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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35445 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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I'm curious about how you're using "folklore" here. Do you consider any of the following to be folklore in the sense you've used here:

  • Fiat currency

  • The concept of debt

  • National borders

  • Adoptive parenthood

  • The line between a species and a subspecies

  • The line between a genus and a species

  • The concept of species

  • Laws

  • Rules of etiquette

  • Social hierarchies

  • Race

  • Skin color

  • Nationality

  • Citizenship

If you don't consider any of the above "folklore", do you consider them "real"? Until I understand exactly how you're using the term "folklore" here, I don't know if I can really say one thing or the other of the exercise you've done here. Do you believe that the "folkloric illusion" is stupid in other domains, or just in redneg? Do you believe that folklore requires evidence, or can cultures simply create castles in the sky that are locally relevant but seem strange to those outside those cultures? Do you think folklore can be important and useful, even if it isn't "real"?

Similarly, you make the assertion that "half the humans on this planet believe themselves to be the folkloric entity called 'namow'", but I'm curious how you would get to that assertion. Do you mean that if we properly map all folkloric entities in all cultures in some n-dimensional space, we would find a cluster somewhere that every culture would recognize they more or less have in common, and that in our field of redneg studies is called 'namow', and that each culture would independently identify the beliefs of 50% of humanity as being non-different from the proposition "I am a namow"?

Could we train a neural network for "namow" and "nam" and input empirical information we collect about individuals and train it to reliably classify people into these categories, in such a way that there would be broad agreement that the classifier accurately tracks namow-ness and nam-ness? Can a human brain be reliably trained to recognize namow-ness and nam-ness in at least some cultures?

Speaking personally, I have no redneg identity whatsoever. Although born as male, I feel neither as a nam nor as a namow, much like atheists who no longer feel as a believer.

That's just normal, it doesn't set you apart from the general public. It's only unusual in that most people who encounter the concept of gender identity aren't introspective enough to think about whether they actually have an internal sense of such a thing and don't have enough contrarian tendencies to call bullshit. To quote a comment I made a year ago:

The concept of "cis gender identity" wasn't created because anyone investigated whether such a thing actually existed and found that it did, it was created by trans activists as a deliberate mirror-image of their model of transgenderism. Someone who believed in the concept hard enough and was introspective about it would probably notice that he doesn't actually have any internal sense of what his "gender identity" is and decide that makes him "non-binary" or something, when really it just makes him normal. Or look until he interpreted random noise as a sign of some gender identity or other. After all, as the British charity Mermaids has taught us (and taught the organizations like schools and police that have taken their training), not being Barbie or GI Joe means you're towards the middle of the "gender spectrum", and by the way gender dysphoria can present as any and all problems you might have.

It's only unusual in that most people who encounter the concept of gender identity aren't introspective enough to think about whether they actually have an internal sense of such a thing and don't have enough contrarian tendencies to call bullshit.

I mean, I could try to steel man the concept.

If you're a typical person, you probably have a good sense of where your body is in 3d-space. Even if you're not looking, if you're in a familiar environment you can reach your hand towards different objects like furniture and have reasonably good odds of getting within the ball park of those objects. This capacity to have a sense of where your body is and how it's moving in 3d-space is called proprioception.

Most people have an accurate proprioception about the world. But some people don't. One example is amputees, who sometimes experience phantom limbs which can include a proprioception that they have an arm somewhere in 3d-space that they do not.

It is possible that some people have genital-related proprioception disorders that make them feel like they have "phantom genitals" that they do not have. On this model, one form of gender dysphoria would be "phantom cross-sex genital proprioception" and cis people would be those who have correctly functioning "genital proprioception."

In this situation, the idea that one's proprioception is an "identity" would be a simplification used for others. After all, how do you explain the idea of "phantom genitals" to other people who haven't experienced this thing?

(Even if I allow for the possibility that this covers one kind of gender dysphoria, I tend to think there are many different kinds. Basically, being trans can be described behaviorally as seeking out cross-sex hormones, "cross-sex" cosmetic surgery and attempting to live a cross-sex social role. There are probably several causes of this kind of behavior.)

Most of the focus is on social stuff like "misgendering" though. Which combined with the "everyone has a deeply-rooted gender identity but cis people are just fortunate enough to match it" model makes some predictions that are noticeably false. For instance it seems pretty common for trans activists to try to use "How would you feel if people were referring to you with the wrong pronoun all the time?" as an argument. This makes sense from their perspective but doesn't really work because normal people don't care that much, certainly not enough to become suicidal or the like. Women on the internet sometimes correct people who assume they're men, but it's not a big deal. At worst someone might take it as an insult (e.g. in cultures where calling a man a woman is a way to call him a coward who is failing to live up to his martial responsibilities as a man, or feminists who think assuming people are men is reflective of sexism).

If someone could press a button saying "everyone calls you the wrong pronoun for the rest of your life but you get $5,000", I think most would be happy to take that option. (Provided this was some sort of mystical change that didn't have side-effects like messing up your romantic life or making your friends think you've gone crazy.) Indeed, even "everyone thinks you're the opposite sex" wouldn't be a big deal if it wasn't for side-effects like messing with your romantic life, and of course nontransitioning trans people don't have those side effects (on the contrary, quite a few trans people end up blowing up their marriages). Which doesn't fit with the "cis people are mirror images of trans people" model, since gender identity is presented as being more important than that.

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