vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
5d 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.
vorpa-glavo
5d 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.
vorpa-glavo
5d 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.
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
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.
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.
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
24d ago
As I dive deeper into Ayn Rand’s minarchism, I see how little the government has the moral right to be doing in our lives.
I've read widely in the libertarian, minarchist and anarcho-capitalist traditions, and while I think they are often good at identifying certain problems of government, and I'm convinced by the arguments of Huemer's The Problem of Political Authority and Ellickson's Order without Law that these forms of government could potentially work in the real world, I still find myself more attracted to social democracy as a set of principles for organizing society, especially since it's actually been tried in the real world and seems to work reasonably well.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very sympathetic to the view of government that it is just the largest and most successful gang of thugs in an area, and that there is actually little moral grounding for the idea of political authority. But I'm a pragmatist and a consequentialist, and I'm more willing to shrug and say, "if the big bullies take care of the little bullies and make people more free, that's better than the alternative." I tend to agree with Noah Smith's argument in The Liberty of Local Bullies that there are many "intermediate" groups between the government and the individual that often have just as much power to reduce your liberty as the government does.
Imagine a devout Jehovah's Witness in high school refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because oaths are against their faith, and constantly being punished by their overzealous home room teacher for it. The only way to resolve the issue in a way that preserves the liberty of the Jehovah's Witness to not say the Pledge is to go over the teacher's head, via school administrators. But what if the school administrators support the teacher over the student? The only way to force the teacher to respect the student's religious freedom is to go a level higher to the government, and hope that they will force fines or other coercive measures in order to protect the student's rights.
I think for freedom to be meaningfully maximized you need a centralized government with enough state capacity to force the local bullies to respect freedom. Obviously, it would be foolish to claim that centralized governments with high state capacity always results in increased liberty, but most of the countries I can think of that are good places to live in are some form of liberal representative democracy with free markets and a government with enough state capacity to secure people's rights, and create money transfers and social safety nets (even the United States.)
vorpa-glavo
25d 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
25d ago
nobody is currently arrested for cross-dressing
While this is technically true, I don't assign 0 credence to the reports from some underclass trans black women that they get stopped by the police on suspicion of prostitution more often than the average person. While the so called "walking while trans law" law (properly the "loitering for prostitution" law) I'm most aware of in New York was repealed in 2021 after years of efforts going back to at least 2010, it wouldn't surprise me if there are several other jurisdictions where anti-prostitution laws accidentally catch innocent trans people in their nets.
I think part of the problem is that underclass trans women probably are more likely to be prostitutes, and a police officer is going to Notice The Pattern whether he wants to or not, and then he's going to act on his experiences and stop non-passing trans people more often as a result.
I fully admit that this issue could be solved with reforms to prostitution laws, without any reforms of existing legislation around trans people (including transvestite passes), but that doesn't mean it's not a problem for underclass trans women right now.
vorpa-glavo
25d 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
25d 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.
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
1mo ago
My question, then, is: What would you recommend for those boys, to help them understand the power that they will eventually wield?
Maybe Plutarch's Parallel Lives, and Seneca's Letter's? The first book covers the biographies of many important men of Greece and Rome, and the latter explains how to actually put virtue-based philosophy into practice.
Alright, having read part 1, and half of part 2, I'm going to attempt a response. Please forgive me if you've already addressed something I say in your other writings. Based on what I've read, I think you and I have fairly similar trans etiologies and ontologies (even if I emphasize or deemphasize different parts, and might assign higher or lower probabilities to certain things existing or mattering), and the primary point of difference between the two of us is the philosophy of language surrounding the issue of categorization, and the resulting normative theory that arises from that difference.
I doubt I'll "pass [your] philosophy-of-language litmus test", but I'm more rat-adjacent than an actual rationalist, and so I'm not really concerned whether you "lose all respect for [me] as a rationalist."
The issue was that category boundaries are not arbitrary (if you care about intelligence being useful). You want to draw your category boundaries such that things in the same category are similar in the respects that you care about predicting/controlling, and you want to spend your information-theoretically limited budget of short words on the simplest and most widely useful categories.
First, I want to say that I think you have an overly narrow conception of category drawing. Humans are very good at coming up with new categories on the fly, even when those categories don't always have good words for them. When academics are being responsible with terminology, you'll get discussions of emic (insider) vs. etic (outsider) terminology, and acknowledgement that some word or phrase is being used as a matter of convenience and not because it refers to a particular well-conceived or robust category.
Heck, look at something as "frivolous" as TV Tropes wiki. While some of the "tropes" they identify were named and recognized before the wiki started, a lot of the tropes are just patterns in stories and storytelling that people picked up on and decided to name, and when people notice a similar (but different) pattern they have to decide the boundaries between the two "tropes" they identify. The entirety of the wiki is an exercise in human categorization of an essentially endless and unresolvable set of category questions. The only thing keeping it somewhat sensible and stable is a respect for precedence, and a desire to settle on some set of useful vocabulary that outweighs people's desire for endless debates about category boundaries.
