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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3521 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 8, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Can anyone explain what all this hubbub is around the new AI models? Seems to have been a sudden uptick in people expecting fast take-off or something?

The biggest change has been in coding and software engineering capabilities. Around December, models and harnesses reached an inflection point: before, they could do small tasks, but it was very easy to find yourself spending as much time guiding or coaching them as you would have spent coding it yourself. That is no longer the case.

Personally, in the past month I've probably committed 3x the code as I did in the past, while actually writing maybe 10% as much as I did before. I'm somewhat ahead of the curve, even within my very AI-forward company and team, but for years I've felt "AI will put me out of a job in 5 years"; this is the first time that expected career longevity has actually decreased. I've got an agent working on a ticket right now.

We also have seen advances in math, video, cost per token, etc., but the software inflection point is driving the current vibe shift.

Does anyone have any theories with the US shutting down airspace with no warning over El Paso, Texas? And similarly over the southern New Mexico border?

Overflight of the zone above 18k feet is legal, which makes jumping to the "someone-lost-a-MANPADS-in-Juarez"-theory the obvious choice. Both the Stinger and the Verba have an effective ceiling a little under 18k feet. The interesting questions is how hard do you have to kick the cartels for them to fire one at everything that flies?

The other option would be counter-drone operations in that airspace, probably also against the cartels and their drone activity. But stranding tens of expensive commercial aircraft for 10 days would be a little absurd for something that should be easy to plan...

Piecing together what I can find:

Apparently the Department of War has been testing GPS jamming and directed energy systems in a base near El Paso. The FAA got spooked about how it is impacting instruments for aircraft and after a test (which involved hitting a birthday balloon with a laser) they pushed on the DOW to stop it. DOW would not stop it and the FAA shut down airspace to show how serious they were. When Trump woke up in the morning and learned about it, he told them to knock it off and airspace restrictions are lifted now.

It's hard for me to imagine anything that could piss the American public off more than shooting down one of our passenger planes in our own airspace. The risk/reward there doesn't make sense at all.

Makes a bit more sense as a bluff, I guess, especially if it were mostly unspoken and so plausibly deniable. "No, we're not about to do something like this, but remember that we could."

Well, other than flying our planes into our own buildings, that is.

Open an E*Trade account and trade your own capital first. Show that you’re good at it.

Piggybacking: i actually do have a personal account where I have been significantly beating the overall market for about 10 years now. Is there any way I can leverage that to get a good job in finance?

It depends on whether you had a systematic strategy to get those returns, or if you just were very overweight Google and Nvidia.

Somewhere in between. I have a few strategies, but they're a bit loose and I do use some intuition. I didn't just go all in on Nvidia or any other individual stock though. Mostly I try to apply leverage plus hedges with an ear towards the news.

In terms of 'rock up at an interview with your account', unless you've shown spectacular overperformance or have generated a meaningful social media following somehow it's pretty unlikely to be able to get recognition. If it's more along the lines of 'Have been sitting in a big financial community for a few years, made friends with somebody high in the industry and they put a good word in for you' that's more likely to be productive but that's more complicated than pure performance.

Depends on whether earning roughly double the S&P for most of the past 10 years counts as "spectacular" enough to compensate for me not having a social media following lol. Didn't realize I needed to be live streaming trades on twitch for to a horde of teenagers.

No, that's probably not spectacular enough. 30% CAGR or whatever you're talking about isn't all that rare. An individual investor can realistically do that. It'd be harder with a fund's size. Speedboat vs cruise ship.

Well, it's just funny to me. Growing up, it was pounded into me that it's incredibly hard to beat the market, it's all hyper-effecient to the point where almost every active investor underperforms, etc. Then it turns out that I can, in fact, outperform, but no one in the industry cares because I'm just too small. Maybe someone should offer an outperforming fund for small investors, to take advnatage of all these "speedboat" factors that apparently Wall Street doesn't care about.

There are many persistent myths about investing. The whole market efficiency thing was overstated. Yes there's some efficiency but never full efficiency in all areas. The myth that you can't time the market is perhaps just as pernicious; started by some fund managers in the 80s who failed at doing it and got people to believe that everyone else should and would fail at it too. "If I can't do it, no one else can do it either, and they should be discouraged from trying to keep me from looking bad" type logic.

But how do you expect to keep your speedboat factors when people and their money pour into your fund? Before long you'd have to space out your trades over days and weeks to keep from moving the price too much, just like the bigger boys. You'd have to cap the money at a pretty low set point, and if you take let's say 1% annually from each client you wouldn't become filthy rich by doing this, given that you'd probably have to employ some people to help you out. Idk.

Can I ask if you actually in the finance industry? It's OK if you don't, I just want to calibrate whether you're speaking from experience or your personal opinions.

My background is programming, where it's relatively common for people to come in without formal CS degrees, but having experience in other ways. Someone who built their own app that's "like an existing big name service, but better" would be very impressive! Even if it doesn't scale up, that's OK, we all know that scaling is a difficult problem and that's why we have huge engineering teams. Just the fact that someone could do that on a small scale is still impressive and would at least get them an interview, or possibly some funding to try a startup if they apply somewhere like YC. It's very odd to me that the big finance industry seems to take the opposite view, where first-hand experience and small startups count for nothing, it's much more about "who you know" and "where did you go to school."

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Ironically there's probably a market for that. Get a gimmic and enjoy your side hustle.

Yeah I'm not knocking the skillset just saying it's probably more down to being visible than actual skill level perse.

Double-piggybacking for the same reason.

He asked if he should get a job in finance, not if he should move to Vegas and become a degenerate gambler.

Uh not really relevant to quant work aside from maybe showing some interest in markets as a thing.

For top end quant stuff, you kind of need the pedigree. But the backdoor option is still good. It may take some networking, but there are a lot of "support" roles for the quants themselves that are still highly technical. In my own lived experience I saw a lot of large scale infrastructure dudes get recruited by quant firms to help manage clusters that included specialty hardware (think high throughput I/O and memory caches). They weren't making crazy bonuses s like the quant strategists / implementers, but they were competitive with FAANG peers at cash plus level.

Get used to being triggered. Quantitative Finance is famously ruthless and will chew out anyone with an ego.

If you think this sub talks about humans in a dismissive manner, wait till you meet someone in Quant. Quant alongside top AI-startups are the 2 most sought after jobs in the tech industry. They get 100k+ applications. They use ruthless high-pass filters before they begin to read resumes. Pedigree, prestige, track record....call it what you want, they serve the purpose of bringing a 100k applications down to a digestible hundred that are worth looking at.

I'm a Legacy American

So a white Christian whose religion tells him that lending money and working with derivatives is a sin ? (/s)

So you're saying you're superior to me by blood, essentially

You're putting words in the GP's mouth.

So in an efficient market, there would be a job for me.

The market converges to an efficient state given enough time. That time become near infinite if there is low discoverability, which is true for non-conventional candidates. Hell, Quant relies on the assumption that the market is always temporarily inefficient. And exploiting those inefficiencies is how you make money.

There are 2 ways to get noticed by Quant.

  1. Conventional - Ladder climb - Ruthlessly compete in a crowded field of elite candidates and consistently come out on top. This is the prestige path. Get into an ivy and out-compete fellow smart kids in math. Win math & coding competitions. etc. If you are in front of the line, you become the boring and obvious choice.

  2. Unconventional - Be interesting, be visible - This is a 2 parter. First, do something that makes you interesting. eg: Run your own backyard trading strategy and make $$, win big on prediction markets, be a world leader in an obscure nerd only card-game, make an open-source tool that all the trading people are using, etc. Alongside that, you also need to be visible. Find a way to get your face in front of Quant people (recruiters, employees, etc). If you are interesting enough and visible enough, they will give you an interview. This is the back door. It combines some unconventional excellence with network.

The paths are well defined. if #1 isn't for you, then do #2. If not #2, then idk what's left.

try to go all-in on coding instead?

