This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The Zizians as we probably know are a rationalist murder-cult, followers of Jack "Ziz" Lasota, a non-passing preop MtF transsexual, which is an identity shared by many of Jack's followers. Yudkowsky commented on it on X, and I noticed he used "she/her" pronouns for Jack.
This seems to be the dominant social norm in rationalist spaces. In my experience I have seen rationalist spaces completely capitulate to trans language norms, even using altered pronouns to refer to people who don't pass and exhibit male-coded bad faith behavior, like murder sprees.
I'm rationalist adjacent myself. I don't go out of my way to refuse to use someone's altered pronouns. I certainly have used chosen pronouns for people that pass and seem to engage the community in good faith. But I have a hard time adopting chosen pronouns as a rule. It seems to me that a social norm of always using altered pronouns weakens the defense against bad-faith actors. I've gotten comments deleted on rationalist message boards for correctly gendering various people in the news who seemed to me to be bad actors.
The fact that Jack Lasota is a man and not a woman seems like an important fact about the world for us to know. It seems important for the justice system. It helps explain his behavior. And it seems important for communities that are pattern-matching to filter future bad actors.
While I've spent a lot of time in rationalist spaces, I've also absorbed a bit of Gender Critical ideology. I used to have strong AGP urges, describing myself as a "lesbian in a man's body". But in my mid 30s I figured out that having an auto-erotic fantasy at the center of my sex life was isolating and would keep me from having the kind of family life that I desired. I began to detox from TG pornography and erotica, treating it much as one would treat an addiction. Gender critical forums were helpful for puncturing the balloons of my fantasy and helping me understand how some could see my TG roleplaying as anti-social behavior.
Coincidentally on X I recently ran into a GC account describing the behavior of another trans bad actor in a Facebook group for lactating mothers. This transwoman was pretending to have lived through a pregnancy and then lost the baby in a miscarriage. He sought sympathy, support, and validation from the group. This was obviously fulfilling some sort of fantasy for him, to which the women of the group were made non-consenting participants. This incident got some play on social media because some of the real women in the group did object to the presence of the transwoman and those women were kicked out. This group chat was governed by suburban nice liberal norms, which like the rationalists have completely capitulated to trans beliefs.
I wonder if the rationalist default to fully embrace trans language norms reflects the fact that there aren't a lot of mothers and daughters in the rationalist space, while there are a lot of MtF transsexuals. Perhaps it is just easiest for a scene to adopt the norms which will cause the least social friction within the scene. There's not a lot of breast-feeding forums, girl's swim meets, or female dorms in the experience of people in the rationalist community where the presence of transwomen would create conflict.
But I wonder if there are any people here who are willing to explicitly defend trans language norms as a more universal principle. Do you perceive bad actors and slippery slopes to be a problem? If so, how do you defend against them?
I think it’s a consequence, in part because of the utilitarian approach most self described rationalists have. Utilitarian philosophy doesn’t have any inherent moral principles other than “minimize harm.” The problem comes when you have a group that’s defined “telling the truth” as “causing harm.” Theres no leverage to push back with. You can’t say “I refuse to tell lies” because that’s not really a base level moral principle of utilitarian moral thinking. The argument would take the form of “I don’t want to tell lies”, but unless you can show that you telling a lie leads to worse consequences than “trans woman committing suicide because you hurt their feelings,” it’s not something you can support under that moral code. It end up being “suicide vs my desire to tell the truth.” Truth loses.
Thing is, the problem with this view is that "trans women are not women" is not a universally-accepted truth--if anything, it is a matter of fundamental values conflict. To you, it is truth, but to trans women, it is the opposite. The only thing that points to objective reality is a trans person's birth identity--but the entire point of being transgender is to leave said identity behind as thoroughly and quickly as possible. You're not going to be able to do more than keep referring to The Artist Formerly Known As Prince as just "Prince."
Surely the chromosomal and hormonal makeup point to some sort of objective reality too, but this shouldn't even matter. I'm with Scott's The categories were made for man(...) here, taken to what I think is its logical conclusion - my mental categories were made for me, and if I for whatever reason decide that I want to cluster those humans with XY chromosomes plus whatever set of unprincipled exceptions in one category, nobody else should have any more right to force me to redraw my mental boundaries, any more than some snarky time traveller would have the right to force a legendary king to remove whales from the purview of the ministry of fish. Allowing this kind of epistemological violence against adults and even unrelated children seems wholly inconsistent with the rest of the modern human rights package, and more akin to medieval conquerors forcing the subjects of their conquest to convert at swordpoint (and spying on them to make sure they do not secretly retain their old faith).
(I do in fact have little objection to pro-trans policies that do not entail "you must believe and profess that trans X are X", insofar as they are not used to salami-slice their way towards sword-point conversion. If people want to make a mockery of women's sports or women's hiring quotas or whatever, they can duke it out with those that care for those things.)
If I remember right you understand enough math that you should see the difficulty with the distinction between "facts" and "categorisations" hes trying to draw. Have you thought about that more/found a way its not self-undermining?
