site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   31816 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Recently on LessWrong: Estrogen: A trip report

(Yes, he's treating estrogen HRT as the type of psychedelic drug that might necessitate a "trip report".)

There's a lot to sift through here, but the most interesting part of the post to me was being introduced to the concept of the schizotypy spectrum, a related-but-distinct counterpart to the autism spectrum. Autistic traits and schizotypal traits both have similar outward manifestations (e.g. introversion and difficulties with social interaction), but they have different root causes and different internal subjective manifestations (principally, autistic types are higher in detail-orientation, and schizotypes are more prone to disorganized and delusional thinking):

A couple of years ago Ely recommended that I read the paper, Autistic-Like Traits and Positive Schizotypy as Diametric Specializations of the Predictive Mind (Andersen, 2022). It turned out to be the most interesting paper I read while writing this post. The author proposes that the archetypal behavioural traits observed in autism and schizotypy – like variation in attentional modulation, theory of mind, and exploratory behaviour – are downstream from a fundamental oversensitivity or undersensitivity to sensory prediction errors, respectively:

It has previously been argued that autism-spectrum conditions can be understood as resulting from a predictive-processing mechanism in which an inflexibly high weight is given to sensory-prediction errors that results in overfitting their predictive models to the world. Deficits in executive functioning, theory of mind, and central coherence are all argued to flow naturally from this core underlying mechanism.

The diametric model of autism and psychosis suggests a simple extension of this hypothesis. If people on the autism spectrum give an inflexibly high weight to sensory input, could it be that people with a predisposition to psychosis (i.e., people high in positive schizotypy) give an inflexibly low weight to sensory input?

[...]According to these models, everyone falls somewhere on the autism–schizotypy continuum, and neither autistic-like traits nor positive schizotypy represent dysfunction. Instead, each side of the continuum is accompanied by its own set of cognitive-perceptual strengths and weaknesses. People high in autistic-like traits are detail-oriented, have a focused attentional style that allows them to ignore distractors, have some advantages in sensory-discrimination abilities, and have highly developed systemizing skills, allowing them to learn and use complicated rules-based systems.

People high in positive schizotypy tend to be imaginative and creative and have a more diffuse attentional style (compared with the average person) that allows them to switch their attention more easily. There is also some evidence that people high in positive schizotypy tend to direct their attention toward highly abstract, "big-picture" concerns rather than focusing on details.

[...]Although the autistic type may rely more on culturally inherited high-level belief systems, the schizotype's proclivity for tinkering with high-level priors may lead to the construction of relatively idiosyncratic high-level belief systems. In our own culture, this could manifest as having odd or (seemingly) unlikely beliefs about high-level causes. This may include beliefs in the paranormal, idiosyncratic religious beliefs (e.g., being "spiritual but not religious"), or believing conspiracy theories, all of which are associated with positive schizotypy.

The author of the post then goes on to claim that, subjectively, estrogen caused him to experience a shift away from autistic traits and towards schizotypal traits:

I'll outline some of the psychological changes I've noticed in myself since starting estrogen. The term "schizo" is used very informally in today's internet vernacular, making it difficult to discuss these concepts in a sensible manner – but if the reader is comfortable playing armchair psychologist, perhaps they can judge for themselves whether the following makes me more "schizo":

  • Increased predisposition towards associative thinking. Activities like tarot are more appealing.
  • Increased predisposition towards magical thinking, leading to some idiosyncratic worldviews. This can probably be gauged by the nonsense I post on Twitter.
  • Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life. This felt really good.
  • Increased mentalising of other people's internal states, resulting in a mixture of higher empathy and higher social anxiety. I'm somewhat more neurotic about potential threats.
  • Decreased sensory sensitivity.
  • Decreased attentional diffusion, contrary to what the paper predicts.
  • Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances.

Obviously this all has to be taken with a grain of salt, because the risk of confounding factors and psychosomatic/placebo effects in this case is high. Nonetheless, I'm curious whether pre-existing schizotypal traits in an individual (contrary to the author's experience in which HRT induced these traits) might play a causal role in explaining the abnormally high incidence rate of MTF transsexuality among so-called "terminally online" young men. By "terminally online" I mean the prototypical image of this demographic: likely to be in a STEM field, likely to have had little romantic success with women, likely to have obsessive "nerdy" interests like anime and video games, etc. This demographic is often stereotyped as "autistic", although that label may potentially conflict with the fact that MTF transsexuals are disproportionately drawn from this demographic as well, since it's not clear a priori why a disorder that allegedly gives you a "hyper male brain" would also make you more likely to want to be a woman. But if some of these "autistic" men actually belong to other personality clusters that have a tendency to masquerade as autism, it could help us build a higher resolution mapping of this region of cognitive space and provide more accurate explanations of the trajectories of different individuals (especially because one of the schizotypal traits is, as mentioned previously, a predisposition towards delusional thinking).

Regardless of which theory ultimately turns out to be correct, I think the biological basis of LGBT traits (or at least, which intrinsic traits increase one's predisposition towards being LGBT) is a subject that deserves further study. In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories (and in particular, the "social contagion" theory for transsexuality). Wokes are the opposite, heavily opposing biological explanations for race and sex differences but somewhat warmer towards biological explanations for LGBT (although they may not allow themselves to present it in exactly those terms). I prefer the simple, consistent position: it's all (at least partially) biological! Social contagion is undoubtedly a part of why the incidence rate of transsexuality has skyrocketed in the last several decades, although I think it's clear that only some people are susceptible to "catching" the contagion in the first place, and one's individual susceptibility is biologically mediated.

Should note for context that 0.1mg transdermal estrogen is a cartoonishly low dose. I'm on 40x as much and it's still considered mid range dosage. I haven't had any of these sort of phenomenological effects. Calling placebo on this

It has previously been argued that autism-spectrum conditions can be understood as resulting from a predictive-processing mechanism in which an inflexibly high weight is given to sensory-prediction errors that results in overfitting their predictive models to the world. Deficits in executive functioning, theory of mind, and central coherence are all argued to flow naturally from this core underlying mechanism.

Am I the only one reading this passage and thinking, "what the actual fuck?!" Because my understanding is that the defining neurological characteristic of autism is that the corpus callosum of autistic people does not primarily pass traffic directly back and forth between the brain hemispheres as it does in a typical person but rather it primarily passes sensory inputs to the brain. The autistic brain compensates for this somewhat like the internet, which is to say that it develops a significant amount additional neural connections that essentially travel around the hemispheres and facilitate communication between the left brain and the right brain. Taken together, between the much greater amount of sensory processing that an autistic brain does and the greater isolation of each brain hemisphere, the autistic person experiences reality in a profoundly different way than not just a typical brain, but another autistic brain as well! Thus, blaming the autistic brain's predictive-processing mechanisms and calling them the core underlying mechanism of autism reads to me like wet streets cause rain.

This guy was grating to read but it sounds like there might be a lot more wrong with him than gender nonconformity? He keeps circling back to 'messing with sex hormones changes things' but see also puberty.

This is all hopelessly confounded by the fact that, on the author's own admission, they were doing significant amounts of ketamine at the same time.

Any comment on estrogen upregulating NMDA signalling?

I've never given it much thought, it's not something I've had to look up in depth.

Do these people want to make me actively hate 'trans' people? I mean, I have some difficulties with how some strands of activism are playing out (particularly the rigid reinforcement of simplistic gender roles of the 'blue is for boys, pink is for girls' type) but I don't think I hate anyone.

And then I read shit like this and I want to get a gun and start shooting (in Minecraft).

"Ooh, I tried oestrogen and it made me so girly! I liked tarot and magical stuff and giggling and being all fuzzy brained!"

(And I say this as someone who likes playing around with tarot imagery but don't treat it as serious.)

I have been on oestrogen all my life (up to menopause) and if it made me describe my sensations like this, I would have preferred to jump off a cliff. "Oh gee, the reason I can't maths is because my little girl brain so soaked in hormones, gosh!"

I think there's a lot of "I expect X to be the opposite of Y, and if taking A gives me the sensations of X, then I will behave differently to how I normally behave" going on here. I think there may well be some physical changes, but mucking around like this is just annoying as all hell.

"According to these models, everyone falls somewhere on the autism–schizotypy continuum"

Yeah, and what makes these models worth more than a hole in the ground? "Hey, by our new model, everyone is some flavour of crazy and if you're not Stereotypically Male Brain Things oriented then you must be Stereotypically Female Brain People oriented".

Give me a break. Or a bottle of sherry. I feel the glittery pink girly need to get blind stinkin' drunk after being exposed to this.

EDIT: On a more serious note, why doesn't progesterone get any love? In cis females, oestrogen isn't there on its own. There's a balance between the two (and more). Do trans women/trans experimenters like our guy here ever dose themselves with progesterone as well to get the full female experience?

Oh, I see he did:

Additionally, at one point I tried taking a 300 mg progesterone suppository. This made me feel quite stupid the following day, so I did not try this again.