I am not sure coding is going to be around for much longer

No, he insulted my pedigree by insinuating I don't have one. If you look up the definition of pedigree, it's an insult to blood. I'm sure he meant school but that's almost as bad, especially by repurposing that word.

This whole class of "whining about word choice because the etymology allows me to claim it is racist despite any sane reading makes it 100% clear that it isn't about race in the slightest"-style argument belongs on 2014 Tumblr, if that. Do better.

Whining about the hiring practices of highly profitable and successful firms in a cutthroat industry because they won't give you the time of day is a very bad look.

You're both right to a degree IMO. Some of the metrics used in Quant recruiting are probably dumb but also they've got 100k resumes from top percentile applicants and can't blame them for leaning on the previously applied great sort.

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If hiring the right people has little relation to making money, I don't know why you think they'd care about your GPA.

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Perhaps the less triggering way to describe it would be "traditional" and "non-traditional". I know a couple people in the field who got in by doing a math PhD, deciding academia wasn't for them, and then getting referred by their advisor. That or specific quant finance programs seem to be the traditional pipeline for the industry. You aren't going to get your foot in the door without either that background, someone willing to vouch for you, or specific skills they need that aren't provided by their existing hiring pipeline (eg. hardware, high-performance computing, security, etc). The signal to noise ratio would just be too low if they interviewed anyone with a CS degree.

It's the same issue as with FAANG companies - sure, there are brilliant students who go to average CS colleges, but for them it's not worth the effort of interviewing dozens of duds to find an occasional hidden gem when sifting through applications for junior positions.

Unfortunately your competitors are in the top 1% at better schools and also did grad school or a specialized masters degree in the field. You can argue that it's unnecessary credentialism, but they are spoiled for choice when the salaries are high and supply vastly outstrips demand. If this is something you are genuinely interested in and you have the intellectual horsepower, why not go back and do grad school? Do a bit of research and find a research group with a track record of placing grad students at quant firms if they don't end up going the academic route. It's that or find some other way to distinguish yourself from the crowd.

Look having been in your shoes of sparkling-good-but-not-elite academic accomplishment, being a mildly autistic egotistical white guy getting moderately discriminated against in hiring and academic admissions. You don't have to be a quant to make money, always opportunities surfacing and trying to wedge yourself into the elite end of the System(TM) is not necessarily going to be the best fit.

Yes, it's galling that your SBFs or whatever occasionally get grabbed off the pile for having the exact right references and autism vibes to align with the hiring team, but that's life. Poke around stuff that interests you and there'll probably be a couple million dollars lying around somewhere.

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grad school isn't relevant to the job

It is when the employers you want to work for say it is. You are perfectly welcome to try convincing them that you are worth their time without having a graduate degree (though, pro tip: saying you are in the top 1% of brainpower out there is just going to make you come off as an arrogant jerk, so drop that line). Other people here are trying to give you guidance as to how realistically you are likely to succeed, but if you choose to ignore that and do your own thing nobody will stop you.

pro tip: saying you are in the top 1% of brainpower out there is just going to make you come off as an arrogant jerk, so drop that line

Either that or they'll say "well actually we are kind of after the upper .01%, sorry" -- probably a bit of both actually!

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Dude, I've never worked in quant finance. The use of "pedigree" was just short hand for "You should probably have at least an MS in Quant Finance from Baruch / Princeton / Etc. if not a PhD in something applied math related." It had nothing to do with, like, bloodlines. Chill, Bro.

but I seem at least as intelligent and I know more of the math relevant to the topic than them.

Prove it. Solve hard math problems and post your process for doing so online. Start a blog. Push to github. Do something. What else are you asking for? That the hiring managers at quant funds call you up unprompted and ask you politely to show them how smart you are?

So in an efficient market, there should be a job for me.

Stop whining. Understand the world for what it is, not for how you think it should be. These jobs are heavily PEDIGREE and NETWORK driven. You don't have the pedigree, that's fine. Go network. Asking strangers on the internet for advice even netted you free advice - and you 'sperged out about how "there should be a job for me and my smart me brain."

That's not whining. Stop saying I'm whining. It's rude.

Then I apologize for my rudeness, but you are whining. Replying to "life's unfair, but that's just the way it is" with "but it's unfair!" is called whining.

I've now updated by odds of this being a troll post to >50%. Well done if you got me. If not, best of luck.

Hiring from prestigious universities is kind of like buying from IBM decades ago. It's known not to be the best value but managers also know that they won't get blamed if the Princeton kid doesn't work out but will if he hires the Murray State kid and they don't work out.

Quant firms are high enough on the desirability totem pole, they mostly don't have to risk hiring outside the prestige schools, so if you want to get in the other way you have to be more impressive than their median candidate to be worth taking the risk on.

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plus it's not as robust against AI as I would like

Outside of "surely governments would intervene" or "the world is ruled by an elite cabal that intends to feed 90% of the population into an AI wood chipper and I think finance is in that 10%", what is your rationale for why being a quant is safer than being a programmer?

I'm genuinely asking here. From where I'm standing it seems like they're in similar ecological niches.

Which music did you hate the most in the duelling half-time shows, Latin pop or country? I have to begrudgingly admit that I hate country more than Latin pop.

I've heard of Bad Bunny before, but I've never heard his music before. I'm not a Spanish speaker and I'm not overly big on listening to foreign language music where I'm expected to understand.

The half-time show was... ok. I've seen better. I've seen worse. From what I've read online from native Spanish-speakers, I wasn't missing much and many people are reporting that they couldn't understand it either.

I'll probably never listen to his music again. I didn't find it interesting enough to ever seek out in the future.

(Exceptions to the foreign language music for me include things like German industrial where it's a chill beat for me to program or some classical/operatic music)

Bad Bunny is a weird case for me. I can objectively recognize that he's skilled, but I absolutely loathe music performed in romance languages, and rap maximizes all the things that I hate about it the most.

Something about the linguistic structure of the verbs, along with the comparatively low number of phonemes, makes it feel repetitive and bland in a way that drives me nuts.

It makes me wish we could have somebody perform using one of those Caucasian languages that have 80+ consonants and half a dozen vowels.

There’s plenty of Chechen music on YouTube. It’s not the best stuff.

What are your favorite languages for music?

I really do think English is fantastic for singing.

I also enjoy the sound of Swedish a lot, and I think it works surprisingly well for rap. Check out Fel Del Av Garden by Movits for a good example.

Russian also has a really appealing sound. SidxRam and Glucoza have some interesting pieces. I'm not somewhere that I can copy paste names, but a good example of the SidxRam style is a video where they're dressed as demonic Japanese schoolgirls, and the best Glucoza example is the cyberpunk music video where the heroine has to save a dog.

The best way I can describe it is that I don't like songs written in languages where the word endings are highly constrained by the grammer. Rhyming when nearly every word ends in -a or -o feels like cheating.

Honestly, it seems like I mostly disagree with you. I really like Japanese music for its often high BPM, and the rap I do hear tends to sound pretty good. I actually think English is a bit hindered because it has to rhyme, and if you listen to enough music, you hear many of the rhymes over and over and over again. On the other hand, Japanese accepts that rhyming doesn't make any sense for the way the language is set up, so rhyming is not something they even try to do.

No judgement here, but I can never get over how cringe Japanese rap sounds to my American ear. I realized long ago that it's not for me, it's for the domestic audience who have a completely different idea of what rap is. But it is so goofy and poseur-ish (and not in an ironic self-aware way) that it triggers a disgust reflex when I hear it. Objectively speaking, there are some quite talented Japanese rappers, but I just can't get into the genre.

Japanese is entirely too strange to my ear to really speak about it intelligently.

I don't mind Latin music but I genuinely find Bad Bunny's stuff to be weirdly totally inoffensive elevator music. I wouldn't say I dislike it it just has this ability to essentially pass by my musical taste in the same way I don't have culinary opinions on common building materials. Kid Rock might be all over the place but atleast I can identify what he's going for.

I can think of a bunch of genres I find grating and I wouldn't put Bad Bunny there it's just a nothingness to me.