Can you give me some more detail about the difficulty that you are seeing? I didn't think that it is hard to draw in any way that is particularly relevant to the trans question - the only problem that really pertains to it is that people tend to become very coy about why they want to engage in various aspects of the male-female distinction. The reason people care about facts is that facts determine the action->outcome function they are facing as agents; the reason they create categories is that the (facts \times actions -> outcomes) function is hard to evaluate and has a large domain that you would need to search if you seek to optimise. Lost time and effort also affects the outcome negatively, so all else equal it is better if you can approximately factor the function through a smaller domain (facts -> categories, categories \times actions -> outcomes) without skewing the valuation of each resulting outcome much. If you don't understand what actions you are considering and what outcomes you find desirable, though, this is a hopeless or at least hard undertaking.
Scott's King Solomon gives a whole array of good reasons why he wants to categorise whales with fish, given that his outcomes are valued by "edible biomass captured" and his actions are in the class of "allocate money to biomass-capturing institutions". If you cluster whales and fish and your second factor just gets "dag sighted" as its first parameter, the expected outcomes of each available action ("pay the fishing ministry") are about the same as if you evaluated the full function with every little detail of the whale. His psychiatrist avatar does so as well, given that he evaluates on his patients' subjective wellbeing and has actions consisting of talking and prescribing various FDA-approved drugs. What Scott misses in his discussion is that the characterisations the king and psychiatrist use, too, are grounded in facts - just different ones, which are more relevant to how their available actions affect their valuated outcomes. It is just as much of a fact that whales spend all their time in water, have fins and no particularly flexible limbs or neck, and that the transwoman patient will be unhappy if they are called a man to their face.
Aggregating on these factual criteria is useful for these people - but that doesn't give them any standing to suggest or impose categorisations on other people with completely different goals. King Solomon's fishing goals are irrelevant to the geneticist, and the psychiatrist's patient ratings are not similar to the objectives of almost everyone interacting with trans people on a day to day basis. For example, in my academic environment, my actions are basically talk and sometimes putting the thumb on the scale in some hiring decision, while the outcomes I want are about a peaceful social environment that is conducive to doing research. If trans people cluster with their birth gender as far as these are concerned (topic for another discussion thread), then whatever the mechanism is, that is the fact I would want to build my categories around.
All of this is irrelevant, though, because I think granting a human right to have bizarre and impractical categories if one so wishes is necessary for a society that is worth living in.
The correspondence between sets and predicates as shows up in formal logic. Applied to the example of the whales, this might be something like "What if the tanners guild wants to say whales dont have hairs?". Basically, it is not the case that there are some propositions that are "facts" that you just have to believe, and some that are "categorisations" where you can pick how you want to do them. You face the same basic situation wrt all of them, and obviously theyre not all up to you to decide - because on what basis could you decide, that is not itself a proposition?
I'm afraid I'm only getting more lost - you seem to be referring to some very specific (philosophical?) discussion that you assume I'll recall if you hint about it, but I'm drawing blanks. When you say "correspondence between sets and predicates (...)", this makes me think you are talking about predicates in extension (is-whale := the set of all things that you want to call a whale) vs. predicates in intension (is-whale := <some description of an algorithm to determine if a given thing is a whale>), but I'm not sure how that would relate to the rest of your post.
Do you want to do something like drawing a distinction between predicates that are "more naturally" expressed extensionally vs. intensionally? So you would for example consider a notion of "nice number" that actually amounts to "is a Fibonacci number" as "factual", whereas a notion of "nice number" that amounts to "gives off good vibes to Lykurg" is "arbitrary".
I don't understand what that would have to do with the "tanners' guild" example, though - that sounds more like a setup where two different entities use different categories under the same label and want to push the respective other to adopt theirs (why? to reduce cognitive load for themselves when they are interacting with each other?). For your example, how do you envision the tanners' guild using that assertion of theirs? Is it (1) if someone gives them a piece of whale skin with hair follicles, they will say "whales don't have hairs, so I will pretend these are not there and not smooth out these before tanning it"? (2) if someone gives them a piece of -"-, they will say "this is hairy, so it is not whale skin and I will not put it in the whale processing pipeline"? (3) nothing changes about how they process whale skin with hair follicles, but they will dispatch a guy to argue all day if anyone anywhere claims that whales have hair?
You can define sets in terms of predicates (x \elem Fish \iff: fish(x)) or the other way (fish(x) \iff: x \elem Fish). So while you might intuitively say that x \elem Fish is a categorisation, it has a brother thats intuitively has the form of a fact, and you cant change one without the other.
There is not a logical distinction between intensional and extensional definitions, except
in modal logics, where it exists but depends entirely on details in your semantic setup that are in no way constrained by evidence, or
in model theory, there are intensions and extensions - but still no intensional or extensinal definitions in the underlying.
This is another manifestation of the problem.
I had (1) in mind when making up the example.
No. Its just an example of how one of the things he lists as "facts" might be redefined with just as good a justification as "fish". The problem is that when you decide what the optimal most convenient way to categorise is, you need to have some facts based on which to make that decision. But if theres no difference between facts and categorisations, then you dont.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link