Passing a remark about "well duh you stuck a progesterone suppository up yourself all in the name of amateur hour endocrinology, I don't think it was the progesterone that made you stupid" would be too easy - oh darn, there I went and did it. But yeah: wanting the alleged results of oestrogen without figuring out the natural cycle of the cis female hormone levels does lead me to think that there's a lot of "I expect to feel like a, b and c, and I'm going to feel like that even if I have to imagine it!" going on here, I don't think there's a neutral/blind "let's see what happens" trial happening here.

EDIT EDIT: Clearly I'm coming at this from the angle of someone who naturally had these hormones all my life, so I can't speak as to what it would be like to experience the effects for the first time. But I have to say, all the "it's like being on mild psychedelics" - I've never tried psychedelics so I can't say if being female is like being slightly stoned all the time, but the rest of it - cutting down sensory issues, helping with sleep, etc.

Oh how I wish. I've had mild insomnia all my life, and the good old autism spectrum "this tag on the collar of my clothing will drive me insane if I can't tear it off right now" sensory issues. Oestrogen is not a magic cure for that, folks, so I strongly suspect some placebo effect going on, as well as the guy admitting he's doing/had been doing a lot of ketamine at the same time.

Trans women commonly start progesterone after roughly a year on estrogen depending on the provider. The most prescribed dosage is 100mg taken daily, it can be taken orally but many take it rectally because the pills can cause nausea. Doctors prescribe a steady dose rather than a cycle, but some people vary the dose to try to match the natural hormonal cycle. I think 300mg would approximate peak mid-luteal phase progesterone serum levels.

I wonder about the people who are "so I bought some pills off the darkweb/brewed some bathtub HRT/decided for myself I'd try this" instead of being under a doctor's care and getting monitored prescriptions. All the complaining about medical gatekeeping makes me suspicious that every single person deciding "so today I think I'd like to be a little bit more femme" is going the doctor route and not self-dosing.

Doctor's don't really do that much unless things are going wrong with adults. They do blood tests to see if hormone levels are within acceptable ranges every few months and check on liver and kidney functions to see if there's any indication of decline. Interpreting hormone levels and adjusting doses doesn't require much medical expertise.

(And I say this as someone who likes playing around with tarot imagery but don't treat it as serious.)

In the hope of trying to find something more positive to talk about -

I wonder if there are any other Motters with a passing interest in tarot? I used to be fascinated by it as well. I give no credence whatsoever to divination, but I think the imagery of the tarot is extraordinarily rich and multi-faceted. Its supposed divinatory powers, I hazard, have more to do with the way that that imagery is both endlessly open to interpretation and psychologically provocative. If you find yourself mentally 'stuck', a randomised pile of images from the tarot may well give you the jolt you need to consider new perspectives.

I don't use it for advice myself, but I can still appreciate the symbolic language it provides. If there are any other Motters familiar with it, maybe it's worth a chat in the Fun Thread one day?

Clearly I'm coming at this from the angle of someone who naturally had these hormones all my life, so I can't speak as to what it would be like to experience the effects for the first time.

This has always fascinated me when I read accounts by trans men. Their description of what testosterone does to their mental processes sounds completely alien to me. I cannot relate to it whatsoever. There are a number of possible explanations for that, one of which is, indeed, that I've had this level of testosterone all my life, and my body is accustomed to it. It's just part of the way I think, and any downsides or difficulties that come with it are things that I have had decades of practice compensating for. Someone who suddenly shifted from a much lower level of testosterone to the level of a natal male like me, however, probably would experience it as an overwhelming flood, and that might explain, for instance, them having problems with impulse control that I have never had.

If so I can only guess that it's plausible that a natal male suddenly taking a much higher dose of estrogen would experience a similar shock, but in the other direction, and that it would be something that natal women cannot relate to either.

Of course, as the top-level poster mentioned, it also seems likely that there's some element of placebo as well. If you're telling yourself that you're taking a chemical that's going to make your more feminine or girly, well, you can probably just think yourself into that absent any chemical effects at all. All the more so if you're also making intentional behavioural or social changes. So plenty of grains of salt seem warranted here.

This has always fascinated me when I read accounts by trans men. Their description of what testosterone does to their mental processes sounds completely alien to me. I cannot relate to it whatsoever.

I've found at least some of their accounts to be startlingly accurate, and quite revealing.

I was once reading a book -- can't at all remember the name now -- written by an FTM transsexual describing her experience with testosterone. She was older and she would have been going through this before the internet (and before free 24/7 porn, keep that in mind).

One of the effects she described was how her visual perception seemed to become "more 3D" (lines up with how men tend to do better on spatial rotation tasks), especially whenever she looked at women or images of women. A billboard showing a sexy woman suddenly "popped" for her in a way that it never had before which consequently made it much more attention-grabbing, despite the fact that she had always been a lesbian even prior to starting testosterone. She was still subjectively viewing women in a new way, which is exactly the sort of effect I would expect testosterone to induce.

She described an episode where she went with some female friends (all of them lesbian or bisexual) to watch a series of film screenings at an indie theater. One of them was a short reel that showed various women in bikinis and underwear doing things like dancing, striking sexy poses, maybe a bit of a striptease, things like that. And all of her friends were laughing at it: like, oh look at these girls being so silly, haha. But she couldn't help but be struck by how serious the images seemed to her. She looked at her friends laughing and thought, "why are you laughing? This isn't a joke. Stop laughing." And I just thought... yes, this is it! This is the difference between male and female sexuality! You couldn't ask for a more perfect illustration, it's amazing.

Kind of frightening to think that one little chemical can unlock such complex emotional states. But, there you have it.

She looked at her friends laughing and thought, "why are you laughing? This isn't a joke. Stop laughing." And I just thought... yes, this is it! This is the difference between male and female sexuality! You couldn't ask for a more perfect illustration, it's amazing.

I fully believe that this is the testosterone experience, because it matches observed behaviors. But I've always wondered how people on testosterone from birth reconcile that hormone-induced aura of intense seriousness and urgency around whatever their sexual desire of the moment is, with the fact that if you look at it objectively the sexual impulse is pretty ridiculous.

Like, rub your penis on her foot. Rub it. On her foot. Or on that corpse. Go on, DO IT. Rub your penis on that unconscious person. Rub your penis on that toddler. Look at that girl's nipple. It's very important that you look at it! Go on, make visual contact with the external part of our mammalian glands designed for feeding young. You need to see it! You do! Look at it!

In service to this feeling of seriousness, men have betrayed their friends, their families, their country, they've lied, stolen, squandered fortunes, murdered and courted their own deaths because it was so deadly important to rub their penis against this specific thing in this specific way. I mean, I totally get why the evolutionary programming would exist, and ours isn't even that extreme in a world where some spiders' mating instincts get them slowly eaten alive. It just seems as though it would be weird to be a self-aware, reasoning person who's nonetheless in the grip of that kind of perceptual distortion. Women also do dumb things for biology, and women also have plenty of our own weird animal instincts, but for the most part we don't have anything quite so trippy as "this specific flap of somebody else's flesh is now the literal most important thing in the whole world."

Well, from my point of view, the Jedi are evil the female attraction in the extreme is insane. (I won't quote the specifics, but you can check out some of the more out-there fanfiction on the web to see what I'm hinting at). You say thinking a flap of flesh is important is trippy, but that's not really much different from thinking food or water are important. Isn't it just weird and kind of gross how digestion works, if you look at it through a lens?

You describe intense seriousness and urgency, and I fail to see how women wanting lavish marriages and being bridal carried to bed and less tame things aren't serious and urgent. Do you just pretend you're serious about enjoying them while in your mind there's "heeheehee" on loop?

It just seems as though it would be weird to be a self-aware, reasoning person who's nonetheless in the grip of that kind of perceptual distortion.

It's a good question!

All humans are familiar with the experience of impulse control, and the failure thereof. You should start that project tonight, but you don't. You shouldn't eat that donut because you're on a diet, but you do. You know that rationally you should be able to control your impulse, and it would be better for you if you did, but that often doesn't help much in the moment. These are universal experiences. The only difference with men is that they experience particularly strong sexual impulses, of a variety which many women find foreign. Like many impulses, they're fundamentally immune to examination by reason (knowing that the donut is unhealthy for you doesn't stop it from tasting good).

Impulse control follows a bell curve. Most men are able to rein in their sexual impulses and live perfectly normal lives in accordance with social expectations. The ones who are cursed with a sufficiently deleterious combination of high impulse intensity / poor impulse control are the ones who become criminals.

The fundamental point you're gesturing at is correct: men are insane! Their insanity has been the engine of so much death and destruction throughout history. But it's also been the engine of so much beauty and goodness. Things in life have a habit of working out like that.

Like many impulses, they're fundamentally immune to examination by reason (knowing that the donut is unhealthy for you doesn't stop it from tasting good).

Impulse control follows a bell curve. Most men are able to rein in their sexual impulses and live perfectly normal lives in accordance with social expectations.