I genuinely find Bad Bunny's stuff to be weirdly totally inoffensive elevator music.

Enjoy these "inoffensive" lyrics from Safaera, the third song Mr. Rabbit performed last night

Man that’s even dumber than I expected

Wasn't really referring to the lyrical content more in the sense of 'if this were on in the background I wouldn't mind it but also not really get anything out of it', whilst other recent spinoff genres like Drill or whatever have more of a sonic impact.

I see no reason for quote marks. Inoffensive to mainstream media consumer tastes, and has been for several decades.

I'd be extremely surprised if the NFL let an english language performer recite those lyrics.

Pointing back to the 2022 half time show, Snoop and Dr. Dre sang censored versions of their songs from the 1990s.

Okay, agreed. But I don't think it's enforced because of any consensus about rules of propriety or moral standards. It looks like more like such rules are what a biologist may call a vestigial remnant, rules from the land that time forgot. The powers-that-be already know that sex sells, it's only matter of time they realize there is no moral majority to hinder the sales potential of more explicit sex appeal. First it will be a surprise, then it will be commonplace.

Beware of mistaking a loose consensus for no consensus. There is still a sufficient moral majority to hinder the sales potential of appealing to many sexual niches.

Well, you're not wrong

(Link above to OpenAI planning to release "Adult Mode" in early 2026)

Not a fair comparison. Bad Bunny belongs in the Super Bowl for the Latin conference; Kid Rock wouldn't even make the playoffs in country music.

Kid Rock has played at a Super Bowl before: he was part of the infamous 2004 halftime show, although not as famously as Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake.

Kid Rock was 20 years younger then, Bad Bunny's current age, he was 30 and actually pretty cool. Kid Rock's last hit was, what, All Summer Long?

Yeah he's also clung to relevance for a decently long period. Top 10 albums between 1998 and 2017 is decent longevity for anybody

One of the minor weekly dramas in my corner of X, the everything app, had to do with this tweet by Flesh Simulator, where he states that

"if there was a “magically become a girl” button, a solid 25% of men would probably press it. Of that 25%, 95% of them are basically still fine with living as a man and don’t experience any noticeable gender dysphoria even though they would press the button immediately. The issue with “egg cracking” and convincing people to transition is that, because of the nature of transitioning, that 5% dysphoria rate turns into effectively 100%"

(Flesh Simultor is a somewhat popular youtuber who specializes in talking about existing conspiracy theories and seems to be one of the few actually heterodox leftists, combining stuff like rabid support for socialized healthcare and the Palestinian cause with reluctant support for ICE even after the MN shootings, but that is not directly relevant to the current micro-drama)

In response he got hundreds of quote tweets and replies from people who called the 25% estimate comically unrealistic, mixed with MTF-run accounts suggesting that he is a "repressor" (someone who, in trans slang, feels gender dysphoria, but chooses not to transition due to various fears) because, again, no way a normal cis man would think that 25% of fellow men would press the "magically change one's sex" button. That seemingly caused FleshSim to backpedal a bit, stating that his estimate assumed that the button could be used to change your sex back, but my impression is that the original tweet was supposed to mean a one-way ticket to womanhood.

I was very surprised by that reaction to the tweet, because I'd give around the same estimate. My impression always was that if a "magically change biological sex" button was on the menu, the world, or at least the developed parts of it, would be at a 35:65 M:F split within a year or so. Basically, the real world would turn into what you see in most MMOs – almost all women would stay women, but a significant minority of men would choose to become women as well.

Now, I'm far from unbiased here, given that, I, for one, would absolutely press such a button. While I have no plans of transitioning IRL and belong to the 95% that are "still fine" living as the sex I was born as, my post history has me admitting to being a weeby sperg who does not feel much of a connection to his IRL body and physical reality and spends most of my time on the computer, so me choosing to press the button is probably not exactly surprising. But still, I just fail to see FleshSim's 25% conjecture as particularly outlandish. Surely, the quote tweets are all just signalling, and the share of people who'd press the button's gotta be at least in the double-digits, right?

So I ask you, minds of The Motte, what's your best guess about the percentages of men and women that would press the magical "change biological sex" button (for the purposes of the experiment, the button, due to being magical, also solves minor accompanying issues such as getting the new legal name on documents, etc.) if it was freely available?

25% sounds about right to me, but this is an area where I really, really cannot recommend generalizing from internal experience. People have been reporting wildly different experiences on the subject since long before it reached the mainstream Culture War.

I personally find women attractive, play female characters in games, et cetera. It is rare for me to do something and think “ah, it’s great to be male”. When that does happen, I usually think of comorbidities—“this is a cool engineering problem,” “I feel so competent,”—rather than framing it as masculine.

By the same token, though, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten excited about expressing something feminine. The idea isn’t offensive, but it’s far enough removed to be an intellectual question, not an intuitive one. “Sure, nobody should be judged by her sex.”

Others have mentioned Cis by Default; I’ll endorse the followup. There is a fraction of the population which cares deeply about something called “gender identity,” and another fraction which finds the idea alien. These groups are the long tails on a distribution. More importantly, they are correlated with, but distinct from, the “trans” and “cis” categories.

As an aside: this model explains the worst parts of gender discourse. The skeptics aren’t (usually) lying repressors, and the evangelists aren’t (usually) cynics building a coalition for the inevitable purges. Such groups are just having very different experiences. I like this because I think conflict theory is overrated.

So I would guess Flesh was more or less correct. The percentage of men with a weak masculine gender identity probably dwarfs the percentage with a strong feminine one. Encouraging these men to transition using current technology is a recipe for dysphoria. In a fantasy world with no downsides, though, plenty of them would push the button and remain roughly as happy about it as they are now.

25% of men would eventually press said button out of boredom, if not higher. You’re 80, everyone you loved is dead and dying, you don’t have the energy to climb a mountain, fuck it, why not.

But in the spirit if the question? 5%

The 25% guess comes from having too many opinions that stem from online knowledge.

Not sure about percentages, but the Transgender Social Ecosystem (TSE) offers a lot of social reinforcement to transitioners, especially to the alienated “weeby sperg” (your characterization). By clicking the transition button, you receive: a peer group that believes you are innately valuable and beautiful; a peer group that will talk affectionately and supportively about your body; an in-group that makes you feel as an intimate member of the tribe, replete with shibboleths; a political coalition which provides a sense of mission and morale; an excuse for past and future failures; a colorful subculture (color=engaging); and a subculture where being a loser is considered at least acceptable and at most honorable. The female stereotype that exists ambiently in American media culture and is greatly exaggerated in anime only amplifies this: women can be cute and ditzy yet incompetent and still retain ultimate social value; I believe this is why anime is a risk factor in transitioning.

Verbal social reinforcement is an extenuation of the physical body-grooming that primates engage in as a social need, required to feel socially secure and bonded to members. There is still a relic of this link in our instincts: men still embrace with hugs, coaches pat on the back, and in the past it was normal to sit on your friend’s lap or hold hands (the early Christians had “laying of hands”, and would smooch their brother on the lips before prayer, this kiss ritual mentioned five times in the epistles). So TSE is highly desirable: you get the verbal “grooming” and it is linked to your own body, satisfying a deep evolutionary need.

The transgender epidemic also appears right at the advent of “toxic male gamer” discourse. It’s easy to forget how <2012 entertainment culture catered to men who were mediocre. A chubby guy in a dirty room lifting a middle finger to his improbably attractive girlfriend was an acceptable form of gamer media. You had Weezer, Shaun of the Dead, etc where being a male loser in a bromance was a romanticized social identity. Perhaps this is related, too: maligning “loser male identity” means those guys have to find identity elsewhere, unlinked from being male.

Honestly the recent adventures of Will Stancil has been a good reminder of why posing as atleast gender questioning as a white male in left spaces is probably a good idea. Stancil is a true believer but has no Idpol clout so gets nuked every time he thoughtcrimes.