I think if I was trying to steelman something in the realm of "words can mean whatever you want them to mean", it would be in this context. I frequently have conversations where there's some idea I want a short word or phrase to refer to, and a suitable one does not exist. It is easy enough to drill down into the features I want to call out, and try to come up with a good label for it. This is a very fluid thing that happens naturally, and I assume it's being done casually, all the time, throughout human conversations. It's easy, and part of the fun is working out conventions on-the-fly with the people you're having the conversation with so that a conversation can happen in the first place.
I think this is part of why I'm less insistent on the idea that words must mean one and only one specific thing. If I'm talking with someone, and it becomes clear that the semantic scope of some word that's important to a discussion I want to have is different for them than it is for me, then as a practical matter I will have to come up with a new word or phrase for both of us to use to fruitfully have a discussion anyways.
My position is less, "words can mean whatever you want them to mean", and more "while it is useful for common, everyday words to cut reality at the joints, it's not the end of the world if you have to come up with a new convention on the spot that sets aside terminology disputes you're less interested in having." That process is about as free and fluid as "words meaning whatever you want them to mean", but with a specific pragmatic goal limiting the scope of the word creation process.
Aside from that, you make some specific claims about human cognition and psychology that I find dubious, such as:
Forcing a speaker to say "trans woman" instead of "man" in a sentence about my cosplay photos depending on my verbally self-reported self-identity may not be forcing them to lie, exactly. It's understood, "openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning," what trans women are; no one is making a false-to-fact claim about them having ovaries, for example. But it is forcing the speaker to obfuscate the probabilistic inference they were trying to communicate with the original sentence (about modeling the person in the photograph as being sampled from the "man" cluster in configuration space), and instead use language that suggests a different cluster-structure. ("Trans women", two words, are presumably a subcluster within the "women" cluster.) Crowing in the public square about how people who object to being forced to "lie" must be ontologically confused is ignoring the interesting part of the problem. Gender identity's claim to be non-disprovable functions as a way to avoid the belief's real weak points. [Emphasis mine]
First, it's not obvious to me that this kind of word usage actually confuses anyone's mental maps of the world. Consider a phrase like: "Toy elephants are elephants."
I think even a child understands to their core that toy elephants and actual elephants differ in important regards. If you ask them if toy elephants breathe, or have working organs or a thousand other questions, if the child answers honestly they will admit that a toy elephant has none of these features. I think if someone took an analogous stance to the word "elephant" as you take to the word "woman", then we'd insist on always calling them "elephant-shaped toys" or "toys a human creator designed in the image of an elephant" or something silly like that.
But no one is confused. No one's models about the world are distorted. Everyone with any sense understands that a toy elephant might be an elephant, but it isn't a "real" elephant.
I don't think it "matters" whether toy elephants go in the "elephant" cluster or the "animal-shaped" toy cluster, because my intuition is that everyone's pre-linguistic understanding of the situation is fundamentally the same regardless of what words we decide to use for the situation or where we draw strict category boundaries.
Now, I admit that the social norm that it is wrong to ask about a person's genitals or what surgeries they have undergone, combined with other social norms that hide people's genitals from sight does create a situation where people might genuinely be confused about how the world actually is as a matter of fact. But I think those are the the primary issues, not the fact that the phrase "trans woman" doesn't offer specific insight that would overcome the ignorance that our social norms might produce.
The person also said it was hard because it seemed like there were no moderate centrists on gender: you could either be on Team "if you ever want to know what genitals someone has for any reason, then you are an evil transphobe", or Team "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes".
I added that the worst part was that the "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes" view was basically correct. It was phrased in a hostile and demeaning manner. But words don't matter! Only predictions matter!
I think you and I approach the implications of your last sentence here from different angles. I agree that predictions matter more than raw words, and I believe that you and I would make similar predictions about a number of things related to the trans discussion. I think you and I could even have a fruitful discussion on trans issues if we made a short-term convention of "useful" terminology that neither of us found objectionable.
However, if predictions matter more than words, then where words don't actually confuse people (as I believe they do not in this case) there can hardly be an objection to using a particular word for something. Ask me any empirical question about "trans women", and I believe I could answer in a way where my predictions would largely line up with yours, perhaps with some differences due to different research paths and life experiences.
I get that you were burned by the rationalist community, since they seemed to get what you consider a very easy question wrong, and consistently did so in a way that undermined your belief that they were sincerely applying the principles you though they were trying to live by. I get that this is important to you because you've lived with this set of emotions for years, and have felt like you were going crazy when no one else seemed to be able to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance that you seemed to observe in them. But I'm not actually convinced that this is as big a deal as it has become in your head. If you already "know thyself" on this topic, and feel like you have a reasonably good read on what the world is in fact like, why blow your life up over an unimportant word quibble?