The everyday impulse/akrasia thing you're describing matches female sexuality just fine, I think: certainly pure horniness does impel women sometimes to make choices they later regret. But I quoted your passage upthread, re: male sexual desire conferring an aura of importance and seriousness on its object, because that seems interestingly different. Normal appetitive impulses like eating junk food are hard not to act on, but they don't really involve a sense that "this is serious, this is not a joke," do they? I've gobbled a donut in a weak moment, but I would never say that the donut felt serious at the time, nor would I be annoyed if somebody joked about eating. In fact, I was very aware of the ridiculousness of it, even as I was eating. If somebody offered me donuts in exchange for state secrets, no part of me would think it was the right thing to do. I don't think I would have willingly hurt someone to get at the donuts. If somebody took the donuts away mid-binge, I would be relieved; I wouldn't have laid deep plots to get some more.

Whereas, the passage you quoted seems to be getting at a kind of a weird transvaluation-of-values field that testosterone creates around the object of desire, where whatever the penis wants seems worthwhile and important in itself: not just having a moment of weakness and regretting it, but having one's whole will redirected, such that old values or priorities just aren't relevant anymore. That's probably a stretch based on just the one statement in your comment, but I can think of various other examples that this makes sense of. I've heard people remark on the cold, unapologetic demeanor of men who have midlife-crisis affairs or come out as gay, etc.: maybe they cared about their wife and kids before, but now absolutely nothing feels as important as pursuing that hot secretary or that succession of Grindr hookups, whatever. Fetishists have laid incredibly complex, years-long plans in starry-eyed pursuit of goals that violate basic self-preservation logic, like freezing off their hands to replace them with paws or recruiting another man who will cut off, fry and eat their own balls. That value-revision power gets deployed for good in the whole manic pixie dream girl trope, where just the experience of sexually desiring a fetishized girl (usually a cypher, not a person: normally the guy lusts at first sight after noticing her 1-2 incredibly attractive physical features) supposedly revitalizes the hero's whole life, changes his priorities and makes him a permanently better man.

I obviously have no firsthand experience of male sexuality, but sexual desire that can change your sense of what's important, your affections, and your character, making you permanently callous to loved ones or calmly indifferent to the loss of your limbs, feels qualitatively different from donut-binge genital impulses. The only other thing I know of with that eerie character-rewriting effect is substance addiction.

The fundamental point you're gesturing at is correct: men are insane!

I'm absolutely not saying that men are crazy, because I don't know what it would mean to be "sane" at the level of basic motivational wiring. It just is what it is. Obviously the process can work for good if young men lust after wholesome people in wholesome ways. I was just saying that it would feel very strange to have a constantly-on hormonal system that could fully rewrite one's conscious sense of reality itself like that, because aside from having a baby, I don't know of any female hormonal dynamics that can accomplish anything similar. But I'd also be curious if this resonates, if testosterone-based sexual desire feels to most men as it does to the hand-freezing-off guy, or if there's something fundamentally missing from my outsider's impressions of how the whole thing works.

But I quoted your passage upthread, re: male sexual desire conferring an aura of importance and seriousness on its object, because that seems interestingly different.

Yes, you're correct about all this. There is something qualitatively different about male sexual impulses (their "seriousness", and all the downstream effects thereof that you mention) that sets them apart from other basic biological drives.

I think this seriousness stems from the fact that a man's sexual impulses (and the fulfillment thereof) are closely tied to his sense of self-worth and self-actualization, in the same way that a career or other major life project might be. When he has sex with an attractive woman, he gets more than just the raw physical pleasure of the act: he gets a sense of holistic contentment, he feels that everything must actually be going quite swimmingly right now, he feels like he's exactly where he needs to be. Threatening the fulfillment of his sexual impulses is the same as threatening the fulfillment of his life project as a whole. This extends, albeit in a limited or distorted sense, even to fetishes that are shameful or harmful. The crossdresser might be ashamed of his crossdressing and try to hide it, but he still feels like he's expressing something vital by crossdressing, he's exploring an integral part of himself that might otherwise remain obscure. Asking him to give up his crossdressing is the same as asking him to give up part of his soul, even if it's a part of his soul that he's ambivalent about.

Now you might reasonably ask: can't you see, in a moment of sober reflection, that this is all a bit silly? Can't you see that there are plenty of other sources of meaning in life (friends and family, career, creative projects, etc) that obviate the need for this obsessive sexual drive? And the answer is, well... no. No matter how much I reflect on it, I can't disavow the importance that men place on sex and their particular sexual fetishes. Perhaps that's just the testosterone-induced delusion that I can never extricate myself from (it's a bit like saying "I've shown that love is just a chemical reaction, so now you can discard love as nothing but a useless illusion, yes?" -- the biology is whatever, but the feeling remains real regardless). But from a certain perspective, it also kind of just makes sense. Objectively speaking (not subjectively/psychologically), it's more difficult for men to reproduce than it is for women. Significantly more women than men throughout evolutionary history have reproduced. He's competing against an army of other men who are all offering large quantities of the same commodity (sperm cells) at very cheap rates. If he's able to enter into a normal and healthy (not talking about extreme fetishes here) sexual relationship with a woman, where she gives herself not just willingly but enthusiastically, then that is an accomplishment that he should objectively feel proud of.

Evolution had to instill men with a strong drive towards sexual competition (complete with that whole "all reward centers firing at once, total-soul-actualization" feeling) because otherwise they would be out-competed by other men. And the extreme fetishes that you bring up (necrophilia, self-mutilation, etc) are a result of this basic drive going haywire and becoming misdirected. The drive is, by necessity, strong enough and all-encompassing enough that its behavior becomes unpredictable.

It’s all a bit difficult to talk about because there are multiple types of sexual impulses (everything from “normal” relationships to extreme harmful fetishes) directed at different types of objects, and multiple levels of explanation (objective “marketplace” dynamics, biologically-mediated instincts, and the internal-phenomenological experience) all interacting with each other.

I'm absolutely not saying that men are crazy

No worries! Those were my words, not yours. I really do think that men are crazy (for good and for ill).

But I'd also be curious if this resonates, if testosterone-based sexual desire feels to most men as it does to the hand-freezing-off guy

On the one hand, a desire that extreme (plus the will to actually act on it) is foreign to my own experience, so in some sense I can only speculate. But on the other hand, I think I can say that, yes, I do get it. At least on a theoretical level. I could see a path where, if you kept turning up the dials on my currently existing sexuality, I could end up in a place like that. It's just that the vast majority of men don't have the dials turned up that high.

I’m not familiar with tarot but I’d like to be. I had a set somewhere - always wanted to learn how to do readings.

In some ways I'm surprised that it's not more popular among nerdy male rationalist types. That's the kind of demographic that gets really into Campbellian monomyths, loves mythology, and is also obsessed with creating and then tweaking complicated symbolic languages. It's exactly the sort of thing I would expect to be popular.

But for some reason tarot is female-coded, and maybe that's a killer?

Fortune-telling is stupid-coded. Side effect of the millennial emphasis on science and downstream emphasis on atheism.

For a long time, even if you said ‘I tell fortunes but I don’t take it seriously’ people would assume that you are just trying to hide your embarrassing beliefs. Same with conspiracy theories - ‘I’m just asking questions’ often codes as ‘let me rant at you for hours, and don’t criticise my theories because they’re (not) only for fun’.

The benefit of fortune telling is that it lets you understand yourself if you are too clever by half.

There’s a strategy you can use to make a decision where you flip a coin, and (while it is midair) think about what you want it to land on. Tarot is the same thing, but is complicated enough that you can’t outsmart yourself in the way you could with a coin toss.

To take a very simple example: if you draw the fool as your “problem” card, and have the upright 4 of swords as your “obstacle”, it can represent quite a few things.

The fool represents the start of a new journey, or it can represent naïveté, or it can represent letting go of problems. The 4 of swords can represent interpersonal conflict, intellectual conflict, or someone who limits your potential. So valid readings of the two cards are that you should forgive someone as they don’t understand what you are trying to do, or that you should avoid someone who is making your life more challenging, or that someone has your best interests at heart and you should reconsider a decision.

A good fortune teller will present the card meanings so that someone listening can make their own choices based on what they actually feel.

Also, if you are a dude - I mentioned once that I knew tarot to one of my female coworkers, then spent the next 3 months doing readings for a huge number of women my age, so…

I like that way of looking at it. And your pitch at the end isn’t bad either :P

Female- and especially wiccan-coded. If the first doesn't kill its appeal, then the second is certain to by making the cringe LARP nature of it too obvious.

Given how jhanas and tulpas get far more rat/postrat attention, the wiccan-coding acting as preventative strikes me as particularly accurate.

The irony being that it was men who did much of the work on Tarot and other systems, such as de Gébelin (who is the one responsible for popularising the idea that the Tarot was mystic secret Egyptian wisdom).

As you say, then it got picked up as witchy-woo vibes and that is where the current interest is - women like astrology, divination and the likes.

Their description of what testosterone does to their mental processes sounds completely alien to me. I cannot relate to it whatsoever.

Can you give some examples? What I can recall is trans men talking about becoming incredibly and uncontrollably horny after starting T, and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but that seems reasonably accurate to the experience of any man who’s ever gone through puberty.