I think you put a bit too much stock into the TSE thing. A good number of people online are Just Like That, you don't need to psyop them. I don't deny that there is a social contagion element to it ("Nerd communities devastated by HRT", etc.), but it's not the only thing that originally attracted people to trans-adjacent stuff. MtF TSE got off the ground because there were initially people who created the ecosystem – they did not want to be men, fulfill the male role or abide by the male social engagement etiquette, so they went and created pleasant spaces with norms of support and positivity, sort of "LARP as a woman you want to see in the world" clubs, where weirdos could be free from those male social codes, which later attracted others who also wanted in on that, as those were much nicer than default male-coded spaces, at least to a certain type of person, and eventually the whole thing reached escape velocity and TSE we know and are ambivalent about emerged, although not without many twists and turns that changed the original idea.

To illustrate with a bit of personal history, way back in the day I started hanging out in a few chatrooms full of people who mostly went by female nicknames and addressed themselves as female online, while being unmistakably male offline and not really denying that fact. This was in the early 2010s, in the non-English-speaking parts of the internet, long before TSE was a thing. Some of them came from MMOs, some from imageboards, others from different internet places still. Yet these people had similarities – most of them were autistic, heavily into anime, extremely online and probably experienced some degree of AGP. They didn't like or fit in with male social norms and culture of the time (despite ostensibly being mediocre men, whom the culture revolved around), so each LARPed as an anime girl archetype they enjoyed. They wanted to act cutesy, ditzy, haughty, flirty, et cetera, whatever is the opposite of the standard male MO. Color is a good way to describe it, the regulars indeed wanted to be colorful and emotionally expressive rather than stable and stoic. They didn't act like real women, but they acted out idealized female stereotypes instead. It wasn't a political thing, and politics would rarely be discussed, certainly not identity politics. Most everyone tried their best to act how their ideal of themselves as a woman would act, because they enjoyed it, and that's who they wanted to embody. Those were very nice places to be part of, certainly much nicer than the current trans-adjacent spaces. I believe all of the regulars there would press the button with zero hesitation, and not because some nefarious TSE made them do it.

(I've kept contact with many of them since, half of these individuals have transitioned, and if we were in the US, the number would probably be closer to 80%)

Basically, the real world would turn into what you see in most MMOs

One piece missing from this conversation seems to be an unstated assumption related to this. Most MMO female characters are hot, statistically speaking most MMO players are not. Attractiveness of biological females with bad nutrition, physical activity, and other habits usually suffer more than males with equivalent habits.

Suppose you maintain life habits that guarantee physical fitness, looks remain a question to ponder. I suspect it is much nicer to live as a man with average to below average facial and other genetically determined attractiveness than as a woman with average to below average equivalents. Unattractive men who have no clear deformations are usually unremarkable and forgettable, unattractive women often stand out.

If the magic button turned men to hot women, perhaps I could see relatively high rate of men doing it. 25% sounds ridiculous if it is permanent. 5%, perhaps. Would drop after the first wave who really want it, get it immediately, then dwindles down after the first reports of menopause, periods, and other unpleasantness of female biology come in. If it is reversible and guaranteed attractiveness, it might develop into a 25%+ tier popular kink.

Akshually, not all women are interested in makeup, clothes shopping and crying about feelings. Yes, a lot of women are, but not all of them, so imagining becoming one of those that aren't is not ridiculous. Though to benefit from some advantages the contemporary society affords to women, one might have to get interested at least in the first two, and maybe producing at least a decent imitation of the latter. Otherwise you may not getting the benefits that were imagined when pressing the button.

If the button was as trivial as a character select toggle on a computer game I don't see much reason why anyone wouldn't press it. Five minutes, switch back, what have you lost? If you're talking about it being a magic, transgender fantasy, one way, fully seamless and socially integrated instant sex change button with no returns I don't think anyone other than the current transgenders would press it because they're the only ones that want what it offers.

There are a thousand computer games where people push a button and play being a soldier but most don't push the same buttons to enquire online about enlisting even though it's a perfectly real opportunity.

I don't think anyone other than the current transgenders would press it because they're the only ones that want what it offers.

I feel like there's gotta be some population along the lines of 'Would be down to change genders if they had a painless instantaneous actually-effective methodology but don't think the current sex-change meta does anything to actually help them', though I can't imagine that'd be an overwhelmingly large population

Maybe. It implies either a sincere interest in permanently abandoning their current sex, or a sincere interest in joining the other sex, but not an indifference such that changing would be no benefit, because it would follow that remaining would be no worse. But also an interest that isn't strong enough to accept the substitute of even temporarily changing gender.

It's a little like trying to think of someone who would enlist but wouldn't wear any camo that wasn't issued.

I suppose the men who want to transfer to women's prisons might qualify. I can't think of any others. Faildaughters of nobles in primogeniture jurisdictions, perhaps?

Man (pun not initially intended), I've never felt like "being" a man, nor have I ever felt tempted to become a woman. I wouldn't hit the magic button, I'm content the way I am.

I have a masculine personality and stereotypically male interests. I'm very good at the touchy-feel stuff when I can be arsed (I had a bunch of female friends, even if I had more male friends overall), but I prefer the way men talk to other men. Being a woman also comes with severe inconveniences in the form of periods. And here I was feeling bad for myself after getting migraines once every few months.

When I contemplate changing my body, I envision becoming taller, stronger or more handsome (and escaping from the prison of my flesh)—more masculine—I've never even desired to be twinkish, let alone feminine.

At the end of the day, I don't feel like I have some kind of pointer in my head that affirms my male personality. If I turned into a woman by means either magical or Indistinguishable From It Science, I'd just do the same things I already do. There's no gender dysphoria or euphoria, there just is.

You forgot to include a link to "Cis by Default".

I think 25% is too low for a two-way ticket. Most men would try this out just for the sheer novelty of it, to visit women-only spaces and ogle, to see how much they can goon with a different package.

For a one-way ticket? 25% is too damn high, especially if you gave these men time to think. If you're a run-of-the-mill heterosexual man, why would you turn yourself into a run-of-the-mill lesbian? There are lots of drawbacks (I assume you somehow manage to retain your personality): weakness, periods, most men (including your friends) now do that "would?" calculation as soon as they notice you. The only potential benefit is that other nu-lesbians might have sex with you out of solidarity.

Two-way ticket? Yes, I'd treat it like a vacation. I'd have an itinerary & everything.

One-way ticket? Hard no. I think daily life would be different, but I don't think it would be better.

Basically, the real world would turn into what you see in most MMOs – almost all women would stay women, but a significant minority of men would choose to become women as well.

I have always assumed the reason for that not to be trans-curiosity, but the well-known fact that men like visual stimulation. "If I'm going to spend hours staring at a wizard's backside, she might as well be leggy and plump. And if I'm going to have to worry about which amour to play dress-up with, there better be cleavage."

So, unsurprisingly, my estimate for the magic button pressing would have been 1%. 25% is unfathomable, even if the button also magically turns you 16. Because if it doesn't (which we have to assume, since age was never part of the discussion), the button would just trade sweet testosterone for a few short years of menstruation and then the horrors of menopause for a significant fraction of "all men", without any of the perks all those guys fantasize about.

So, unsurprisingly, my estimate for the magic button pressing would have been 1%.

The current share of transsexuals among the US population seems to be >1%, and with a button that makes transitioning much easier and more "complete", we should probably expect those numbers to rise rather than fall.

But most of those are FtMs who don’t, on average, seem to want to be male as much as they want to be ‘not women’.

I have always assumed the reason for that not to be trans-curiosity, but the well-known fact that men like visual stimulation. "If I'm going to spend hours staring at a wizard's backside, she might as well be leggy and plump. And if I'm going to have to worry about which amour to play dress-up with, there better be cleavage."

Likewise if you had to actually play female avatars as having typically female behaviors, I'd wager few men would persist at that for very long.

What are typically female behaviors in this context?

Plus, if you play long enough, you just get bored of seeing male characters and want something different.

I think it's one of those questions that really depends on how exactly you phrase it. Obviously in the real world there are no magic buttons, so we have to use our imaginations.