I'm trying to work through your posts from the beginning before I get to the most recent one you posted here. But I did want to chime in to say that I've long advocated for a "socio-legal model" for gender, ahead of the common "identity model" that many activists advance, in part because I cannot deny that some people who want to live as the opposite sex also seem to have a fetish of some kind. (Even if I'm somewhat open to the argument that many women are also autogynephyllic in some way, and thus autogynephilia might be compatible with the "intersex brain hypothesis.")
I'm not a huge fan of nebulous metaphysics, and the socio-legal model of gender only requires as much woo-woo as the concept of adoption or marriage does. I say this even as I acknowledge that there are plenty of cultures without adoption or Western-style marriage.
I have a strong confidence that autogynephilia exists at the very least, since I have a non-gender-related transformation fetish and I have incidentally seen a lot of captions and stories with AGP themes in them while searching for my preferred content. Now, that isn't yet strong evidence that AGP and being trans are connected in any way - I have no way of knowing if most of the people who like MTF transformation stories self-identify as males or females, but I do know at least a few transwomen who also have MTF transformation fetishes on various sites.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I don't pretend to know what exactly was going on in the heart or mind of Epicurus. I can only speak of the writings of him and his school that come down to us in the modern day, and I would say Epicurus' letter to Herodotus and Lucretius' De Rerum Natura seem to prefigure a lot of modern materialism. While there are a few things a modern reader might scoff at (such as Lucretius' insistence on a flat Earth, at least a century after Aristotle collected the best arguments for a spherical Earth in one place), their basic conclusions about the afterlife, divine intervention and the supernatural are remarkably similar to a modern materialist.
I actually think you underestimate the degree to which the educated elites of Greek and Roman society might have already cast off the highly symbolic world they lived in. Look at Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, where at a meeting of several philosophers of different schools, they just offhandedly reject the traditional concept of Hades as the afterlife, and even call the idea foolish. Most ancient philosophers believed in gods of some sort, but that doesn't mean that their concepts weren't far removed from what the masses believed. Even as early as Socrates and Plato, most philosophers seemed to reject Homeric conceptions of gods as impious and immoral.
If you want to believe that the Greek Atomists couldn't "really" believe in materialism in their heart of hearts because of the culture they found themselves in, then I'm not sure how I could argue you out of that idea. Yes, hypocrites exist in every era, but surely you believe sincere people exist in every era as well, however rare they may be?
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I read through your excerpt from the Summa, and I don't feel like it properly dealt with my main objection.
The passage from the Summa that most directly touches my line of inquiry is:
The ancients, however, not properly realizing the force of intelligence, and failing to make a proper distinction between sense and intellect, thought that nothing existed in the world but what could be apprehended by sense and imagination. And because bodies alone fall under imagination, they supposed that no being existed except bodies, as the Philosopher observes (Phys. iv, text 52,57). Thence came the error of the Sadducees, who said there was no spirit (Acts 23:8).
But the very fact that intellect is above sense is a reasonable proof that there are some incorporeal things comprehensible by the intellect alone.
However, I don't accept the "fact that intellect is above sense", and so I can't agree with Aquinas' conclusion that this proves there are some incorporeal things comprehensible by the intellect alone.
I also can't help but think that most of the angels of the Bible seem fairly corporeal. Did Jacob/Israel wrestle with a non-corporeal spirit that somehow broke his hip?
Aquinas supposedly deals with the objection that angels must be both spiritual and physical later, but I'm not actually convinced he's on good exegetical grounds here.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I'm not sure I buy this explanation. Even if our minds are somehow made of soulstuff and not reducible to purely physical processes, I don't know why ESP would need to be explained using soulstuff?
Our eyes somehow get information to our minds/souls, and yet we can explain the basics of sight in purely physical terms. Light bounces off of objects, and hits our eyes. So a physical process gets information into our minds/souls.
Why would ESP need to be a non-physical, non-material process? I could easily see an explanation along the lines of:
- ESP-particles are constantly hitting physical objects, and travelling large distances.
- Our ESP-eye is a sensory organ in our brain that ESP-particles can hit, and much like we have visual processing that takes place in our brains, we have ESP-particle processing that is capable of processing the ESP-particles that hit our ESP-eye.
- It is this process that we call ESP.
Even if the specifics could be a little different from the above, I think it's a good starting point for thinking about what ESP even means in practice. Why do you think that is not what Western science will discover to be the case?
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
So angels and spiritual beings exist in essentially higher dimensions than ours…. But again I don’t think we have any concepts that can accurately explain. This is why mysticism and experiential understanding is so crucial for most religious practices.
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?
vorpa-glavo
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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 prefer Diogenes the Cynic to C.S. Lewis on this count:
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.
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