I remember reading an article (can't find it now) in which a trans man had recently started taking testosterone and was driving to a session of his trans support group, when another driver cut him off in traffic, which so enraged him that he found himself experiencing the worst episode of road rage he'd ever have had in his life: heart racing, temples pounding, furiously cursing, to the point that he had to pull over his car to calm himself down. He'd never felt anything like it. Upon arriving at the trans support group, he described this experience and how unlike any previous road rage episode it was, whereupon the older members of the group smiled knowingly and explained that he'd gotten "boy angry" for the first time.

Male aggression is qualitatively different from female: like most stereotypes, the male urge to punch holes in walls or break things when you feel angry or frustrated has a large basis in fact, and seems comparatively rarer among women. It must be very alarming to experience this all of a sudden without the benefit of a years-long puberty in which to acclimate oneself to it.

I was thinking particularly of descriptions of impulsivity, immediacy, and emotional intensity. I read accounts by trans men saying that all their desires become both powerful and immediate, as if someone had switched caps lock on for their desires. They didn't get hungry, they got HUNGRY. NOW! And so on. Ironically, the emotional balance they described reminded me more of being a child, prior to puberty, so it was hard for me to associate that with puberty or testosterone.

For what it's worth, I myself had a quite gentle puberty - it was a gradual slope, rather than a wall breaking. As such I've never subjectively understood either why some kids fear it, or why some adults describe it as a very painful, tempestuous time of their lives. It just happened to me quite smoothly, and over a few years my voice dropped lower, I got more hair, and I experienced sexual attraction, but there was never a moment where I found it painful or disconcerting. I was even a little disappointed that nothing dramatic happened. Maybe sex ed at school had just hyped it up too much.

Anyway, their descriptions of getting very horny on testosterone didn't seem to match my experience of sexual desire. I had my sexual awakening just like anyone else, the phase where I hid pictures of sexy women underneath the bed and snuck guilty glances at bikini-clad models on magazine covers, and so on. But it was never a consuming fire for me. Maybe I'm just unusual and this is a universal experience I'm missing, but I don't think that's it? I got turned on by the hot girl sitting in front of me in class. All the basics seemed to happen to me. It just internally didn't feel like this overwhelmingly, uncontrollably powerful force. It felt like, "oh hey, that's happening to me, all right, deep breaths, focus on something else".

I'd be somewhat interested in other men's experiences of this. It's not something I really talk about with other people, since it's obviously a personal and embarrassing subject, and I suspect that the kinds of men who talk about it openly are self-selected for being uninhibited and horny.

I'd be somewhat interested in other men's experiences of this.

Since you're asking, my personal experience was that puberty was smooth in many, but not all areas. WRT my own sexual awakening specifically, yeah, it was pretty smooth on-ramp, and no, it never got to be a consuming fire, but it was a fire that (while abstract) wasn't quite as simple as taking deep breaths and focusing on something else, for me, either. More like I was really eager to find the one and live happily ever after, including lots of hot sex. In retrospect, I feel like I obviously bought into the Hollywood movie version of sex and love way too hard.

I'd be somewhat interested in other men's experiences of this.

Totally agree with your description of puberty. It was a nothingburger, way overhyped.

I actually think Olive will find their experience of puberty is more common around here than not. Guys for whom testosterone is overwhelming get driven to different interests than mostly polite arguments with strangers about ephemera.

Yes, I suppose it's possible that it's to do with the level of testosterone, and maybe higher-T men are more aggressive, and lower-T people more, for lack of a better term, intellectual or interested in abstracts.

I have no idea whether that's true, though. I obviously don't know my own level of testosterone or how that compares to other men. I would hazard that personality has to do with way more than just a single hormone, though, and while testosterone does make one more aggressive, the behavioural consequences of that seem like they would vary widely with everything else that goes into making up one's personality.

I could just as easily suggest that this forum might select for more testosterone, because I'd guess that it's unusual for people to actively seek out argument. People who post on the Motte are probably positively selected for enjoying conflict.

Ultimately I just really don't know. It would be interesting to have statistical data on the hormone profiles of Motters, but that data is inaccessible to us. I suppose I will file it away as something that would be mildly interesting, but which we won't know. Oh, well. It is an ever-growing file.

I can see how you interpreted what I wrote as being about the level of testosterone, but that was not what I meant. I was talking about the sensation being overwhelming - if it makes you feel like Grug the caveman you'll inevitably end up somewhere other than here imo, no matter why it's overwhelming. It is just a guess, but I will stand by it.

I obviously don't know my own level of testosterone or how that compares to other men.

A shy, quiet, intellectually-inclined friend of mine got his T levels checked and he was dead center average (by male standards).

Obviously there's something important going on with sex hormones and how they affect cognitive and personality traits, but it's not as simple as "number go up = big manly man, number go down = beta nerd".

More comments

People who post on the Motte are probably positively selected for enjoying conflict.

Do we really? It seems that most posting on the motte is either neutral or communal bashing of the outgroup or cooperative exploration of some topic, with very few exchanges being actually adversarial.

More comments

I think it really is a question of degree and immediateness. I had some problems with violence around elementary school, like many boys, but over time realised how destructive that was, adapted & looked for new friends, and by the time testosterone really hit in puberty I was already well-adjusted to dealing with it. I haven't had a brawl or anything similar in more than a decade by now, but I also know that I still very much enjoy violence, so it's not hard at all for me to imagine that if a person was suddenly hit with my level of testosterone without any time to adapt or critically reflect on it, they may struggle with their temper.

I can understand it with violence, or I'd speculate possibly with competition or dominance in general? There is a thrill I get from competition, including physical competition, and that involves a certain level of aggression. When I was going through puberty I was involved in fencing, at school, and that was one of the co-ed sports. I remember trying to be chivalrous about it, but... you can't really go all out against the girls, and it's not the same. I wanted to push myself. I wanted to be allowed to be fierce.

That was probably a major difference, because I did recognise that trait in some other boys, but much more rarely in girls. There was definitely a female kind of aggression, but it did not manifest the same way.

I recently started on hrt and as someone who has been an insomniac her entire life, the progesterone gets all my love. Sure, the estrogen may be helping with aches and pains and vaginal atrophy but the progesterone is letting me occasionally fall asleep before midnight and sometimes sleep past 3am. It's magical! (My mom had a mild peri/menopause and mine was starting in that direction too, but when I read some women found progesterone helped with sleep I had to give it a try.) I will probably stay on hrt for the bone benefits. I recently got a weighted vest to try out. I bet the tricksy girlie hormones made me do it - math is hard, let's go shopping!

I bet the tricksy girlie hormones made me do it - math is hard, let's go shopping!

We're all just Barbie Girls in our pink and our shopping sprees 😁

Obligatory

I think that's what the Bud Light attempt to link up with the influencer Dylan Mulvaney got wrong.

Who exactly is this supposed to appeal to? They wanted to move on from the old, fratty, stale male customer base, to younger generation of drinkers (or would-be drinkers). Great, but is this for girls? Because women aren't beer drinkers. I'm a woman, I'm not a beer drinker, and this would not only not get me drinking beer, it gets me riled-up over 'is this what we are supposed to accept as representing women, now? a novelty drag act?' (see the one in the bathtub for International Women's Day). Gen Z men? Are they drinkers either, because the demographics say not. It's perfectly alienating to your existing customers but I don't see what new market is supposed to come flooding (or trickling) in to replace them.

I've had mild insomnia all my life, and the good old autism spectrum "this tag on the collar of my clothing will drive me insane if I can't tear it off right now" sensory issues.

This and your other comment in this thread makes me wonder whether you're autistic. No judgment, it just sounds like that's what you're implying.

No formal diagnosis, but reading up on it certainly sounds like "somewhere on the spectrum" as well as it probably being in my paternal family. There's plenty of gossip about cousins etc. going back generations who were "odd" or "weird" and the described behaviour matches up with autism-spectrum behaviours.

Of course, self-diagnosis is no diagnosis, but the descriptions of sensory issues made so much sense to me about "okay this explains why tags on my clothing drove me nuts as a child when nobody else seemed to mind them".

Ah, that makes sense. I have never suspected autism in myself — not least because my development showed the exact opposite of the typical pattern for autism, where non-verbal development outpaces verbal development. But the sensory issues are similar: certain soft fabrics (velvety fabrics? I don’t actually know) are uncomfortable for me. My parents and I started calling it “the fuzzies” when I was a kid, which I admit does sound like an autism origin story.

Ooh, the unpleasantness jittery fuzz of felt versus the soothingly orderly corrugation of corduroy. Tags have never bothered me, but I used to have to cover my ears at basketball games. (To be fair, UNM’s B-ball arena “The Pit” is famously loud.)

Yeah, the feeling is almost like I'm being shocked, it tickles in an uncomfortable way. I don't know enough about fabrics to say what actually triggers it.

I used to be very sensitive to noise. When I first rode on an airplane as a little kid, my mom had to buy some of these earplanes which were made to equalize pressure but also work well to reduce noise. This was back when turboprop planes were still in use at some regional airports in the US.

Well, still am I guess, but it's a lot better. I have to cover my ears during fireworks shows. Which is probably a good thing -- even fireworks explosions sometimes get loud enough that it could damage your hearing.

It's also true that I have a penchant for repetitive fidgeting. I have a box of fidget toys I keep on my desk.

