-cause mortality and, based on a detailed physical examination, motor function. The outcome assessors were not blinded for any outcomes. Blinding of outcome assessors is less important for the assessment of all-cause mortality, but crucial for motor function. The quality of the evidence for the mortality outcome may not be downgraded. However, the quality may be downgraded for the motor function outcome.
I'm going to edit my original post to reflect this information, but I'll make clear what I'm adding. Basically, it appears to be the case that non-double-blinded RCTs cannot easily be high quality evidence according to GRADE.
Where did you get the idea that the decision was arbitrary?
I tried to search through the report, and they just used GRADE without really explaining why. I suppose "arbitrary" isn't quite the right word, but "unjustified within the report" is probably defensible.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I want to ask, what is so wrong with being a guy in a dress?
This feels like it works best for middle and upper middle class trans/gender non-conforming (GNC) people, and terribly for every other kind of GNC person.
Whether it is technically legal or not, a male-bodied teenager who comes into a job interview with lipstick and a dress is likely not going to get the job. Good numbers are hard to get, but there's plenty of anecdotal accounts from trans people who had trouble finding work because they were non-passing trans people, and I don't think there's any strong reason to doubt their accounts even without good hard data on discrimination that shows up in "legible" parts of society.
I seriously doubt affirmative action, and DEI initiatives have made things much better for all trans/GNC people in this regard. (I mean, isn't it common knowledge that the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action have always been cis white women?) Sure, a progressive tech firm might happily hire a trans woman as a software engineer, but for every company like that there's probably a dozen bodegas and fast food joints in more conservative areas that don't want to hire a teenage cross-dresser in their first job, and that lack of work experience might echo out into their job prospects down the line, amplifying the effects always present because of their status as a recognizable cross-dresser.
Part of the reason that Weimar transvestite passes looked interesting to me, is that they seemed like exactly the sort of legal vehicle that one could attach non-discrimination laws and cultural norms around. I know more libertrian or social conservative types would still have issues with such a regime, but I do think it would overcome the basic issue of "telling a societal lie" that many people claim is their main objection, and I think a world with transvestite passes and social norms of pronoun hospitality (enforced by social censure, and not legal censure) could get 90% of where trans advocates want things, and without any obvious "lies" or "metaphysical nonsense."
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
1mo ago
I don't know. I've seen several trans skeptical people bite the bullet on trans suicide rates.
The attitude seems to either be "the threat of trans kids committing suicide is emotional blackmail meant to shut down the argument from society and parents and force them to go through with mutilating their child against their will" or occasionally even "if they commit suicide at higher rates, then completely ignoring the issue solves the issue (through the self-removal of trans people from the population.)"
I mean, there's nothing stopping both claims from being true (to the extent they're empirically testable.) It could hypothetically be that social contagion and permissive doctors are allowing large numbers of cis children to ruin their bodies through transition followed by inevitable detransition, and that from a purely medical perspective the most effective way to prevent the suicide of enduringly trans children is to allow them to socially transition and take puberty blockers until adulthood when they can make the choice of whether to undergo hormonal therapy and cosmetic surgery. In that hypothetical world, the difficulty would be with separating cis children from trans children in a reliable way that minimized overall harm to both groups.
The empirical case can only solve so much without models of what is happening. The DSM-V's intro talks about how it models mental disorders, and it basically says that they are useful perspectives for treatment and not necessarily a single "real" disease with a known cause or set of causes. That is, ADHD is "real" to doctors using the DSM to the extent that it has been found that patients coming in complaining about a common cluster of issues, tend to have those issues resolved through a common cluster of treatments. And it's no different for gender dysphoria. When it comes to a gender dysphoria diagnosis today, there is no need for brain tests or an "intersex brain" hypothesis or anything more empirical than, "have they had 2 out of these 6 listed symptoms for at least 6 months?"
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I actually have a question for you. Would you be more okay with a regime like the Weimar republic had of transvestite passes? They were doctor's notes that smoothed out the act of cross-dressing in public for people, and made it less of a hassle to interact with authorities.
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.
