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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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Fine, this particular instantiation of word games was the final straw to a portion of the rationalist-adjacent crowd that had never bothered with Yud's masturbatory sequences, and proved that the considerations of the Bay Arean Social Influence were more important than anything a normal person would call rationalism or utilitarianism for the greatest good of the greatest number of people, and virtually stamped approval of utility monsters- so long as they are utility monsters approved by the Bay Arean Society.

This is still quite lacking. The only actual criticism is an underlying claim that effectively says "rationalism and rationalist communities like those under Yud are more concerned about social approval than reason."

This would be a fair criticism if shown, but it's not shown. It seems to me at least to be motivated primarily off your shock that Yud or Scott Alexander might disagree with you on something you personally consider simple, and instead of asking "could they actually have different perspectives?", you assume it must just be a bad faith appeal to the bay area zeitgeist.

Let's try again: redefining the categories of "man" and "woman" to be useless circular referents makes people less economically efficient and dismantles a functional society that broadly continues to find significant moral, ethical, and economic value in having some legal separation of the sexes.

Now this is an actual argument. It makes actual meat filled claims

  1. That categories are being poorly redefined in a purely circular manner

  2. That the redefinitions have observable economic impact.

  3. They also have observable moral and ethical impact.

Now ethical and moral questions are something hard for rationalism to really tackle because they're so subjective. After all, something like a Muslim claiming it is immoral to eat pigs is correct from their moral perspective. So those are just like, ok it's against your personal moral views. Fair enough.

But we can actually address the other ones, particularly if there is an observable economic impact here. We could look at more progressive countries and compare them to less progressive ones. Do countries that allow or condone transition tend to do better or worse than ones that don't? Or do US states that condone it do better than ones that don't? Or we could look at the before/after economic status of a country/state after a relevant law or ruling happened and see if anything changed. Or whatever other sorts of tests.

There may be some confounding factors here, but we can actually test it. I don't know if it's right or wrong, but you've made a real criticism at least.