Like, is this a button that's constantly available, every single day, but once you press it there's no going back? In that case i could see a lot of men pressing it in a moment of recklessness (possibly while drunk) just like how people get bad tattoos or other questionable body modifications.

Also, does it just work superficially, or does it affect their brain, too? Will they suddenly wind up with a drastically different personality? I don't think a lot of people would want that.

Also, is there an equivalent magic button for women turning into men? Otherwise, the world might end up with a huge surplus of women, which changes the gender dynamics quite a bit.

Also, is there an equivalent magic button for women turning into men? Otherwise, the world might end up with a huge surplus of women, which changes the gender dynamics quite a bit.

I've talked to a couple of straight non-dysphoric women who said they would press such a button for some interesting reasons (although I don't know if they actually would). Some of these reasons are around avoiding periods and apex-fallacy misunderstandings of men and their lives. Even perceived male camaraderie compared to female consensus making and 'bitchiness'.

The whole thing is probably performative and a case of 'be careful what you wish for'.

Sure. Easy enough to say this sort of stuff when it's just hypothetical, much harder when it's a real decision that you have to make and it's permanent.

Aha, yes, that's exactly the sort of thing I was talking about below. It's easy to romanticise the other sex and believe that it's so much easier for them, but everything seems easier from a distance. You don't understand how hard it is until you've actually lived it.

Whether women or men in general experience greater happiness or life satisfaction is difficult to measure. Most surface polls show women reporting greater satisfaction, but that link suggests that women tend to use a higher scale than men and may actually be less satisfied. I don't want to make a general statement about which sex is, on average, happier, at least, not without a lot more research, but I would at least say that there probably isn't a vast difference.

I don't want to make a general statement about which sex is, on average, happier, at least, not without a lot more research, but I would at least say that there probably isn't a vast difference.

Yes, and for a lot of the intrinsic problems that men and women face, the coping mechanisms are discovered through hard learned experience. I think it's probably better to deal with 'the Devil you know..' then trade it in for perceived greener grass on the other side.

The transman I linked above for example. Most men have a gradual change from being a child, through teenage years, to being an adult man. They can slowly transition from being valued intrinsically as a child towards being more disposable as the years pass and develop emotional resilience to cope with that in a controlled manner. It must have been rough to go to sleep being valued and then wake up and realise suddenly no one cares about you at all expect perhaps for the value you can provide them (I'm exaggerating here to make a point, but guys will get what I mean).

Yes, I notice this with both trans women and trans men. In the normal course of development, you're socialised into your own sex and you learn a whole array of tools for how to be an adult man or an adult women. Trans people, even if they pass very well as their preferred gender, usually don't have all those tools. It's one of the reasons why they often look a bit uncanny-valley-esque, or can make natal members of that sex uncomfortable.

In the case of the person in that video, I think part of the issue is not knowing how men make friends, or how we express close, deep friendship. We don't do it the same way women do. There's a seemingly-endless genre of observational humour about how men and women have different languages for this sort of thing, and while the jokes are silly, they get at something real. Trans women have the reverse issue - they don't know the script for how to behave in female spaces. Thus that joke about how if a trans man is devastated, he hides and cries in the bathroom, and if a trans woman is devastated, she kicks a hole in the wall.

Anyway, resilience is definitely part of it. As a young man you learn things from your father, other older male relatives, role models, and so on, and one of them is how to suck it up when times are tough. When you've been a man your entire life, you probably don't realise how many things like that you do know. And the same for women in reverse.

In the case of the person in that video, I think part of the issue is not knowing how men make friends, or how we express close, deep friendship. We don't do it the same way women do. There's a seemingly-endless genre of observational humour about how men and women have different languages for this sort of thing, and while the jokes are silly, they get at something real. Trans women have the reverse issue - they don't know the script for how to behave in female spaces. Thus that joke about how if a trans man is devastated, he hides and cries in the bathroom, and if a trans woman is devastated, she kicks a hole in the wall.

I'd push back slightly here in saying that I've met trans women who are very much more on the "cries and hides in the bathroom" side of the fence, along with other behaviors that are often seen as exclusively female, like reading romance novels, preferring feelings-talk over camaraderie-talk, disliking playful trash talk, etc. I also know men like that without desire for gender transition as well. I think this is a stereotype of millennial men for a reason.

My native social orientation is more in the middle than something that falls into strict gender alignment. There are things about me that are clearly masculine and things that are questionably feminine. I have a penchant for making friends with people who 'fall through the cracks,' because often I find they're more raw, and you can get more depth out of them than people who follow the practiced scripts handed by socialization. I like people who are raw, a little unpracticed, real, authentic.

A concern I have about the trans movement is I worry that people with a less rigidly-gendered personality, but without gender dysphoria, are being handed a pathway that would purportedly connect them to other people who share their feelings of alienation but also comes with serious risks and drawbacks. The thing I would note is that a lot of transgender people just seem congenitally lonely, though of course the argument across the political spectrum is going to be that this is a chicken-and-the-egg problem -- are they lonely because of bigotry, or lonely because they always had things about themselves that didn't 'fit', which their transition never alleviated?

I did say it was a joke. If nothing else, I've never kicked a hole in a wall - I'm more likely to find somewhere quiet and put my head in my hands. Like most jokes, I think it exaggerates a real point for effect, that trans people often still have some of the 'scripting' of their birth sex.

Sometimes they do overcompensate by trying too hard to adopt the 'culture' of their preferred sex? Anecdotally I think I see this more with trans women, but for all I know there are trans men who try really hard to lean into a macho concept of masculinity.

I agree with the observation that trans people tend to be lonely, at least judging from those that I've known. It seems plausible to me that people who are already lonely for non-gender-related reasons are likely to be more willing to consider radical changes to their lives. If you're lonely and sad by default, you may feel you have less to lose and be more willing to consider transitioning, and there's the possibility of the kind of love-bombing coffee_enjoyer describes.

for all I know there are trans men who try really hard to lean into a macho concept of masculinity.

At the very least, trans guys with Short Man syndrome abound, even when they're not literally shorter than the average guy. There's more direct and immediate responses from other men, if sometimes more dangerous ones, though. Screw around with women's social norms and you don't even realize what's wrong until you're in the middle of fucking nowhere; screw around too much with most guys and you'll be lucky to just get hauled out of a room by your shirt.

It seems plausible to me that people who are already lonely for non-gender-related reasons are likely to be more willing to consider radical changes to their lives.

There was actually a wellness Wednesday thread a long time ago, before the site move and maybe even before the split from SSC, where someone gave the advice to a depressed poster that if you’re dissatisfied enough with your life that you’re severely depressed, you should try radically changing your life before giving up on it. That post was actually one of the catalysts that led me to re-evaluate my relationship to faith, so I credit it positively. So I think the impulse to go, “let’s try something boldly new” isn’t terrible, even if we can raise an eyebrow at various ways in which people might try to do that.

But I’m also not a very radical dude, so “consider radical life change” apparently meant something like “maybe you should go to church.” The wildest and most unhinged thing I’ve ever done was drive to Indiana.

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I've always liked to distill complicated arguments like these, in an oversimplified way. So I tend to point to the 4-to-1 suicide rate between men as women as the final word on which gender has it worse.

My understanding was that women attempt suicide more often than men, but men are vastly more likely to succeed, since they tend to prefer deadlier or more direct methods.

My hypothesis is that girls/women do 'cry for help' methods more often, because they can rightly assume that they'll get more sympathy and care when they are discovered or tell others about it. Society is more willing to support sick women than sick men.

Not to mention men's attempts prior to "success" are significantly less likely to be recorded as such for much the same reason.

Yeah but not just because of the methods, but because men keep it more to themselves and if they reveal all their problems to a health care professional they are more likely to get labelled with something that implies the man's moral character is at fault, like labelling with "substance abuser" instead of suicidally depressed, etc.