I don't know that autism was ever really suspected, but my mom did have several books on her bookshelf whose titles rounded off to "What To Do If Your Child Is A Weirdo" and my social development was somewhat stunted. As far as I know, I don't have any relatives with either suspected or diagnosed autism. I do have first cousins with OCD, and OCD-like traits would probably explain my excessive concern for contamination and orderliness.

I don't know that I ever met diagnostic criteria for autism, although some people in my life have occasionally suggested it. But it is definitely true that I share some traits in common with high-functioning autism.

The diagnostic criteria specify a level of impairment, which is clinical and in need of services. Thus subclinical autism is a real thing, but by definition cannot be diagnosed. I wouldn’t be eligible for diagnosis today, but up through about age 35 my impairment was significant and obvious.

I know little on autism diagnoses. I have a cousin who might be autistic, and then also one friend who is autistic, she's a former FTM who transitioned ~2011, married a man at about the same time and they're still together, moved out of the country and detransitioned a few years later. She's appreciably different from any of my other friends, especially compared to the ones who describe themselves as on the spectrum, but she and I mostly swap pictures of our dogs and I've had some burning questions, assuming you don't mind answering:

  1. Did you read much as a child? If so, what?
  2. You mention childhood hallmarks of social issues, did you have few friends? One best friend? Are you friends still? How long have you known your oldest friend?
  3. Are you attracted to the opposite sex? When did you first notice?
  4. And this one's just angled at MLP; have you ever read or watched Japanese shoujo? If yes, had you before MLP?
More comments

What helped you improve your functioning? (I realize that’s a very personal question.)

More comments

Do these people want to make me actively hate 'trans' people?

You could ask the same of many "terminally online" types of people.

They don't want you to hate them. But, they kinda just are the way they are. Which contributes to their persistent social difficulties.

Yeah, and what makes these models worth more than a hole in the ground?

Ideally, predictive power.

The original paper on the autism-schizotypy spectrum that was cited in the blogpost didn't actually have anything to do with gender. The single determining criteria of autism vs schizotypy was an oversensitivity vs undersensitivity to errors in sensory prediction. All other differences in cognitive and personality traits were taken to be downstream of that criteria.

This could be cashed out in terms of predictions about e.g. how subjects will perform on tasks related to attention and context-switching, and how those results will be correlated with personality traits.

But, they kinda just are the way they are. Which contributes to their persistent social difficulties.

I think (from what might be described as a TERF adjacent position, at least when it comes to "no, trans women are not exactly the same as cis women") that the problem is sixty or more years of feminism trying to knock down the idea of "male brains (logic, reason, science, progress, all that good stuff)" versus "female brains (feelings, emotions, silly little fluffy heads)" and the gender-essentialist roles of "some interests are only for boys, some are only for girls", then along come the (worst of the online visible) trans set to go all "I knew I was really a girl because as a kid I didn't want to play sports or I liked cooking".

This defeats "boys can like cooking! and wear pink! girls can like diggers! and wearing trousers!" efforts and drops us all back into the "but okay as a girl I was not girly, I don't like makeup and fashion, I don't feel like I am going around with the fuzzy brained 'ooh I love little puppies and kitties' mindset, are you now telling me I'm not a real woman?" dilemma.

That is what is frustrating about the description of "this is what happened to me when I went on oestrogen":

  • Increased predisposition towards associative thinking. Activities like tarot are more appealing.
  • Increased predisposition towards magical thinking, leading to some idiosyncratic worldviews. This can probably be gauged by the nonsense I post on Twitter.
  • Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life. This felt really good.
  • Increased mentalising of other people's internal states, resulting in a mixture of higher empathy and higher social anxiety. I'm somewhat more neurotic about potential threats.
  • Decreased sensory sensitivity.
  • Decreased attentional diffusion, contrary to what the paper predicts.
  • Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances.

"Ooh I like astrology and don't like having to think about hard things like finances" makes it sound all too much like this Harry Enfield sketch.

The single determining criteria of autism vs schizotypy was an oversensitivity vs undersensitivity to errors in sensory prediction.

Im sceptical of this because for me this differs a lot between different kinds of sensations. E.g. I can never "forget that youre wearing it", whatever "it" is, but it takes effort to not tune out music in under a minute, even if Im not doing anything else.

Obviously this all has to be taken with a grain of salt, because the risk of confounding factors and psychosomatic/placebo effects in this case is high.

Yeah. "Girlish" traits like frivolity, stupidity/incapability, and artsiness are valued among AGP folks because it turns them on. Whacking it to not being able to do math is a common AGP pastime. There's an element of roleplay going on that is impossible to dissociate from the chemical element without double blind studies.

Also, "Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life." - yeah, making major life changes, having a new project, and potentially a new social group, can do that for you.

Whacking it to not being able to do math is a common AGP pastime.

How do you know that?

Pretty common is an overstatement, but it's a behavior I've seen around AGP/sissy spaces. I used to be AGP. Not all trans people are AGP, but it seems that a greater portion of AGP people are going trans nowadays than back when I was into it.

In the broad sense, getting turned on by behavior the person associates with feminity is the most common and defining AGP behavior, and that is not rare at all. The trans redditors call it "gender euphoria" nowadays, to avoid calling it a paraphilia.

to avoid calling it a paraphilia.

Yeah, but that's both because nobody knows what a paraphilia is[1], and because it sounds like that other '-philia' that means you're into kids.
(Actually, the same's true of using the expanded form of 'AGP', for the same reason, and those who use it know that.)

[1] I mean, I like that caliber and being prepared and all, but I've yet to develop a sexual attraction to bullets and MREs.

it sounds like that other '-philia' that means you're into kids

It's curious that sex-positivity means that you can openly declare yourself kink-friendly, and yet in common parlance the suffix "-philia" is only ever used to refer to creepy things which even proudly kinky people would not want getting out about them if they had them (paedophilia, necrophilia, coprophilia, ephebophilia, zoophilia). Maybe it's just because Greek words sound clinical, like you're a specimen being studied under a microscope? Maybe AGPs would be less resistant to the diagnosis if it was framed not as "I have autogynephilia", but rather "I have an 'imagining myself as a woman' kink".

A lot of the axis that popularized AGP have been trying to paint furries as autozoophilies. It's objectionable to me in part because a lot of people would round off the 'auto' bit, so it is less palatable than 'tf kinkster'.

((Although there's a few places that -philia that does show up in kink-heavy spheres: vore fans call themselves voreaphiles or endosomaphiles pretty often depending on flavor, and people who buy 'i consent' sleep masks call it somnophilia even if it doesn't fit under the technical definition.))

But it's also objectionable because it seems pretty obviously wrong as a broad model. Yes, there are people who fit the central version of the case: Bailey brings up plushophiles that have a plush tf kink, which is pretty common, but I could link to a guy talking about how he wants to TF into a werewolf, get rawwed by a werewolf, or both at the same time. But there's an absolute ton of people that don't, ranging from human-on-anthro fans, to those who fantasize about being a different species than what they find attractive, to those who only find transformation or becoming an anthro interesting in a nonsexual sense even if they have sexual interests in other parts of the furry fandom, to those with intense sexual interests in a transformation concept so long as it's happening to someone else.

To be fair, Bailey et all don't claim that autoanthrozoophilia is absolutely universal among furries. But they do everything up to that point in the articles themselves, and in contexts outside of academic papers just imply it really heavily, and indeed go further and suggest that these correlations explain how people became interested or more interested in the fandom, rather than any other possible arrow of causation.

That's a pretty big central part of the disagreement for Blanchard/Bailey's AGP theory, and there it is much more explicitly aggressive: they claim that trans people either fall strictly into one of homosexual transsexual or AGPs, categorically. To the point where any testimony that crosses the margins -- a solely-androphilic transwoman without traditionally-male interests and who masturbates to dressing as a woman, or a solely-gynophillic or bisexual transwoman with traditionally feminine interests who doesn't -- is evidence that the trans person isn't willing to be truthful. This was maybe defensible in the 1980s and 1990s, where various motivating factors lead trans women to present study leads highly sanitized versions of themselves.

But these days we have wide arrays of sources that can't be built around people trying to lie to psychiatrists. There's tons of counterexamples, and even a handful would raise serious questions about whether this behavior was the motivating factor.

people who buy 'i consent' sleep masks call it somnophilia

Well, I can't imagine any way that could possibly be abused.

they claim that trans people either fall strictly into one of homosexual transsexual or AGPs

In fairness, I don't remember ever personally encountering any trans women who didn't fall into one of these categories or the other. I'm sure there must be a handful, but based on my own personal experience it wouldn't be unreasonable to round it off to these two categories (increasingly heavily weighted towards the latter).

Maybe AGPs would be less resistant to the diagnosis if it was framed not as "I have autogynephilia", but rather "I have an 'imagining myself as a woman' kink".

They'd still be highly resistant, because the rest of society can say "kinks/fetishes are optional, so we have the right to tell you to keep it at home and otherwise judge you for it".

It has to be an orientation, because orientations are considered sacrosanct (that was the whole "born this way" fight being hammered out in the '00s). If they fall out of that social protection scheme they predict, correctly, that their social power to do their thing will go away.