Contra Innuendo Studios On "Didoing"
Today, another video from Innuendo Studios in their "Alt-Right Playbook" series just dropped, and it describes a move in an argument where Person A will propose a small gesture that they assert will make things better for some group, and Person B counters by essentially agreeing that society is unfair around the issue being discussed, but that it is such a minor problem that it is not worth addressing. Innuendo Studios' preferred word for this move by Person B is "Didoing" (after the Dido song Thank You which features the lyrics "[...] it's not so bad"), but he also points out that some people have called this issue "The Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness", which I prefer as a name for this, since it doesn't rely on knowledge of a song from 1998 to explain.
According to Innuendo Studios, Person B's hidden premise is that "it is okay for things to be unfair, within a certain tolerance." That "some people do and should take extra precautions just to exist in the world alongside the rest of us."
My own politics lean towards social democracy, and aside from some anti-woke skepticism, I am far from "alt-right." But to the above I have to say, isn't Person B obviously correct?
Innuendo Studios initially frames the discussion around content warnings, so let's start there. I want to set aside, for a moment, the question of whether content warnings are actually successful at addressing some alleged unfairness in society. Let's grant for the sake of argument that they are 100% successful at addressing the issue of people with PTSD or anxiety attacks having their conditions activated as a result of media they are consuming.
That still doesn't answer at what level society should be trying to deal with this issue. As I see it, there are four basic levels a coordination problem can be solved in society:
- The government (AKA the use of organized force)
- Social norms (AKA the use of organized social ostracism)
- Private organizations
- Individual actions
Now I believe the question becomes, assuming that content warnings work, at what level should we try to solve the problem that they solve?
None of these options are without downsides. If we create a new government bureaucracy to do this, how do we stop it from trying to seize new power or misusing the power it was given? If we enshrine a new social norm, are we prepared to accept the ostracism of people from polite society for its violation? If a private organization tries to solve the problem, how can its limited reach be solved so the maximum number of people possible enjoy the benefits of the solution? And doubly so for individual actions.
We already live in a world where there are a ton of voluntary systems for content ratings, from the MPA film rating system to the United States pay television content advisory system to the ESRB. All of these systems are being done by private industry, and don't have the force of law.
We also have successful examples of crowd-sourcing trigger warnings with sites like Does The Dog Die.
I don't think it would be unreasonable for a person to think that this level of dealing with the problem is more or less acceptable. We haven't delivered a perfect solution to all people, but we've achieved reasonably good coverage at a tolerably low cost to society in terms of money and resources invested. Sure, some people might find this incomplete resolution unsatisfying, or on the other side believe that even the level we're currently investing in it is too high.
All discussions are going to end up like this in the end, whether we're talking about whether the government should have programs to pay for eye glasses for people, or whether we're talking about whether we should force private companies to build handicapped spaces in parking lots.
If we have a list of societal interventions we're considering implementing, I think it is obvious that you should do the ones that have the highest impact with the lowest cost of societal resources to implement. It doesn't mean that the problems that you don't focus on aren't problems, but they might be small enough problems that you don't actually need any larger coordination to solve the problem.
I think it would be worth prioritizing relatively cheap interventions like eyeglasses, which can have huge positive impacts on people depending on the level of impairment they started with, over more untractable problems that tend to be the focus of woke bellyaching.
No matter how you try to solve a problem in society, there will always be trade offs. You're always compromising between bigger interventions in Area A and Area B since every resource that matters is finite, and I think most people find it acceptable to leave many small problems unsolved. We're okay with saying, "suck it up, everyone has to deal with some level of unfairness, and the current status quo already solves most of the most important issues you have to deal with." Or alternatively, "The status quo is indeed unacceptable, but we should focus on solving big, important issues X, Y and Z, and we won't be getting to your tiny issues any time soon, if ever."
There has to be a Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness, whether you're "alt-right" or not. Most of the argument is about where the line should be drawn.
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
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?
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.
Technically, the Catholic position is to worship (latria) God alone, and to merely respect or venerate (dulia) saints, including Mary. However, because of Mary's special status as the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, she is offered "hyperdulia" the highest form of respect or veneration.
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