Quite. To paraphrase a statement that's stuck in my head since the first time I stumbled across it, attempted suicide for a woman is a cry for help. Attempted suicide for a man is calmly taking out a loaded gun, staring at it for an hour, and then quietly putting it away.

I think some women do have surprisingly debilitating periods that are difficult to medicate properly, so it might be worth it in that case.

Edit: I watched the linked video, and what's the trans man talking about, with forming friendships with women in the bar restroom?? No wonder some trans women apparently think women's restrooms are worth fighting for... Different worlds, I guess.

forming friendships with women in the bar restroom?

Not an expert but that sounds a bit odd and off putting, and it seems like women gossip with their pre-existing friends in the bathroom, not strike up conversations with strangers.

For what it's worth, I'm in the camp that, if I had a two-way button, would try it both ways around and see what felt better for me overall. If I had a one-way button, I would give it a lot more thought and I think would not ultimately choose to press it.

So, that out of the way...

Firstly, I suspect this does depend a lot on your bubble and your particular subculture. I'd guess the rate would be much higher among heavily-online or nerdy people, partly because being extremely online often detaches people from their body a bit more, partly because very thoughtful or intellectually-inclined people are more interested in hypotheticals or other ways their lives might be, and partly because nerds are often a bit bullied or have low self-esteem, which contributes to wanting to change themselves. I could imagine 25% of the kinds of people who play online games being interested in the button; I suspect that normies would be much less interested.

Secondly, this is inevitably a question that involves a lot of idealisation or romanticisation. It's a "the other man's grass is always greener" situation. You will imagine yourself as a fit and attractive member of the opposite sex, and you will probably overestimate all the ways in which being the opposite sex might be appealing, and underestimate all the ways in which it would be frustrating or difficult.

You mention MMOs, for instance, but in MMOs the choice is purely cosmetic. I play MMOs and have both male and female PCs, and the thing is, in an MMO they are entirely interchangeable. NPCs treat male and female PCs identically. Male and female PCs have the exact same physical capabilities. This is not like real life, obviously! If I had the magic genderswap button and pressed it, just on the biological level I would become shorter, weaker, and in general less physically capable. Well, that doesn't sound appealing. Then there's the cultural and social level. A huge number of things are acceptable for me as a man that would not be as a woman. Men's dress is both more simple and significantly more comfortable than women's dress. Men are almost never socially obligated to use cosmetics. Men don't have a menstrual cycle or suffer any of the inconveniences that implies. Just living and existing as a man, day to day, is cheaper and more comfortable than living as a woman. And then in terms of how other people treat you! People treat men and women differently; maybe people treat women with more courtesy in some contexts, but people are also more patronising toward women, or women are more likely to victims of various kinds of minor harassment. The MMO comparison isn't much like men or women in real life.

You see this sometimes from real trans people, right? I know I've read accounts from trans men saying that they didn't realise what it's like when people see you as a man and treat you as a man. Behaviours that were socially licensed for women aren't licensed for men, or at least, not in the same way (e.g. the ways you can display emotion). In general people care less about men; you have to assert yourself more, and I've seen trans men shocked and made uncomfortable by that.

In a world where the one-way button exists, I'd guess that a bunch of people would press it, both ways, and then stories from button-users would spread and social norms around it would quickly develop. In the hypothetical, we're guessing about what it would be like, but once qualitative data from real button-pressers is available, we'd be able to go into it with a lot more detail. Once real accounts of button-pressing exist, a lot of its allure would probably fade, as it becomes clear that it does not fix much of anything.

I'm very bad at guessing this sort of thing, but also I think it would be nigh impossible to get reliable empirical data on the proposal without actually inventing the necessary technology/magic and then seeing how it played out. But I don't think 25% is an unrealistic guess, and I think the MMO check is an interesting way to approach the question. If anything, I suspect 25% is probably a bit low, depending on some further details about this supposed "change biological sex" button. In particular, I think the percentage goes down drastically if the button does not ensure that one becomes a sexually attractive member of the opposite sex.

My sense it that this is all quite complicated. A lot of the trans people I know--but especially the females--are drawing from the well of "gender eliminativism," where they are trying to break down unnecessary social norms, free themselves from the "oppression" of imposed expectations, "queer" (as a verb) things, etc. Some other trans people I know--and this group is exclusively males--are more squarely in the autogynephile mold of "gender essentialism," where the highest success is not passing but being perceived as an extremely hot girl. They lean so far into idealized femininity that they mostly just end up looking like grotesque parodies of women, though some work through this by then embracing the grotesqueness in ways that generate new, weird subculture standards of "beauty." (In particular, the whole "drag queen" aesthetic is just utterly mystifying to me. Every last one of them seems so deep into their own psychiatric bullshit that attending drag shows strikes me as exploitation on par with spectating bum fights or picking on people with Down syndrome.)

Obviously, gender eliminativism and gender essentialism are not intellectually compatible. Feminists know this and have been wrestling with it for decades; the trans movement just inherited and imported all that. But as complicated as all those arguments can get, I find myself increasingly sympathetic to some of the things Foucault argued about all of these things just being power struggles. People aren't (mostly) arguing for principles they believe in for good epistemic reasons, but backing whatever argument seems most likely to get them what they want.

One thing a lot of people--but especially, men--really want is sexual gratification.

From the individual perspective of a heterosexual male, the most powerful person in the world is usually an attractive female. The gnashing of "incel" teeth on this speaks for itself. The blame they place on women is because they really do see themselves as powerless to get what they want--while attractive females are not only withholding what those men want from those men, attractive females can, if they so choose, secure for themselves an essentially limitless supply of what those men want. (At least until they age out of attractiveness!) Give them a choice to actually become a sexually attractive female, and they would likely take it, even though they have zero "self conception" of themselves as "really" being a woman.

But if you gave those same men a choice between a button that would make them an extremely attractive female, or a button that would definitely make them a sexually irresistible male (whatever that ultimately means!), I think a larger number might choose to remain male. Last time I discussed this thought experiment with someone, it had been specified out to details like "your family's memories will be edited so that they don't even realize you've changed," and "your professional life will not be impacted in any way" and "your interest in and ability to experience sexual gratification will not change, nor will your taste in sexual partners, except to the extent that you may want it to," and all sorts of other caveats that arise when you really, seriously think about what it would mean, to live inside a different body. I think those are all significant details, and I don't think they scratch the surface of all the questions one would want answered before pushing the button.

This is related, I think, to something I often observe concerning abortion. Abortion is a young woman's game. The centrality of abortion to the culture wars is, I think, a direct outgrowth of mass media making "youth culture" the dominant culture of America. Likewise, the trans movement is mostly young people doing young people things. A lot of people simply grow out of their sex and gender obsessions; most adults have more pressing business to attend to. So when someone hypothesizes a true "body swap" magic or technology, people tend to imagine transforming into an ideal, and ideally young, specimen of the opposite sex. Essentially nobody's going to push a button that turns them into an ugly woman, unless they have first devoted themselves to a culture that inculcates an "ugly woman" aesthetic (in which case, from their perspective--they aren't an ugly woman after all).

I think this gets to the heart of the argument that the original tweet is making: the "egg cracking" movement also carries the same sort of implicit assumption that transitioning will turn you into someone attractive. It only takes a bit of scrolling through /r/egg_irl/top listings to find memes about how trans is when you want to be a hot anime waifu or pretty video-game princess.

This fallacy works even if people's perception of what a "woman" is is more realistic. If you're in the half of men that are below average attractiveness, and you imagine that transitioning will make you more like some composite image of what a typical woman is like (i.e., average attractiveness), that's still a positive change.

Those same men would also buy a button that magically transformed them into a man, if not for the fact that they are already men, and thus the expected outcome of the button is "nothing happens" rather than "I become what you'd get if you look up 'man' in a stock photo library".

The one thing missing from this analysis is that it doesn't need to be a fallacy at all (in the context of the unrealistic hypothetical button); for most values of n, the nth percentile of attractiveness woman is more attractive than the nth percentile of attractiveness man.