We use Greek for diseases a lot. 'Homophobic' is used because it connotes a diseased mind, as did 'homosexual', which is why nobody willingly uses those terms to describe themselves. Gay people don't call themselves 'homophiliacs'.

Gay people don't call themselves 'homophiliacs'.

They were going to back in the '70s, but this didn't catch on.

I've seen some people on Tumblr encouraging the use of "androphilia" and "gynophilia", the main disadvantage of hetero- and homo-sexuality being that they are relative, rather than absolute, terms: you need to know the speaker's sex before you know the sex to which they are attracted. Andro- and gyno-philia don't have this problem. I like the terms for this reason, but I can't imagine them catching on in casual conversation.

nobody knows what a paraphilia is

Of course we do. It's obsessive sexual target error.

The exact causes or how alterable the phenomenon is is subject to lots of debate, but it's obscurantist nonsense to claim the category has no merit. It makes specific falsifiable claims.

For all of the issues with it, I'd like people to actually provide scientific arguments against Blanchardianism instead of "nuh-uh" and "my politics say this is badwrong".

Also, "Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life." - yeah, making major life changes, having a new project, and potentially a new social group, can do that for you.

No, I know what he's talking about with that one. (Not because I've ever been on HRT, but because on this particular point he's just describing how I am by default, and this point seems to be a persistent and noticeable difference between how I experience things and how other people experience things.)

The simplest way I could describe it would be something like, "the impression that sensory perceptions carry semantic content that extends beyond the boundaries of what is literally contained in the sense perception". Normally irrelevant details like colors, landscape features, or the particular spatial arrangement of objects triggering strong emotional associations, taking on "narrative weight", etc. I think that everyone is familiar with these types of experiences to some degree (could be something as simple as, visiting a place you haven't been to since you were a little kid and triggering nostalgic memories as a result), but some people have these types of sensations much more frequently and intensely than others, and from a wider range of stimuli. But the point is that it doesn't have to be attached to traditional "centers of meaning" like new projects or new social relations.

It could also be described as "a strong natural resistance to depression". Typically when I hear people describe depressive moods they use language like "feeling empty", feeling like everything has been "drained of meaning", feeling like "nothing matters", and... I've never felt any of that. Like ever. It's hard to imagine feeling like that when everything is so damn meaningful all the time! (On the flip side, I am extremely prone to anxiety, so it's not at all the same thing as just having a clean bill of mental health.)

This is how my perception has worked since early childhood, so I can confidently say I'm not describing the effects of psychedelics or other foreign substances.

I'm a trans-woman and I think this is pretty accurate. I started hormones and then spent 9 months presenting as male 'closing out' my old life and wasn't part of any sort of trans community except some peer support groups that were kinda trite. When I'd go hiking in the Sierra's though I'd get emotionally overwhelmed and end up crying because I was flooded with this feeling of intense meaning I didn't really have any way to structure. I went back to church because I feel a really intense gratitude and God felt like a good place to put it, though I can't say I truly believe. I have a number of friends who became religious shortly after transitioning, though they tend to end up Catholic and I'm the lone prot.

The strong natural resistance to depression is also something I really resonate with. It's easier to be satisfied by and engaged with my own life on E. I feel less drawn to escapism or hyper stimulation and better able to enjoy pleasant steady states like walking in the park with a friend, or cooking a nice meal.

Normally irrelevant details like colors, landscape features, or the particular spatial arrangement of objects triggering strong emotional associations, taking on "narrative weight", etc.

True, but that's also known as the pathetic fallacy. It works better as a literary device, because in the real world yes sometimes the sky is cloudy and it starts to rain just when you're feeling sad or angry, but sometimes it's just a cloudy sky and a rain shower.

I found a much simpler way of explaining it.

Say you're in a large crowd of strangers, you don't know anybody. You scan the crowd and every individual person looks largely the same to you, they just melt into a sea of anonymity. But then you notice your best friend somewhere in the crowd; suddenly this person "lights up" in a way that none of the others did, to you this person looks quite different, even though to anyone else they would look like just another stranger. Importantly, this isn't a conceptual/discursive thing: you don't have to consciously think to yourself "oh there's my friend, we had plans to meet up today, I should go talk to them now". It's baked into the immediate visual perception itself that they just "glow" in a way that the strangers don't, pre-discursively, even though from an "objective" point of view there's nothing really to distinguish the raw visual image of your friend from the raw visual image of any other person.

People who are higher in "meaningfulness of experience" have these experiences more often and from a wider range of stimuli, people who are lower in meaningfulness have them less often.

We can hypothesize that the mechanism of action in full blown schizophrenia is that this meaningfulness becomes so excessive that the person has to adopt delusional beliefs just so they can build a coherent internal model of their own sensory experience (e.g. that signpost on the side of the road looks so salient because it must be a coded message just for me that was planted there by the CIA).

I'm going to assume the word they are groping for here is "meaningfulness" and not "meaningness" but of course their new girly oestrogen brain can't word properly, tee-hee!

Seriously, if guys think this is what being a woman is like, there is no goddamn hope for any mutual understanding between the sexes. On the other hand, it does explain the 'dressing like an anime avatar my new name is Lilith Raven Andromeda see how I've coated my face in a thick layer of makeup so girly now' transformations.

Seriously, if guys think this is what being a woman is like, there is no goddamn hope for any mutual understanding between the sexes.

My guess is that this is common to the subset of guys who both have AGP and the propensity to act on it by transitioning, but can't be extended to guys in general.

To be fair, women don't understand men's mindset either (see the discussions on here about male sexual desire and need versus women's; yeah my dear men, emotional disturbance can make it so that the very last thing you want is to have some snoo-snoo and if the body isn't aroused, it ain't gonna happen).

We do have different bodies, it's hard to understand how something works from the outside as against the experience of "I've been this body all my life".

The term has been floating around in the self-help literature sphere, and even made it onto Wiktionary (which claims that it's chiefly used in "philosophy"). I would assume that it was introduced by people who didn't want their poetic self-help goals tarnished by association with the more prosaic readings of "meaningful" (like not of insignificant scale or impact, not nonsensical, etc.): if you say you are striving for meaningfulness, some are bound to read it as a win-friends-and-influence-people sort of thing.

Oh God, therapy-speak neologisms. I should have guessed!

Also, "Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life." - yeah, making major life changes, having a new project, and potentially a new social group, can do that for you.

I have an acquaintance from college who transitioned male to female. They once showed me a picture of a neckbeard with acne, saying "this is what I used to look like, then I transitioned and I'm so happy with how I look." Well, no crap my friend, you shaved the neckbeard and started taking care of yourself!

Whacking it to not being able to do math is a common AGP pastime.

Now I want to know whether "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is someone's kink. Surely not?

Now I want to know whether "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is someone's kink. Surely not?

Yudkowsky tried it but they apparently didn't end up liking it. I know about this because it became the basis of a rumor in SneerClub-adjacent circles that he kept a harem of "math pets" that he forced to do math problems and that this was abusive somehow.

https://old.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/1jel94/hate_for_yudkowsky/cbemgta/

I've recently acquired a sex slave / IF!Sekirei who will earn her orgasms by completing math assignments.

https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1172190781794160641

It didn't work out at all when we tried it, I married her anyways, and the person who made up the "math pets" allegation claimed no such source, but I agree that explains why the concept was in the air.

Example of the rumor:

https://old.reddit.com/r/badmathematics/comments/127vquu/eliezer_yudkowsky_0_and_1_are_not_probabilities/jehu62q/

The guy who (I learned this just a few days ago) allegedly had an abusive relationship with a harem of women and allegedly called them his "math pets", yes.

I want to know whether [...] is someone's kink

The answer is always yes.

The answer is always yes.

Oh yeah. "Can it be possible that someone would find X a turn-on?" Yes, and it doesn't matter what X is or how disgusting/repulsive/but surely that's physically impossible you think X is.

Matter of fact, it has been my fetish ever since that one time I dated a math grad student with impostor syndrome.

Now I want to know whether "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is someone's kink. Surely not?

I assume /u/FarmReadyElephants was referencing bimbofication fetishes, and I have also observed a huge overlap between transwomen and bimbofication fetishes online.

It seems far less common for people to fantasize about people becoming smarter, and so I doubt there's been a lot of kink around being forced to do derivatives of an integral.

Mostly, my "grand unifying theory" of kink is that most fetishes (in the non-clinical sense) involve sexual power dynamics filtered through an "unusual" power hierarchy. So gigantification/shrinking fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of size, bimbofication fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of intelligence and low class beauty norms, weight gain fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of weight, etc., etc.

I suspect that normal human psychology in both men and women goes out "looking" for power hierarchies to internalize, and that most people in our society converge on a broadly overlapping set of hierarchies (wealth, beauty, class, height, etc.) Those hierarchies then play a role in what a person goes looking for in a sexual partner. But in a subset of the population, they become fixated on a single power hierarchy, like height, weight, or intelligence and so when the internalized hierarchy interacts with their psycho-sexual development, it manifests as a fetish.

I suspect that "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is off the beaten path of power hierarchies, though I suppose it could have overlap with teacher-student roleplay.

I like this model for some things but I actually think bimbofication is a different pathway. The appeal is silencing neuroticism. It's ignorance is bliss and fetishizing not just a lack but a total incapacity for responsibility. Same reason a lot of this stuff is involuntary. Lots of people feel responsibility as an unbearable burden. But maybe you're wrapping all that into the sub role.

I do think a lot of that is part of the sub role, but I was also trying to describe the appeal from "both sides."

There are people who want to become the bimbo, and I agree that a large part of the appeal for them is literally "turning your brain off" and giving in to blissful ignorance while letting another person take control. But there are also people who want to make the bimbo, and I think for them it is all about the feeling of seeing someone who was smart being taken down a peg and becoming a parody of themselves.

I think the bimbo sub has a lot of overlap with the sub in ageplay, petplay, hypnoplay, etc. All of those involve embracing a more simple-minded mentality and letting someone else take control for a while.

A much more speculative part for me is why particular kinks end up appealing to particular people. I have a second hypothesis, which I might call the 'horror story hypothesis.' I think that the power dynamic that becomes part of a person's fetish is often a thing that they worry about a lot. Classic examples would be the girl obsessed with staying skinny who ends up with a weight gain fetish, or a smart guy whose greatest fear was brain damage getting a bimbofication fetish - which are both examples I've seen in the wild. I don't think that this explains every instance of someone fixating on a single power hierarchy, but I think it probably explains a good deal of them.

My understanding is that, in addition to the physical component of masochism (some people really do find pain pleasurable -- maybe it's to do with mild endogenous painkillers released?), much of the interest in submission among people who swing that way is about surrendering control and shutting off your brain, just like you say. Humiliation is probably something else entirely. And frankly my politically-incorrect view is that people with humiliation kinks are people who truly believe they're inferior in some way and believe being placed in a situation where it's called out is just revealing and acknowledging a reality they already fear is true.

It seems far less common for people to fantasize about people becoming smarter, and so I doubt there's been a lot of kink around being forced to do derivatives of an integral.

There is the claim about being sapiosexual, and its opposite: being unbearably attracted to someone stupid, the dumber the better. At least I thought the latter (being morosexual) was primarily a joke, but turns out some people possibly do claim to be that in reality.

Good Lord, I just cannot keep up with the modern world!

I think there’s a bit of LARP to anyone claiming an identity they are not born with. I’m not even convinced that one could reliably describe the feeling of being oneself. What does being M’aiq feel like to M’aiq? If I were asked to describe myself, I wouldn’t be able to describe myself by internal feelings of M’aiq-ness because there’s nothing so unique to my internal states that I could point to and say “if you feel like this, that’s what it feels like to be me.” I could talk about interests and behaviors, beliefs, favorite movies or TV shows. I could talk about my memory of some event. But all in all, my experience of being me is pretty much a normal human being experience. And everyone has male and female coded interests. I like HEMA and art and hiking and watching baseball and Masked Singer. I think I could find several people both male and female who like those things.

Did you reply to my comment by mistake? It feels like a bit of a non-sequitur.

Ok, I guess we're taking this seriously as an idea.

If we're speculating about it like this -- I could easily see a humiliation kink developing around self-esteem issues involving math; I've struggled with math since I was in primary school, and despite having a lot of interest in tyical "geeky dude" hobbies like computers and spacecraft, I find math really hard to wrap my head around. I don't think that was bad teaching or anything, I just don't have the aptitude, and it shows up on actual IQ tests because my verbal IQ massively outstrips my performance IQ. So I've always had a bit of a complex about being intersted in lots of things where math is very significant, but finding it really hard to grasp the mathematical concepts that make them work. I could easily see a complex like that becoming a kind of humiliation kink, because being unable to do things that people you respect can do creates a power hierarchy!

Now I want to know whether "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is someone's kink. Surely not?

The mind of AAPs are completely alien to me, so who knows? Maybe one of them is hot and bothered by roleplaying Grigori Perelman.

I've also noted one instance of an AAGP in the wild (a woman who wanted to be a man who wanted to be a woman). Human culture has no end of oddities.

I've also noted one instance of an AAGP in the wild (a woman who wanted to be a man who wanted to be a woman)

I will admit that the inverse of this has crossed my mind on more than one occasion.

I tried to come up with some sort of calculus joke that would fit, but I think I’ve reached my limit.

Then again I remember barely anything from Calculus and I got Cs on many of my Calc exams. Maybe I’m a woman. (I’m not. The Asian girls always did way better than me.)

In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories

Is this an accurate description? I mean, obviously there are a lot of strands of anti-woke. But it seems to me that a slightly more nuanced read on this might be more like this, and I'm going to dip into analogies here...

Teenage girls being prone to anorexia in the 90s, or teenage girls being prone to cutting, were not biologically determined in the sense that there was a specific "I want to cut" gene that was being triggered, exactly, and cutting was those girls "true self". BUT it was almost certainly the case that many of the girls prone to cutting, or to anorexia, did have some other, background biological traits that made them more likely like to be susceptible to those manifestations of whatever else was going on with them on a deeper level. They had their own hardware, but the social ways it manifest were absolutely a kind of social software, and broader culture played a deeply important role in making those behaviors manifest the way they did... and different broader cultures could absolutely dampen or accentuate harmful behaviors.

Likewise, it is very likely that most school shooters have some biological things going on internally that worked against them. But it was obviously the massive coverage of Columbine that put a giant spotlight on "school shooting" as the cultural pattern that that kind of biology got channeled through subsequently.

I am no expert on HBD and black people, so I'm going to just sort of shrug on this topic. But I will say, because it's quite an interesting detail, that violent, destructive riots by black people in the 20th century has been a largely northern phenomenon in the U.S. Southern law-and-order has been much less coddling of such things, in general, but also, at least historically, Southern blacks were much less successfully targeted by radical activists with immigrant backgrounds from continental Europe that spread a radical culture of violent rioting as a way to force social change and try to spark revolution. Whatever is organically, biologically wrong black people (I will be rhetorically agnostic here, as it's not my point), clearly certain cultural strands can serve to make it far, far worse.

I could do this all day, of course. I don't think most anti-woke types would disagree with me too sharply, or maybe that's just a guess. This is a way of saying "it's nature AND nurture!", I suppose, but I don't think that quite gets at the deeper orientation, which is more something like, "nature is real, a lot of nature is pretty bad, healthy cultures cut with the grain of nature and try to steer it towards better, more pro-civilizational ends, there are absolutely limits about how far this can be taken because of the reality of nature, and certain ideologies work as arsonists in the face of these facts and are anti-civilizational to the core". And even accepting these tenants in broad strokes, different people could come down on different sides about how much culture can actually achieve, versus how much nature cannot be evaded.

So, putting these analogies down, I have to imagine that there a lot of people who put a lot of LGBT pretty firmly in something like the above framework - it's no more real than cutting or being a Quaker (which is to say, it exists culturally, it's very important to some people, but it doesn't exist the way that helium does), it probably is a manifestation of something deeper biologically (like whatever it is that gets manifested in cutting or rioting), the fact that it has even those natural roots doesn't mean it's in any sense good (which is just the naturalism fallacy anyway), and the rise of Queer identification (or even the rise of "identity" as a conceptual orienting principle in the first place) is obviously cultural, political, and activist driven. And just like you can accept that some people choose to live as Orthodox Jews and can accept giving them space to do so (and giving them space to believe things about you that you wouldn't appreciate) while balking at having their belief system aggressively pushed by the state, media, and shared educational bodies, so likewise with the LGBTQ+ movement. In this view, the science and liberal tolerance might've supported something like decriminalization on normal liberal grounds (liberal society tolerates all sorts of things that aren't clearly good or bad that subgroups care about), but active promotion?

It seems to me, anyway, that the current pop progressive stance goes, much, much further than all of this. It's something like, Science shows that gayness is exactly like having brown eyes or being left handed, and it's totally natural, and Science also somehow proves the normative claims that it's entirely morally neutral or even good, and it has existed in exactly the form we now recognize throughout all of human history, but we've finally become enlightened enough, and made enough progress, to recognize this and encourage people be who they truly are, and all of this applies to all humans who have ever lived universally, past, present, and future - and all traditions or religions that have ever been wary about this were always emphatically both incorrect and immoral. And there are no possibilities, now that we have it all figured out, that there will ever be any negative consequences at all to our new progress. And anyone who dissents from this framing is a bigot and should be hounded out of polite society as an example. I'm being a hyperbolic, but to be honest, this does capture roughly how it often seems to me (although I suspect some people might admit a bit more nuance if really pressed on an individual level).

But I will say, because it's quite an interesting detail, that violent, destructive riots by black people in the 20th century has been a largely northern phenomenon in the U.S. Southern law-and-order has been much less coddling of such things,

Southern cities are also much less segregated, that might have something to do with it.

I think on some level the truth is almost always “both”, which has made things like “is X biological” a bit harder to come to a solid conclusion on. You can have predisposition to just about anything you can think of, but often the truth is that it’s biology meeting just the right environment. People are much taller than they were in 1700, as anyone who’s been in a historical home can tell you, as the furniture is designed for people much shorter than we are. Humans didn’t suddenly evolve to be taller, it’s just that we have more food and better quality food and therefore grow taller.