Half-joking idea: Ugly people do not get the dignity of a gendered pronoun, and instead are referred to as "it" rather than "he" or "she".

Men who are not attractive or useful certainly stop being read as "people" and fade into the background.

That already happens in some (usually crass) all-male circles when ugly women are mentioned.

This is related, I think, to something I often observe concerning abortion. Abortion is a young woman's game. The centrality of abortion to the culture wars is, I think, a direct outgrowth of mass media making "youth culture" the dominant culture of America.

I am not American, but my impression is the opposite - that abortion politics (on both sides) is, like almost every other political movement in the west, dominated by boomers fighting the last war. The exception is Very Online Feminism, which is a Gen X thing. (Jessica Valenti was born in 1978 and Amanda Marcotte in 1977). In the UK, the loudest pro-life voice was Nadine Dorries (born 1957) and the women Labour MPs who put full decriminalisation of abortion on the agenda in 2025 were mostly in their fifties.

Yeah, abortion politics is up there with Israel as the last holdouts of the religious right. At least on a national scale. All the big controversies of the 90s, etc. have slid out from the Overton window.

But if you gave those same men a choice between a button that would make them an extremely attractive female, or a button that would definitely make them a sexually irresistible male (whatever that ultimately means!), I think a larger number might choose to remain male.

Here's an even harder choice:

  • button A turns you into a perfect man as defined by the average revealed preferences of het women
  • button B turns you into a perfect man as defined by the average stated preferences of het men

Here's the hardest choice, but it's for women:

  • button C turns you into a perfect woman as defined by the average revealed preferences of het men
  • button D turns you into a perfect woman as defined by the average stated preferences of het women

I feel like the male attractiveness button has a bunch of non-physical aspects like earnings and social cachet that can't really be transmitted the same way.

From what I've read, women's revealed preferences are actually shallower than they say.

Isn’t part of the point of the hypothetical that it makes you rich and not just 6’2?

What do you believe the differences are?

Well, for C vs D I think C will be much less agentic than D. Maybe a loyal big-tiddy horny catgirl maid (stated preferences) is far enough from the real preferences of men that it's the wrong image to have in mind (maybe men actually want some BPD or bipolarity in their mates, not absolute level-headed loyalty), but I still think it's directionally correct.

For A vs B, it's a bit more interesting. B is a gigachad: muscle-bound, based, confident, hung, never anxious, never shy. A would be less muscular (but still visibly fit) and having more Dark Triad traits.

What do you believe the differences are?

I forget the comic who said it, but I recall a line that went "you know, being an ugly woman is a lot like being a man. You're gonna have to get a job."

The point about age is a good one - if you ask me to picture 'a man' or 'a woman' in the abstract, I picture a fit, attractive person in their 20s or 30s. Culturally I think we do tend to idealise 20-something women, even more than we do 20-something men. I can thus imagine the woman there being an appealing thing to become.

But ask someone, "Would you rather be a 50 year old man or a 50 year old woman?" and I'd bet the woman starts to do a lot worse. What about if it's age 60? More than that? Culturally I think we have a model for middle-aged or elder men still being charismatic, authoritative, and even attractive, whereas that is not the case for older women at all.

FWIW I feel the same as you. I've been open that I would certainly have pressed that button when I was younger, and might now, and part of my resistance to trans stuff is that it's an infovirus that would have really fucked me up if it'd come ten, fifteen years earlier.

Agreed. Sometimes I say things and I think, "wow, they're going to crack an egg over my head, aren't they?" and of course it's always a catch-22 -- denying gender dysphoria is often treated like repression rather than honesty.

My biggest concern with the trans movement is the possibility of sweeping up people who just don't fit in society for one reason or another and giving them a pathway that says they aren't 'defective', they have a real condition shared by dozens of us and now they're explained

When I was a young child I had a period of time where I legitimately believed there was a chance I was some sort of space alien Superman'd onto the planet. I just felt like I didn't fit. What's interesting to me is that this kind of narrative has almost entirely been captured by the gender and sexual minorities debate: when Pixar recently made a movie literally about a child who believes he might be a space alien, the critical response was that this was because he was gay, or transgender, or autistic. Even the concept of "being weird" has become a kind of regularized set of categories! It feels almost high modernist: like we are supposed to have such a profoundly complete understanding of the human phenotype that every oddity can be precisely categorized and explained.

I often get along with transgender people better than some might expect of me based on my worldview, but I'd argue that I'd get along with them just as well had they never transitioned. I like people who don't fit. They're interesting, and sometimes more real.

Even with the trans social contagion I'd personally have a lot less issue with a magical button or procedure that could actually accomplish gender transition. Current surgical interventions might want to do that but are at best a crude simulacra.

The other day, quantum computing expert(?) Scott Aaronson wrote about how he didn't meet Epstein and summed up in a comment something I had been thinking as well.

I had a further thought. Back in 2019, when Epstein became a central topic of conversation following his arrest and then death, and lots of my scientific colleagues were telling stories about their contacts or near-contacts with him, it struck me that there were zero stories about any scientist—liberal or conservative, male or female, morally naive or morally astute—saying, “no, of course I want nothing to do with you, because you’re friggin’ Jeffrey Epstein, the infamous mass rapist!”

So I concluded that, if anyone now imagines that they would’ve responded that way, it’s almost certainly pure hindsight bias. Indeed, even after Epstein’s first conviction, a short jail stint in one’s past for “soliciting prostitution” simply doesn’t sound disqualifying, according to the secular liberal morality that most academics hold, unless you researched the details, which most didn’t.

All of the pearl clutching about how powerful men (and women) who associated with Epstein must have clearly known what he was about and what he was up to as a convicted pedophile ephebophile, when it's almost certain that 97% of the population would have gleefully accepted an invitation to one of his parties filled with leading scientists from MIT and Harvard, heads of state, CEOs, inventors, billionaires, and the rest of the somebodys.

A man with that much social approval could easily say, if anyone ever confronted him, "oh, that. yeah, it was a thing with an escort. it was consensual. she said she was over 18. it got blown up into something. I paid my dues. trying to move on" and be happily believed. Due diligence: done. Very few people with the liberal morality to be condemning him for hiring an escort wouldn't have bought that excuse and gone back to dreaming of rubbing shoulders with the who's who and maybe getting a sweet private jet ride. "Can he really be such a bad guy if all of these other great people are hanging out with him?", thought all of the other great people hanging out with him.

The thing about the sort of Academic Experts who would have talked to or gotten money from Epstein is that due diligence just does not exist in that world. If Epstein had been tried for chopping up puppies with an axe, and it was national news, probably fewer than 10% of the professors etc. that he talked to would have thought to google him and respond with some condemnation of axe murder. It's a bit different for CEOs and university presidents, because their PA is supposed to do that, but I doubt many of their PAs actually do due diligence on routine meetings either.

From that link:

To be clear, I never witnessed illegal behavior and never saw anyone who appeared underage in his presence.

One of the things that it's impossible for anyone in authority to say is that Epstein was not Jimmy Saville. Unlike our resident UK paedo, he wasn't going around children's hospitals and asking to meet the nice little boys. And even with Saville there's a fascinating reddit thread asking what the hell happened:

When someone has done something to endear themselves to the public, it can be hard to see what is really be going on and sometimes difficult to change that perception.

He fronted Top of the Pops at a time when music was beginning to be a part of everyone's everyday lives. As he was introducing new, exciting songs, people naturally associated him with the music. You'd be sitting around the tv, waiting for your favourite song to be played, and he was there, introducing it to you. People associated him with good times.

He went on to build that idea up. Safety campaigns, the idea that he cared about your kids' safety, TV shows where he helped kids dreams come true, charity events where he donated money to those who needed it all helped to associate him with good things.

That protects against an allegation here or there. Or some odd behavioural traits.

As he continued working for his causes, he built up some powerful friends. Meeting the PM, having royalty as friends furthered the idea that he was essentially good, even if he was eccentric. That warm, nice feeling when someone is remembering back to their favourite song they saw on the TV on Top of the Pops is linked with him introducing it.

I've always found it interesting that his personal assistant steadfastly refused to believe what he was really doing. She couldn't accept that he was an abuser. It took a very long time for her - even when faced with facts - to accept that he was a paedophile. And she was working with him every day. She associated him with doing good things and that perception is difficult to change.

and

I grew up watching Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It, and I remember his 'Clunk Click Every Trip' road safety adverts, and seeing his charity marathons on the news.

With hindsight, he was working extremely hard to attach himself to things that were popular or worthy. He wasn't everyone's cup of tea but most saw him as an oddball not a creep, and Britain loves eccentric characters.

When he died, some of the press reports emphasised how he never married, lived alone, and was close to his mother - basically implying that he was a sad, lonely, closeted gay man. There was a bit of a backlash to that, with people who knew him talking about his wide circle of friends. There was no mention of any allegations.

It was another year before the story broke. The public had no idea. Even the people who worked in showbiz or the NHS and had heard rumours couldn't have imagined the scale of his crimes.

(That last isn't true. Hospital people knew to give him a special room and send the children in, and everyone in the BBC knew. Famously, the one joke that the BBC vetoed from The Thick of It was about "what they'll find in Saville's basement after he's dead".)

and

Hang my head in shame time. When it first broke i thought it was a cash grab by the victims and it was a shame as he wasnt here to defend himself. To me he was just Jimmy Saville. He was always there so he didnt seem weird. Should probably add i accept he was a monster now.

But in Epstein's case 'rich man surrounds himself with nubile girls, one or two of whom may have lied a bit about their age' is not something that's going to make people's alarm bells ring.

Savile was exactly who I had in mind. The guy was a literal child molester, and yet the only person who spoke out when he was alive was, as @FtttG wrote, a punk rocker, someone who by definition should have zero respect for the establishment.

Imagine being invited to Epstein's island. Having lots of RHRGs around is the sign of a any good party. There are literally dozens of other very important people at the party with you, some of them more important than you. One of the girls looks a bit too young to be 18. Well, there are many possibilities there:

  • She's 18, she's just cynically exploiting her looks.
  • She's not 18 and she's cynically exploiting her looks.

Well, maybe she's not 18 and someone here on the island might be violating 18 U.S. Code § 2423. But you're not a cop nor a lawyer. Surely the arrangement, if of dubious legality, is mutually beneficial: the girl wants some pocket money, ol' Jeff brings her to the island with no explicit expectations of illicit sexual conduct. If she lies to someone about her age to play hide the sausage with a celebrity, then it's her problem. Surely you can't be the first one to blow the whistle, surely someone else would've done that already.

Exactly, plus whilst I don't want to be drawn into the eternal Ephebophilia debate I haven't seen any allegations personally that Epstein's tastes went towards pre-pubescent types and expecting everybody on prostitute orgy island to either be checking legal IDs or to have a perfectly calibrated legal agedar is a bit silly.

The more I read about Savile, the more appalled I felt. John Lydon of the Sex Pistols once gave an interview in which he more or less stated that, within the BBC, it was an open secret that Saville was having inappropriate contact with children. This was in 1978, three decades before Savile died and all this bad business started to come out.

There is a Texas state rep who is one of the most conservative reps in the state house, with high approval ratings and strong support from the moral majority.

Thing is, he used to own a porn site. His campaign straightup acknowledged this and said it was ‘before he acknowledged Christ’ or something to that effect. He apologized but it wasn’t grovelling, he just said that before he was born again he regarded it as a business decision and now regrets it. 0 political liability running in a lane that wants to ban porn.

So yes, I believe this. Lots of people did things they’re not proud of and lots of people acknowledge that. Epstein slipped through the cracks by lying, and it’s a lie most people are willing to believe.

This is extremely confounded by selection bias. Sure the kind of person who ends up in that orbit ends up going along for whatever reason of being ok with it, accepting social signals instead of reasoning from other principles etc.

But to extrapolate that to 97% of the population is a farce. This is ignoring all the other decisions and avenues that a person who said no also would have taken to avoid (intentionally or more likely completely unintentionally) ever being in the place to “tell Jeffrey off” in the face of an invitation.

Plenty of people quietly lived lives that didn’t get them into his invitation list in the first place

I still have a hard time believing the average person would not accept an invite to a party at a rich guy's mansion if it had a few household names in attendance. And feel chuffed to bits if Epstein took a liking to them and wanted to introduce them to more people, and would easily look past his minor legal trouble.

97% is hyperbole but it would be high.

I think there's a difference between accepting one-time invitation - which I'd accept from a lot of people, if only out of (somewhat morbid) curiosity - and entering a prolonged association while receiving tangible benefits. I wouldn't fault a person who met Epstein once or maybe got introduced by a common acquaintance and didn't immediately threw a drink in his face and run away screaming. People don't do such things. But I would fault a person who had prolonged, extended, beneficial relationship with Epstein while fully knowing who he is. You can't really control who you meet. But you can control who you maintain friendship with.

But I would fault a person who had prolonged, extended, beneficial relationship with Epstein while fully knowing who he is.

That's the key here. How do you prove someone fully knew who he was? My contention is that the people who were curious about it were probably satisfied pretty easily. From my original comment:

A man with that much social approval could easily say, if anyone ever confronted him, "oh, that. yeah, it was a thing with an escort. it was consensual. she said she was over 18. it got blown up into something. I paid my dues. trying to move on" and be happily believed. Due diligence: done. Very few people with the liberal morality to [okay with people hiring escorts] wouldn't have bought that excuse

Absent seeing him mess with underage girls, or noticing a lot of underage girls in his company, it's probably not that legible.

How do you prove someone fully knew who he was?

For example, AFAIR we have communications from Chomsky where he specifically discusses Epstein's troubles and gives him advice as to how to handle it. I think it's sufficient to establish he knew. There other pieces of evidence which mention specific details enough to establish knowledge. In some other cases, the perp just brags about it - like Polanski, who AFAIR said something like "everybody wants to do it, they are just jealous I got to do it".

Then there's a plausibility criteria. As they say in the legal speak, "knew or should have known" - we're not talking about some naive children, a lot of these people are mature, experienced adults who have a top positions in some very competitive fields and have considerable power. You don't get this by just stumbling around blindly. You get this by acquiring, processing and using a lot of information, and the information about who Epstein was were widely available in public at least since his first conviction, and a lot of non-public information was definitely also available for anybody who knows how to ask and has access - and those people were exactly the people who had access and knew how to ask - otherwise they would never achieve the position they were in. There could be an occasion case of genius savant who achieves high position somewhere but is entirely naive in the ways of the world otherwise - but that could not be the case for dozens of people for decades. Virtually all of them were in the position where you know such things, and thus it is proper to conclude they knew - or were willfully blind, which is the same as knowing because to purposely not to look into something you need to know there's something there you don't want to look at.

oh, that. yeah, it was a thing

With Epstein, just as with a number of others, it never was one thing. Even in initial conviction in 2008 there were 36 identified victims. You don't get a party island and a plane called "Lolita express" for an one-time thing. And that thing continued after he got his wrist slap. When you're doing it constantly, there's always a pattern. And if the pattern keeps for years, it becomes noticeable. He didn't do it alone in the dark basement. That was the point - he invited people. And eventually it becomes common knowledge to people who are in the same circles as the perpetrator is. The whole point is Epstein did not move on, he kept on, and a lot of people were involved too.

It's not the only case. Weinstein story was the same. Polanski story is still the same. Probably many others I don't recall right now. And I think there are likely dozens of other people with similar proclivities who didn't get publicly caught and are still treated the same way - "yeah, there are rumors about him, but that's not the reason to be impolite and make a scene! Yet less the case to refuse tangible benefits of associating with him."

That's why cancel culture is especially heinous btw - they don't even strive for purity (that would be terrible, but at least they'd be honest terrible fanatics!), they strive for performative purity expressed in peer-approved ways towards peer-approved targets, and only for that. There are no rules, there is only context.


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