I suspect some of the increase in gay/trans is down to environmental factors. Some of it is the endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment, some of it is cultural influences that not only don’t discourage them but often celebrate them. But biology still has some part. It makes some people much more susceptible to those influences.

I think there are definitely external factors that contribute to mental illness. There are twin studies that show that in twin pairs where one has schizophrenia, there’s only a fifty percent chance of the other twin having it. So clearly it’s something beyond just base genetic predisposition. Nobody wants to admit that because the idea that madness is something you can catch is an extremely disturbing idea. Almost Lovecraftian.

Nobody wants to admit that because the idea that madness is something you can catch is an extremely disturbing idea. Almost Lovecraftian.

I find it weird people don't have those qualms about PTSD. But then again we refused to believe it was a thing for a long time.

I find it weird people don't have those qualms about PTSD. But then again we refused to believe it was a thing for a long time.

There are still holdouts who refuse to believe. Not only cranks, but as esteemed HBDIQ rationalist adjacent people as Greg Cochran (his argument: "There was no PTSD in ancient Rome").

Scott made a point years ago that I've been thinking about for years. The conventional wisdom in so much of psychiatry is that mental illnesses are "historicist" i.e. caused by a personal experience that the patient in question had. It's not common to hear people state "I have an anxiety disorder as a result of being in an abusive relationship", ascribing a direct causal relationship between a certain series of events and a certain constellation of symptoms. In the case of post-traumatic stress disorder, the historical framing is right there in the name - in order to be formally diagnosed with PTSD, one must have gone through a traumatic experience.

But of course, not everyone who goes through a traumatic experience (or experiences) exhibits PTSD-like symptoms, and many people develop said symptoms who have never gone through a traumatic experience. And it's not so long ago that the received wisdom in the psychiatric community was that autism was a direct result of a child having a cold, emotionally remote mother. Now We Know Better and autism is now understood as a condition primarily determined by genetics, but it's remarkable how little self-reflection the psychiatric community has engaged in when it comes to the historicist paradigm undergirding so many other psychiatric diagnoses. We might soon learn that there's a genetic basis for what we now call PTSD which is only activated in the case of profoundly elevated cortisol levels over an extended period of time, and the idea that someone might suffer from PTSD in the absence of said gene expression will seem as preposterous as the idea of children with emotionally remote mothers invariably developing autism as a result.

Per your twin studies example - because WEIRD people spend most of their time in hermetically sealed antiseptic environments, there's a tendency to conflate "environmental" with "social", and assume that anything which isn't caused by genetics must be caused by social influence in some nebulously defined fashion. But of course, that isn't the only thing that "environmental factors" can refer to. Maybe schizophrenia will eventually turn out to be caused by pesticides that only one twin was exposed to, or a pathogen of some kind (e.g. if one twin is more promiscuous than the other and catches an STD). Maybe the recent surge in PTSD diagnoses will turn out to be a side effect of the fact that we all have microplastics in our balls/breasts. Who can say?

I definitely would not be surprised if your theory turned out to be correct. Quite fittingly, the reason Lovecraft himself was so obsessed with madness and sanity slipping away is that he had to watch both his parents go insane from neuro-syphilis.

Regarding your last point. I suspect that many of the cases of war PTSD are actually caused by TBI from exposure to explosions. Ancient warriors didn’t seem to have much problem with it, and notice that the absolute worst cases of shell shock seem to come out of the Great War, in which indirect exposure to heavy artillery was most common.

I think that this "estrogen cures autism" analysis is false, for the simple reason that this reads like confirmation bias and (ironically) an attempt to systematize the effects of estrogen in a way directly counter to any notion of the author becoming less autistic. That being said, I'd assign something like a 1-5% chance that they're onto something, and that something would be really interesting if it was true, so for a bit I'm going to be arguing from that perspective.

Before anything else, let me establish that the "problem" with autism is difficulty communicating .That predictably leads to social deficits and-- guess what-- trans people report high levels of social isolation and loneliness (This figure includes FTM trans people too, which aren't what I'm talking about with autism, but I'll get to that later). Meanwhile, estrogen increases oxytocin and oxytocin reducing autism symptoms and oxytocin decreases the felt impact of social isolation. So immediately, there's a pretty compelling link between autism->feeling lonely->taking estrogen->feeling better that explains the "success" of the trans phenomenon, including the high rates of treatment satisfaction. This blog post goes one level deeper, and proposes an autism-schizoid axis that underlies the taking estrogen-feeling better link... and additionally, explains why trans people feel better even without taking hormones. Namely, if their problem is an excess of autistic traits, even just adopting the cultural behavior of a more schizoid culture is enough to make up for part of their social deficits-- and joining a dedicated community focused on doing the same thing reinforces that effect even further.

FTM trans people don't really make sense if you assume that autism compensation is the mechanism of action for transsexualism, but with the autism-schizoid axis they start to make more sense... being schizoid causes it's own form of social deficits that presumably testosterene helps compensate for. We know that testosterone encourages altruistic behavior under certain circumstances... I'm not sure how that would help it counter schizoid personalities, but it's certainly suggestive of something going on.

Put all that together with the fact that transexualism has increased pretty much in tandem with the simultaneous rise of autism/ADHD diagnoses and hormone disruptors like phthalates, microplastics, high fructose corn syrup, etc. and you can put together a comprehensive, self-consistent explanation for why this entire social movement in happening.

Again, I don't actually believe the article. Even if the author is right, I think their methodology is so wrong as to be useless. But it is interesting, and for that I have to respect it.

This figure includes FTM trans people too, which aren't what I'm talking about with autism

A high number of FTMs I've known have at least stated they're autistic. While autism among the female sex is controversial, I suspect they're correct. I have no data for this, but I think the two greatest risk factors for FTM transitioning are 1) autism and 2) PCOS. I have a friend with PCOS who is a huge fan of Abigail Shirer, and believes that a great number of FTM transitioners are women with the same syndrome -- which is caused by abnormally and dangerously high levels of testosterone in women -- who feel like the symptoms of the condition like male-pattern hair growth and irregular periods make them less of a woman and therefore seek to embrace them as part of their "true self."

This is perhaps analogous in some ways to AGPs and transwomen more generally who are bullied or ostracized for femininity and come to believe that they really are a sissy loser who can't be a man and might as well embrace the only gendered path that seems possible for them.

Actual bona-fide gender dysphoria obviously plays its role, although I wonder sometimes if much of it isn't so much active identification with the preferred sex and more a feeling of alienation and incapability to be accepted as a member of their birth sex that emerges into body image issues. That would make it something that social contagion can affect, much as anorexia can take even subtle (or not so subtle) social cues towards physical fitness and thinness and transmute them like a witch into an inability (Edit: originally there was a typo here that was "anability", which is an uncomfortably good phrase to describe the perception problems of anorexia) to accurately perceive the body's actual thinness. Obviously not all cases, but I think transgenderism is a multi-factor phenomenon and this might be one of the factors.

People sometimes conceptualize transitioners as villains or attention-seekers, and sometimes they can be like that, but I strongly believe there's a wellspring of intense suffering that motivates it in many cases, even if we don't have to affirm every decision that someone who is suffering makes or even agree with their interpretation of their experience.

This is perhaps analogous in some ways to AGPs and transwomen more generally who are bullied or ostracized for femininity and come to believe that they really are a sissy loser who can't be a man and might as well embrace the only gendered path that seems possible for them.

I don't think this is actually the correct reading of AGPs. Is there actually any reason to think that AGPs are more feminine than baseline?

A high number of FTMs I've known have at least stated they're autistic

Yeah, that's part of the reason why I'm only assigning a 1-5% probability of this being true. I could come up with an argument along the lines of, "autistic women do better with men than schizoid women" but that has its own problems.

I think that this "estrogen cures autism" analysis is false

Well for a start, there are women with autism.

Presumably also women don't become autistic when they go through menopause?

That is a good point!

That predictably leads to social deficits and-- guess what-- trans people report high levels of social isolation and loneliness (This figure includes FTM trans people too, which aren't what I'm talking about with autism, but I'll get to that later). Meanwhile, estrogen increases oxytocin and oxytocin reducing autism symptoms and oxytocin decreases the felt impact of social isolation. So immediately, there's a pretty compelling link between autism->feeling lonely->taking estrogen->feeling better that explains the "success" of the trans phenomenon, including the high rates of treatment satisfaction.

Part of this satisfaction could also be gaining a new social group. You might find similar rates of satisfaction among people who joined a church, or who in past generation may have joined a music subculture (goth, emo, punk) instead of becoming LGBTQ++.

Part of this satisfaction could also be gaining a new social group.

Yep, that's what I'm addressing with the

and joining a dedicated community

bit. The autism compensation culture is my explanation for why they join the "trans" group specifically. Sure, they can join a wargaming group and have fun with fellow autists, but reinforcing autistic behavior makes the social deficits in the rest of their life worse. trans groups, meanwhile, teach them to be pro-social at least when dealing with LGB people and white liberals.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats