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From Quillette, an MIT professor describes the outraged reaction from fellow philosophers when he argued that a woman is an adult human female.
Back in 2019 Alex Byrne wrote one of my favorite essays on the incoherence of gender identity and as far as I can tell no one has managed to offer a solid refutation. Byrne follows up by discussing the difficulties he's had in getting a chapter and a book published on the topic, and his travails are equal parts infuriating and hilarious. For example, consider how a fellow colleague was treated once the crowd got wind that her book might be a bit too critical:
This trend of protesting a book before anyone even reads it will never stop being funny to me. Byrne expected his book to go through several revisions and by his account he was happy to accomodate feedback. His reviewers, though, were not:
"What is wrong with my argument?"
"Everything."
"Can you be more specific?"
"Just all of it, it's just bad."
This is the kind of sophistry one would expect from random online arguments, and I'm sure you can identity similar instances even in this very forum. The take-away I'm generally left with is that Byrne's interlocutors are an amalgamation of intellectually fragile individuals. Conclusory statements rather than specifics are a transparent indication that you are aware your arguments will crumble when exposed to a light breeze. Protesting rather than arguing are a transparent indication that you are unable to defend your ideas on their own merits.
All this seems painfully obvious to me as an outsider, and I'm baffled why anyone engages in this ablution pantomime. Who could it possibly convince?
Freddie DeBoer recently put out a banger of a post called "A Conversation About Crime" about the absolute intellectual void behind the "defund the police" movement. The whole thing is worth reading in full, but I'll include the parting shot here:
I love the part of this essay where he goes through the various definitions of gender identity. That is fascinating, and to me illustrates that they are indeed kind of incoherent (or minimally useful outside their specific context, like political/social activism, clinical care, etc). I'd be curious what those definitions are now (it's been a few years)-- perhaps they have evolved as the cultural battle lines shift.
Instead of using these shaky definitions as a basis for a half-assed mathematical (philosophical?) proof he should have gone on to look at formal definitions of male, female, man, and woman with the same rigor. I'd imagine that they are also riddled with inconsistency or context-specific bias. Humans are complicated and muddy (especially at the margins), and any comprehensive "truth" needs to reflect that reality.
Personally I think that some are threatened by the idea of trans people because their existence suggests that our closely-held ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman might be too simple. In the future, when the gender identity people have won (because reality is in fact complicated), we'll probably have more creative (or straightforward?) ways to signal "I can provide semen" or "I can bear a child" or "I can provide you your desired sexual experience."
In that future it wouldn't surprise me if we came to accept that people's "switches," as Byrne puts it, are often innate but also at times flexible and subject to change on a biological basis, whim, trauma, or desire. It's just that the current political/social climate can't accommodate that reality, and current medical technology can't support wearing a different gender to work every day of the week.
If we're predicting the future then no, I don't think we're going to create complicated markers and instill everyone with an intricate and complex understanding of anything like gender. We'll do what we always do with complicated topics, allow them to collapse back down to the sex binary(because sex cleaves reality at the joints and gender, as you've said, is unsuitably complicated to be condensed into the primary division) and acknowledge that there is great individual variation on how those sexes can present, including mimicking the opposite sex. I predict trans-X eventually giving way to femme-boy for natal men mimicking natal women and Butch for natal women mimicking natal men and it be normalized for these practices to be more extreme.
No, we'll continue the trend of matching being done more and more online and the filters will handle this for us. People with extreme minority appeal and extreme minority appetites will find each other online.
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Humans are complicated and muddy, like biology in general. The sex binary, however, is incredibly clear in biological terms. There are massive differences in genetic material between men and women. There are gross morphological differences. And they all come as a set in nearly every case. Only nearly, because it's still biology. But human individuals being of one sex or another is as clear as humans being born with 5 fingers, and a lot more pervasive. Trying to disguise that with "reality is complicated" is about as effective as trying to hide a 1,000,000,000 candela spotlight (or, rather, two) with a smoke machine.
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People don't try to be convincing as a goal in itself. They seem to be doing fine without having to convince (at least intellectually).
"Why did that mugger threaten me with a gun instead of convincing me to give him my money?" Because that works, of course.
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Clearly this isn't about fragility, at least they certainly don't look at this primarily through the lens of expecting humiliation in a debate (though such people exist, and these ones specifically can conceive of their inevitable failure in a debate yet keep their faith, I think). They tend to understand this in the framework of «platforming» or «legitimizing» «noxious ideas». The illegitimacy is predecided, as is their authority as gatekeepers of discourse. Thus, irritation, condescension and flipping out when they are denied the rite of stomping out Evil and an apparently irrelevant issue of analyzing the argument is being forced on them. What does it matter which particular part is «bad» by the deliberately obtuse nitpicky standard that ignores the moral imperative to suppress such noxious ideologies!? Would you have them greenlight a Neo-Nazi pamphlet if it has no grammatical mistakes?
This kind of perception is normal for people who are accustomed to having authority or basking in its favor. Really very Sneerclubby, and it's no wonder many of top posters there are academics.
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We are now living in an Ayn Rand novel. The reality-denial and barely-conscious crushing of sense-making to live the politics of pull she wrote about are all around us.
And since she modeled her dystopias on the terrible societal problems she escaped from, the Bolshevik revolution which became Soviet Russia, I can confidently say we are in the midst of a full-bore Communist revolution.
No, no, we're only dabbling in expropriations.. Moral panics and holiness spirals aren't just communist - you'll find them in Calvin's Geneva and Yankee Boston just the same as in Decembrist St. Petersburg.
These are two notorious theocracies. They had the advantage that they were also bearers of new ideas that were on the up. But those ideas only came to be of importance in the context of a healthier, non-theocratic society.
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What definition of communism are you using?
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Just a slow-motion upper-middle-class revolution (like all revolutions). Not particularly communist, they aren't even organized enough for that children's book.
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FWIW I think the main problem with his article, as with many other similar ones, is that he frames the issue as about determining the Truth about gender and gender identity when in fact for all practical purposes the problem is actually a policy one. The right question is not 'are transgender men really men' (or in the case of Byrne's essay 'do Transgender people have gender identities that do not match their sex'/'does a mismatch between gender identity and sex cause dysphoria', or more broadly 'what is gender identity'), but 'does treating transgender people as their transitioned gender in X circumstance make those people happier with little damage done to the rest of society?' Because if the answer to that question is yes, then who gives a damn what the Truth of their gender is. Obviously there would still be arguments to had over the costs and benefits in every specific circumstance.
If society has to live a lie, it certainly is at a higher cost than if it is telling the truth. You cannot train everyone to lie everyday and expect no consequences. (1984 is often presented as a book about mass surveillance, it is actually about truth and lies. "Freedom is the freedom to say that two and two make four, everything else follows".)
So it seems that both questions (the truth of the gender theory and the damages to society) are related.
Personaly, I would comply with anyone's desire to be treated as a woman, a man or anything else. I don't see the point in bothering these people about their personal choices. But if someone asks me out of context, what I think about gender theory, it seems to me it is my duty to say that I don't believe in it (or at least in some of its main points).
And I have no problem with society enforcing more kindness toward trans people, but at some point there must be spaces where we forget any kindness requirements and look coldly at the truth.
I think this is a little overdramatic. There are plenty of "lies" that come at very little cost in a society.
Lies like "these people may not be biologically related, but as a legal fiction they are parents and children" or "this person wasn't originally from France and isn't of French ethnicity, but now they're declaring their allegiance to France now so they're French." There are even fairly strong social taboos against pointing out the differences between adoptive parents and naturalized immigrants in most cases.
I think viewing the trans "lie" as particularly pernicious or destructive to society is an isolated demand for rigor.
But belonging to a country is a matter of allegiance more than of ethnicity. Would you argue that someone who has never lived in France, doesn't speak french and hates France is actually french just because his biological parents are? And anyway the person is french if society declares her french ( e g with an id or a passport), not if she self identifies as a french person. She can self identify as much as she wants, it won't change anything. The same is true for parenthood : your are the parent of a child if he declares you as his parent, not if you self identify as his parent. It means society expects you to take care of the child. When we think about parent, we think about that more than about the sexual act to make the child.
Transgender identity, on the other side, is meaningless because when we think about women, we think about people with a vagina, two tits, a menstrual cycle, who experienced that from their young age and can bear children. Men are free to wear make up if they want, a lot of men have, it won't make them women. Thinking you can become a woman is like thinking you can become King Charles: either you are born the first son of Elisabeth, or you're not. There is nothing we can do about it, even if you self identify as Charles.
All 3 of the "lies" share the common structure of defining two distinct ideas (gender/sex, legally related/biologically related, nationality/ethnicity) and then, when convenient, implying they are essentially the same thing.
They are ethnically French, but not French by nationality (In the same way a transsexual male is, following the progressive definitions, a "male woman")
But most people would not say either of these things. They would just say this man is French, and the transsexual is a woman. The race/sex is irrelevant, and if you want to know then you have revealed you are a racist who doesn't see immigrants as real French people / a transphobe who doesn't believe transgender women are women.
But the person never changes their race, just as the transsexual never changes their sex.
The point is that now this person is French by nationality, whilst no one would ever outright claim that she is actually racially French, it would be taboo to mention the fact she is not. The reasoning for this being that it hurts social cohesion.
I certainly do think about the upbringing aspect, but in my mind (and I think most others') the idea of the child being the genetic offspring of the parent is also an important aspect.
Because of this, whilst I do see an adopted family as being something similar to a family (just as I do see a passing transsexual male as something close to the category of woman), in my mind I certainly perceive that family as "not a real family".
But just as in the case of transsexuality, I would not say this out loud, because of the social taboo, and because it would upset the person to hear this.
Now you've selectively chosen characteristics that correlate to womanhood that cannot be achieved by a transsexual. Just as with the above, I do think of these things when you say the word woman.
But I also think of things like makeup, wearing a bra/panties, having longer hair, speaking in a feminine voice, having sex with men, crying in public, etc.
These are all things which can absolutely be achieved by a transsexual. Just as one could adopt a child that isn't biologically related to them and raise them to be a healthy, happy adult. Just as immigrant can love their new country, be a productive citizen and be elected to the highest ranks of government,
But the trans "woman" is still a male, the adoptive "parent" is still not biologically related to their "child", and the immigrant is still of a distinct race to the indigenous population.
This is the rhetorical trick. In the modern framing of sex/gender as distinct concepts, you absolutely do become a woman if you sincerely identify as one. You just never become a female (however it would be transphobic to point out this fact)
But again this is the same thing as with immigrants and adoptive parents. No amount of patriotism will turn you into the native race, and no amount of love and affection to the child will overwrite its DNA.
But you do get to call yourself a citizen of country X and the parent of the child, and it would be forbidden for anyone to mention the way in which you differ from a native or a biological parent (unless they want to argue that the difference makes you superior or somehow more of a parent/citizen)
I dunno, man. I mean, there's shit like this:
Similarly for the rest of your post, I imagine.
The article quotes a transgender actress Indya Moore. I've never heard of her before (despite watching quite a lot of US TV shows) and I imagine she is close to irrelevant.
This definitely doesn't feel reflective of the transgender movement. Indeed, reading the exact quote:
Moore is contradicting the logic of gender ideology. The adjective "female" is supposed to refer to sex not gender, yet here she clearly equates the two, despite the most important principle of the ideology being that sex and gender are completely orthogonal concepts.
Hence I do not think this proves anything. It is just an example of someone misunderstanding, or being more realistic, someone trying to downplay the existence of sex.
I mean, we have less obviously-ridiculous examples that still fit the bill:
No, Trans Women Are NOT ‘Biologically Male’
The Myth of Biological Sex
Which try really really hard to downplay sex even as they don’t explicitly deny it as per Moore, and engage in an absolutely heroic motte and bailey to pretend that “Trans Women Aren’t Biologically Male”, which tells me that progressives aren’t very interested in keeping the “male” part of “male woman” (or “female” part of “female man”, for that matter).
Like:
But you could certainly make an accurate guess!
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First thing. I'm not arguing against the fact that you should be polite and kind with trans people. If someone wants to be treated as a woman, I would use "her" and "she" if this is this person's preference. At least when the person is there (but it's exactly the same thing as being polite with someone by calling him Caius Julius, because he thinks he is Caesar). The problem with the transgender activism is that it requires a lot more than that. It requires that I never say what I think to be the truth, even on the internet, and as a general comment (not to offend anyone, but just to state that I don't believe transwomen to be actual women if it's relevant to the conversation). It seems to me that if you transpose your sentence "in my mind I certainly perceive that family as not a real family." to trans people, you would get in trouble in some places (e g reddit). And that is what I call enforcing a lie, and that is what I think is an important issue. Would you comply with your own requirement that "it would be forbidden for anyone to mention the way in which you differ from a native or a biological parent", your entire post could not exist. You need to be able to mention the fact that both differ to build your argument.
By the way, I don't think nationality is a "social version" of ethnicity. It's not in the US, it's not in France, and it's not in most countries. Sure, some countries might decide that their nationality is about ethnicity, just like they can make it about religion. Would you say that someone is or is not "ethnically vaticanese"? Both parenthood and nationality are about law more than about identity. Your nationality gives you some rights, being recognized as a parent gives you some rights. From the political viewpoint, "nationality" and "parenthood" is just those set of rights (anyone who has them is a citizen or a parent). Being a woman gives you no special rights. The only special rights of women are actually rights of females, related to biology, like being accepted in a maternity hospital or competing with people with less testosterone in sports (female sports has never been about gender, but only about biological sex). All the rights that could relate to your gender (like the right to vote) have been extended to women, at least in the West, so being a "legal woman" is not a thing, because a "legal woman" is exactly the same thing as a legal man, as men and women have the same rights.
To be clear, I agree with you that transgender activism enforces a society-wide lie, so I agree that I would get in trouble.
My point is that you would also get in some trouble for saying that an adoptive family isn't a real family (But, thinking about this again, I must concede that you would get into significantly less trouble for it than for saying trans women aren't women)
This feels like a straw man. Throughout the conversation we have implicitly been referring to saying these ideas in general society (in person, reddit, etc).
I can also say that trans women are not women here without facing any repercussions (as can you)
But in the advent of transgenderism, many of these "female rights" have now become "women's rights", in the modern conception of the word (a trans woman can compete with a cis woman in many competitive sports, use the women's restroom, go to an otherwise female school/university, etc
This is in direct analogue to how now someone of a non-native race can be a citizen of their new country, and enjoy all the same rights and privileges of any other citizen.
I think the only reason that these feel different to us is because the fact that a nation does not have to be racially homogenous is now well-established, and opposition to that idea is outside of the Overton window.
I believe that in less than 10 years time (if that sounds fast, remember that gay marriage was only legalised in the west about 10 years ago, and nowadays it would be considered unacceptable to even debate the issue) the same thing will happen to transgenderism.
The issue is that you are advocating for some rule, such that enforcing the rule would weaken (or void) the case for the rule. And it wouldn't weaken it because it makes it less necessary, but because it forbids some arguments about it. It seems to me it is weird.
What I am trying to say, is that while there is a need for nationality even without ethnicity (even in a world where everyone has exactly the same DNA, there would still be different nations due to cultural and geographical differences), and there is a need for parenthood in a sexless world (assume children are fabricated, they still need people taking care of them), there is no need for genders in a world without biological sex. Genders are all about sex, and that is why transgenderism is a lie. You might say, look, genders are unrelated to sex, they have started to invent other genders than men and women (e.g. non-binary). You are right, but then this path leads absolutely nowhere, excepted in a place where everyone has his own gender because everyone has his own identity. And it is so because gender, outside of biological sex, is absolutely nothing.
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These are good examples of the 'we define social categories' argument so let's explore them.
Parent and national are multifaceted social categories, additionally with legal requisites based on observable characteristics. There is an element where people might disagree and a negotiation on the boundary decided politically, but there is a substantive requirement for belonging to the category, beyond just the desire to belong to it. You can't self-ID your desired nationality or declare yourself a parent because in both these cases the legal definition takes precedence. Both do have a social and self-ID component (I feel like a US citizen etc) but this does not guarantee membership as far as others are concerned.
The boundary of a legal category is a political negotiation but what we have in the current mileu is an attempt at top down enforcement without negotiation. While widening the definition of nationality does create potential conflicts, over resource allocation and who gets a say, it doesn't create a fundamental rights conflict. Existing nationals maintain all their rights. Widening the category of women does create a fundamental rights conflict because some rights are based on sex, and gender identity seeks to take primacy legally over sex.
There are philosophical distinctions as well, gender is actually parasitic definitionally on sex, whereas nationality is definitionally based on other characteristics.
Sure, but I wasn't proposing a self-ID regime.
I'm okay with legal hoops comparable to adoption or naturalization.
For people who haven't yet undergone the legal hoops, people can still treat them as honorary members of their identified group, the same way people might say, "You might not be my daughter, but I already feel like I'm your mother", or a close friend might say, "You still have some legal hoops to jump through, but you're just as French as anyone else in my book, and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise."
My point was that we already have many malleable socio-legal categories in society that amount to "lies" if taken absolutely literally. I fail to see how legal gender transition poses any notable risk to society's foundation.
I personally would accommodate trans people in their desire to live as the opposite sex if it were a thorough process - the self-ID laws, which my country already has, make accommodation much more difficult.
I would take issue with the lies implication. It's well understood what kind of categories those examples are and there's no issue with understanding, for example, that there are real and meaningful differences between different citizens.
A trans woman in my view is a kind of woman in the social category sense where we can accommodate them in the category- I am free to form my opinion as to what they can know of womanhood in comparison to a biological woman, just as an eighth generation American can contrast themselves to a recent immigrant.
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Ultimately, the purpose of philosophy is to find the Truth, not to make policy recommendations. We want to know simply because we want to know; there doesn't have to be anything else to it. If a philosopher's own private blog is not the appropriate venue for disinterested truth-seeking, then where, exactly, should the disinterested truth-seekers go?
At any rate, the truth of a trans person's gender clearly does have policy implications, because I think a sizable number of people, rightly or wrongly, carry around an unarticulated intuitive notion that whether someone actually is a woman has an influence on whether we should treat them as a woman. If the underlying truth of the metaphysical questions had no policy implications, then trans activists would not become so apoplectic when people question their metaphysics.
But the truth is trivially easy in the trans case. No one on either side is really confused.
Ask any empirical question, and the pro- and anti-trans side can answer all these questions the same way:
Can transwomen give birth?
Can transmen produce sperm?
Do trans-women and -men typically have XX or XY chromosomes?
Etc.
The fight over the specific words "woman", "man" and "gender" are shallow side shows in my opinion. They're not really part of any deep philosophical discussion. It's a simple classification question - that's philosophy 101. People are just eager to pounce on a relatively uninteresting part of the debate, because they're so sure that they have the one True definition written on the Tablets of Reality, but unfortunately such tablets don't exist, and we can't consult them even if they did.
But what is "birth"? A birth can be stillborn, yes? So what is the difference between expelling a dead clump of fetal cells, and expelling an unfertilized egg during menstruation? And if giving birth is just expelling some group of cells from your body, well, any human can do that...
But what is "sperm"? We already agreed to do away with the non-empirical categories of "man" and "woman" and just focus on what really matters, the genitalia, the organs, etc. So let's simply do away with the non-empirical concept of "cell" and focus on what really matters now, the DNA, the RNA, the ribosome and the other organelles, etc. You see where this is going.
But what is a "Y chromosome"? Suppose I have one mutation on my Y chromosome. And then another, and then another, until it is no longer recognizable as a Y chromosome. Or do we define it in terms of total number of base pairs? Suppose we add one base pair, and then another, and then another, until it's the same length as the X chromosome. At what single point does it stop being the Y chromosome?
This is what frustrates me about Scott's "The categories were made for man" post. It doesn't follow its own premises to their logical conclusion. It spends a lot of time discussing whether a whale is a fish, without acknowledging that the category of "whale" is vulnerable to the same attack that the category of "fish" is. It says that boundaries between categories should be drawn to help "people" fulfill their "goals", but what is a "person", and what is a "goal"? It concludes by making a distinction between "questions about category boundaries" and "questions of fact", but fails to notice that any "statement of fact" will necessarily make reference to categories which are themselves subject to boundary disputes. (Perhaps we might finally hit a rock bottom "natural" categorization when we get to fundamental particles? Even here it's not clear. If a particle is "nothing more" than a fluctuation in a field that pervades spacetime, then one could reasonably argue that they have no independent existence at all, the same way that we don't think of holes or ripples in a piece of fabric as independent objects apart from the fabric itself.)
There is no sharp dividing line between the mushy, subjective, philosophical questions and the hard-nosed, empirical, Just-The-Facts-Please questions. Once you accept the skeptical argument in the case of man vs woman, it runs through everything. Quickly you are lead to the view that there is only the primordial Oneness of reality, about which nothing further can be said; any attempt to speak of anything at all is an equally arbitrary attempt to impose categorical boundaries on the raw unstructured data. This isn't an implausible view, mind you. People should just be aware that this is where the skeptical arguments lead, instead of assuming that there is a natural empirical domain of cells and chromosomes where one can take refuge from philosophical analysis.
Scott's idea of categorization is a pragmatic one, so I'm not sure he would agree that it's all that vulnerable to the attack of "what is a whale?" or "what is birth?"
It might be philosophically unsatisfying, but humans do just tend to categorize things in their environment, and pragmatism is fairly happy to take large swaths of categorization for granted. Something like the category "dog" just naturally emerges from a human interacting with a lot of dogs. Likely for reasons of computational and memory efficiency, we're not the kind of animal that looks at one furry quadruped and treats it as a new and completely unique entity, and then encounters a similar furry quadruped and forgets everything we've learned as we try to learn all the new and unique rules that apply to this separate entity. We find patterns, and one of those patterns is something like what we label "dog."
The boundaries of these spontaneous categories are always fuzzy and ill-defined to start. Then, when humans engage in goal-directed behavior, we take all of these spontaneous categories and find the boundaries that are most important to have a consensus on with respect to that goal-directed behavior.
Why do we have words with well-defined boundaries like "cow", "heifer", "bull", "steer", "cattle", "calf", "milk", "beef", etc.? Because for the art of cattle ranching (which groups a number of goal-directed behaviors together), all of those distinctions are important. A steer can't have offspring, but might be suitable for pulling large equipment. A heifer doesn't produce milk, a cow does. And so on, and so forth.
Just by interacting in the world, humans are going to have a fuzzy version of the "woman" and "man" categories in their heads. Depending on our needs, we can change those fuzzy borders into well-defined ones by looking at what we're using the word for. We're perfectly happy to say that Shakespeare's Othello is a "man", even though he's just a fictional representation of a man. As a fictional character, Othello can't do any of the things usually characteristic of a man - he can't actually breathe, can't eat, can't sleep, and he certainly doesn't produce sperm that could impregnate a real flesh-and-blood woman. We're happy to omit the very important context that "Othello isn't real, and any sentence said about him is about the fictional story he belongs to", because most humans can understand the concept of fiction and don't really need reminding.
I think the distinction between a trans woman and a cis woman is going to emerge at some level of the discussion, because there are goal-directed reasons to make the distinction. If a cis man wants to have his own biological children, then he'll want to impregnate a cis woman and won't have much luck with a trans woman. But... the distinction exists. Even just "trans woman" and "cis woman" captures the distinction pretty well. I think the fight over the specific word "woman" is a distraction. We have "toy bears", which we're happy to call "bears" despite them just being paint and plastic. In a trivia game asking for "famous bears" most of the "bears" will actually be fictional representations of bears, and not flesh-and-blood bears. So, why can't a "trans woman" be a "famous woman" in a trivia game?
I think this starts to raise questions when there's...
I'm not sure how to put this. I think it has something to do with the noncentral fallacy, but thinking about it for a moment I think it's a bit more broad.
I think the audience would feel somewhat cheated if you:
Had a list of the "Greatest Admirals Ever", and put Kirk and Ackbar over Nelson and Yi Sun-Sin; or
Said you were researching "Oldest bears in the world and how they age" and in actuality you were researching wear-and-tear of bear statues that have lasted for well over a century; or
Asserted that the war between the GE vs FPA had "the highest body count ever", and it turns out that it's a fictional war between the fictional Galactic Empire vs the fictional Free Planets Alliance from the fictional Legends of the Galactic Heroes.
Something similar is in play when you celebrate "female achievement" when a trans woman is the first person to break into a field or hold some record, or if you find more trans women than cis women working in some certain company after affirmative action in favour of "women" as a category (I've heard someome mention something about this in tech, but it seems too ridiculous to be true from experiences of tech people I know in the Bay Area. Nevertheless, even as a theroetical example it stands)
It seems to me that these sorts of equivocations only work in very specific circumstances and contexts.
I think it's largely a function of what is common in a particular social and material environment, and what expectations are common in a particular question-asking environment.
In a culture that's crazy about pigs, the trivia category "Famous Pigs" will probably be about non-fictional pigs. In our culture, where most people hardly interact with real pigs, the names are going to be "Babe", "Piglet", "Wilbur", etc. In both worlds, additional context can disambiguate (e.g. "Famous Literary Pigs" vs. "Famous Real-world Pigs")
I don’t think this works out as well as you suggest. Most people don’t know any pigs, but these same people know hundreds of women at least. The social and material context is simply too different for “most famous pigs” including fictional pigs vs “most famous women” including transwomen.
Like, I don’t have a deep-seated aversion to and am quite open to treating genuine trans people with their “adopted sex”, like I did before the whole trans craze blew up in the last decade, simply as a matter of convenience and kindness. I also think there’s likely a small number of people who are genuinely “trans” in the sense that something has gone wrong in their neurobiology. But I don’t think the reasoning you put out is a strong justification for why we should treat trans women as women.
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The transgender being "apoplectic when people question their metaphysics" is purely the result of their requests to be treated as the "gender" they identify with. Society is not discussing whether cis-women are women, so the only way to treat trans-women equally would be to not discuss it either for them. It is a ridiculous expectation, obviously, but it explains why the truth question is so important.
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My favorite Scott essay ever covers this better than I can. Forcing people to believe false things is inherently destructive, even if the truth doesn't matter at all. Sometimes the repression is worth the squeeze, because the falsehood is load-bearing for the functioning of society. Reducing suicide rates for perhaps 1% of population doesn't qualify. Meanwhile, the truth regime required to force everyone else to believe a man is a woman — or at least pretend they do while never ever letting the mask slip — boggles the mind.
Could you get me down with "Transwomen are men, and we all know that, but for therapeutic purposes we will pretend they are not"? Maybe. But that's not what they're demanding.
Arguably the loadbearing structure was the gender roles and sex binary the gender movement is currently torpedoing.
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This distinction is now unworkable, if it ever was
If it doesn't matter, why are activists insisting on TWAW and responding so vigorously to anyone who would say otherwise?
This seems like twisting ourselves into a pretzel and frankly it seems like only the activists who want to alternate between running away from the incoherency of their position and insisting on leveraging its metaphysical claims benefit.
Because "woman" isn't a single, unitary concept.. Sometimes it means physical characteristics, sometimes it means social performance, and sometimes it means social validation for meeting whatever definition of "woman" is in other people's heads. Each of these have different logic, and each of these use the same term, though at different times. So given that some of these are extremely important to people, the vehemence is explained. Insofar as some other uses of the term seem ridiculous to care so deeply about, the confusion at the vehemence is also explained.
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Extraordinary.
I burst out laughing when I read this. We finally have AI that can make sense out of the longest and most incomprehensible Dasepost, so now you pivot to cryptic one-word replies that cannot be understood even in principle except by reference to the rest of your corpus. If not for your clarification to 2rafa below, I would have no idea what you actually meant by this comment.
It's not a reference to my own corpus. It's a typical response by Eigenrobot* (a pretty smart user 2rafa, like many dramanauts, most likely knows) on twitter. He usually writes it in response to… well, you be the judge. Oh, for convenience here they are.
*I'm not eigenrobot.
I read Eigenrobot's Twitter feed quite regularly and I didn't get it. The way he uses it you have to be familiar with his personal positions on issues to get that he's being sarcastic.
It's not just sarcasm. He says it sincerely, I think; and so do I. Some posts you disagree with really are extraordinary – extreme, audacious, wild, unusually unabashed. «A good leader hates his subjects» is in that category, for me.
Again, maybe there is a grain of truth to it – you need the ability to resist public pressure. But really, personal sentiment is orthogonal to the question of having the power to execute any vision you might have. I take it as a given that many leaders above vice-mayor level, certainly national leaders, are more or less non-human psychopathic reptiles who find notions like loving or even having contempt for the populace beneath their dignity; nevertheless, most opt for populism for pragmatic reasons.
And Biden is proving unexpectedly resistant to pressure; he 's ho senile grandpa. Case in point: Afghanistan.
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I thought he was literally just saying that he found her comment to be extraordinarily good. Like a reddit-tier "This!" post.
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Oh please don't backpedal now. It's pretty obvious that you are simply expressing your own sentiment and deep-seated philosophy here: all the bad comes from the unwashed masses, all the good from sometimes mistaken but ultimately competent and well-intentioned elites, whose loathing for villeins is in itself a decent guiding principle. It takes some boldness to spin a paranoid, corrupt autocrat's war of conquest informed by 19th century realpolitik and "geopolitics" into some romantic sentimentality; it stretches the notion of sentimentality well past the breaking point.
Russia also had conducted a wildly unpopular and protested pension reform, if you don't know. Colossal immigration from Central Asia is likewise unpopular and ruthlessly maintained, as is the suppression of popular nationalism. Putin has many faults, but being too soft-hearted isn't one.
I agree populism is poison and submitting to the whims of public opinion can well destroy a nation, but there's, well, at least I don't find much jupiterian in saying «geez the demography is busted, the budget is overextended, I don't know how to fix this shit so how about you scum work more and get paid less»; it's just about the most ancient and primitive tool at any ruler's disposal, on par with "hire more police" and debasing currency. If we're doing the high standards thing when judging plebs, it stands to reason to expect more of the powerful.
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I think it's way less than that. I doubt that it's even 10%, actually. I rarely meet anyone who cares a lot about politics.
Angry people who care a lot about politics seem more numerous than they are because many of them spend a lot of time and effort on being visible, talking about politics, and making political content.
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I don't think this notion requires quite so much cynicism about Macron's attitude towards the average Frenchman; I would suggest that his view comes closer to Burke's famous saying that "his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. ... Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
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Honestly, it would be good for everyone if nobody voted. The reason that neo-liberalism must be so careful to purge society of crimethink is because we vote. I don’t think that all efforts for propaganda would stop, but the volume and ubiquity of culture war propaganda would vastly decrease if it didn’t matter so much that I personally sign off on various issues. Ukraine could fade into the background and I could call their capitol whatever I wanted. I could believe whatever I wanted to about transgender issues without worry about the elites or their lackeys trying to thought-police me to death. There might well be limits to this, but at least the volume, the fear, would be turned down.
Why would anyone normal care about other people’s genitalia or a war in a country they can’t find on a map and only became independent in 1992? Why am I, a relative nobody, worried about policing? And my suspicion is that the average person, because of the vote, is often forced to pretend to care, is policed for the ways they pretend to care, when they’d much rather spend time on kids’ education and sports, their jobs, their family, and whatever hobbies they choose to enjoy. I think almost everyone would actually be happier to never worry about cultural affairs ever again.
If this is true, why did the lack of representation for the working classes occasion such dissatisfaction in, say, nineteenth century Britain? The failure of what would become the First Reform Act in 1832 brought Britain if not actually to the brink of revolution then certainly to an acute crisis, over a bill that only expanded the franchise a little. The meeting of the BPU in that crisis supposedly brought out 200,000 people, an astonishing figure considering that it exceeded the entire population of Birmingham. These were people with far less time and energy to devote to political causes than most of today's people, yet they did so anyway, because they knew how important representation was.
True of course, but then the working classes still came out in support of it; they at least cared about something. And it's hardly like working class agitation for enfranchisement stopped in 1832; 1867, 1884 and 1918 didn't come from nowhere.
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Because of laws about how you are required to treat other people (and how other people get to treat you or your children) based on their genitalia. And those laws won't go away if we abolish voting.
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I’m not sure that the PRC has less propaganda than the Anglosphere…
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…perhaps. Notable non-democratic states of the last century were pretty famous for their wide ranging propaganda. Totalitarianism, of course, was not a system that involved voting.
Plenty of authoritarian leaders who don’t believe in any particular ideology have used mass propaganda: arguably all of Idi Amin, Chiang Kai-Shek, Mobutu, Trujillo, Videla; a lot of Nicaraguan leftists seem to think Ortega is a faker, etc.
But unless I’m reading the comment wrong, the OP doesn’t seem to be talking about the elites at all, but about how propaganda is used on normal people. If propagandizing is the same (or worse) even when the elites have completely different motivations and governing structures, this is much my point. It’s true there are big qualitative differences, but they move in the direction of more propaganda the farther we get from our own democratically elected, self-interested, incurious rulers. If the argumentative is that democracy is the root problem, that trendline has to be grappled with.
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Maybe not loads worse, but I find it hard to believe that it would be a good thing for governance. Did their 'ancestors a few hundred years ago' do much better? Not really, after all the last British monarch who in my estimation was truly active, George III, is best known in that regard for dismissing Pitt for having the temerity to support Catholic emancipation. Brilliant.
In any case, in Britain it was really Parliament that was master of the country at the latest from 1688 onwards. Was pre-1688 Britain notably better governed than after that time? No, surely the opposite is true.
Obviously true but also not necessarily relevant. Sure, members of the Commons were only seeking the votes of a very small section of the population, and many seats were not seriously contested, but nevertheless many were at least seeking the votes of an electorate, and an electorate that by modern standards was probably pretty ignorant in 1688, say. The few constituencies where the franchise was quite large and something approaching the ordinary person did get to vote even pre-1832, Westminster standing out as a notable example, hardly returned worse candidates than the average. Westminster yielded Hobhouse, Burdett and most famously of course Charles James Fox.
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I’m not sure it would, if only because the monarchs would inherit largely functional institutions built by their democratic successors. But to speak for the normie constituency: since the last time the nobility was in power their countries were quite a bit poorer and more war-prone, is there a reason you think they would do an equal/better job than moderns? I feel like an active case has to be made here.
Wrt democracy making people care about politics, most non-democratic countries still invest quite a bit into propagandizing their populations and demand even louder and more public affirmations of political views. Maybe this is because centuries of democratic examples have changed the way you have to govern citizens anywhere, maybe the information age just changes the way you have to keep control of a population, maybe increased urbanization just means rebellious commoners are a much more concentrated threat - either way that genie is likely not going back into the bottle.
Strong monarchies exist today- if we exclude oil states, we get Morocco and probably Malaysia, neither of them war prone, Liechtenstein and Monaco- both of which have higher standards of living than their surroundings, although they’re tiny micro states- Tonga- which doesn’t seem notably worse off than democracies in Polynesia, despite the instability of its leaders on a personal level- Swaziland- which is a shithole and may not have had any way to avoid being a shithole- and Bhutan- which is simply strange.
Notably, these are all constitutional monarchies with full parliaments.
The Malaysian king doesn’t do a ton of day-to-day governance, parliament handles the actual show. Even his role in recent years of playing a part in selecting the Prime Minister (who actually leads the country) has been a historical anomaly they justified due to instability, and even his own position as monarch is semi-elected as a rotating representative from their different states.
Morocco’s king is a lot more powerful (even if parliament still plays a big part) but, idk, it’s still a mid tier country with a lot of poverty and dysfunction. None of these places, or even the old European monarchies, seem as nice and functional as your average liberal democracy.
The King of Morocco is pretty powerful, but I wouldn't consider him all that competent I guess? His powers are greatest in foreign policy and the judicial system, two areas where Morocco is notoriously bumbling. Notably, Morocco experiences pretty significant population outflows of Moroccans leaving each year to try and live under liberal democracies. The leaders of Bhutan and Oman are competent (or at least bin Said was, I don't know much about his successor) but their countries are also poor. Even adding in the rest of the oil states, most achieve pretty middling GDP per capita and HDI scores.
Liechtenstein and Monaco do have extremely high living standards, but neither are anywhere near absolutist. Liechtenstein is a literal direct democracy - the princely powers you describe of vetoing referendums were vested in the monarch by a public vote in 2003 (notably the monarchy did not have these powers when Liechtenstein achieved its own huge takeoff growth) and those powers can be taken away by the public at any time as well, as they considered doing and rejected in the 2012 referendum. They can even vote him fully out of power whenever they want, and he has no power to veto (that was part of the deal for increasing his powers in 2003). For what it counts, I have no personal objection to people voting in a powerful executive like this, or in France or wherever.
I don't know much about Monaco, but it's not really clear to me how powerful the Monacan Prince is beyond his veto power; they seem to have an elected parliament that makes all the laws, no? He can call for new elections, but so can Macron. He's described as "representing the country" in foreign affairs, but the Minister of Foreign Affairs seems to make all the actual calls. Should we even consider this a normal case? France literally handles their whole military defense.
By the same token, both Liechtenstein and Monaco are tax havens with populations under 40,000, both countries put together could easily fit on some college campuses. This feels a lot more objectionable to me than the petro-states. If I was arguing for the success of the liberal democratic model I don't think wildly successful Luxembourg would be a fair go-to example: it's circumstances are too unusual and probably don't scale to bigger countries.
This is part of why I thought the more useful comparison would be between the modern European nation state democracies and those same countries under their former monarchies, which tend to look quite a bit poorer and more likely to go to war.
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This would be my suspicion as well. A good chunk of the reason that past monarchs could do so much to protect and advance their kingdoms is that they’d been raised and trained to handle statecraft on a level that just doesn’t happen today. Most democratic societies train their leadership to appeal to the masses, to become electable, and to raise funds for re-election. The entire job of a typical politician is not governing but winning the election.
This is the biggest advantage on a monarchy— in a true (I.e not tourist attraction) monarchy, a prince would be trained from youth to understand and wield power and the ins and outs of statecraft. Read the advice given to rulers in any society, and the goal is to create a stable and prosperous society and to use power effectively. Charles III wasn’t trained that way, because no one anticipates that he’ll do anything important. His role as monarch is limited to keeping the tourists coming to the pomp and circumstance, greeting world leaders, and waving from balconies at various personal and national events. If handed the power Richard III had to remake the country in his own image, he doesn’t have the ability to do that because he’s only ever had ceremonial power.
…maybe, idk. For all that specialized training in statecraft they seemed to always be getting in silly wars. How effective was their education in raising a stable and prosperous society when they never achieved a fraction of the stability and prosperity we’ve seen under our low budget, smile-for-the-camera leaders?
Yup - weirdly, the dumb politicians who have to appeal to the morons have kept the world much less violent than the ones with divine right ever pulled off. Probably, because even worse, the most corrupt politicians in a democratic society, no matter their ideology so pick your poison, can't get close to the amount of wealth by percentage kings held.
Even Trump, whose been the most openly corrupt President in ways that an ideological President's I dislike intensely would've never dreamed of is still only, a possible billionaire in a world of many billionaires.
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Silly wars that never reached the level of liberal democracies' wars.
Would a silly war between 2 slightly different kind of Slavs over who owns this or that grey bog risk escalating to nuclear apocalypse in a world without liberal democracies?
Traditional monarchies never developed the terrifying weapons (missiles, bombers, toxic gasses, nukes, drones) that the industrial revolution enabled liberal democracies to concoct.
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Transgenderism is religious dogma taken to its logical extreme. The fundamental thesis of the religion is complete mind body dualism. They see humans as a blank slate sould that randomly attached to a body and thereby has had many constraints and suffering imposed on it. Their goal is to liberate the free soul from the constraints of the physical world. The view can't be understood outside their theology. HBD, genetic explanations for class our sex differences, are the ultimate heresy against their religion. They invalidate the core principle and understanding of their theology. The woke ideology is built on a worldview that free souls were created, they were bound to physical constraints through evil and the march of history is toward liberating the soul.
The more tech Silicon Valley take is that this will be done through genetic engineering/AI/fusion powered utopia. The more social science approach is through "justice".
Academia has fallen into a pit because academia consists of writing commentary to other peoples work. In the social sciences the commentary is to a large extent based on philosophers and thinkers that had ideas that are invalid. Rousseau doesn't live up to scientific scrutiny. Yet the ideas that stem from his thinking aren't tossed out. There needs to be a search algorithm that can search citations iteratively and redact those papers whose fundamental principles are false. Papers built on ideas such as "Existence precedes essence" are wrong since your DNA is at least as old as your existence, since you became you at the point of conception or later.
Wokeism in Academia is theologists arguing about the number of angels on a needle. They are taking religious ideas with weak scientific basis and arguing them to their logical conclusion. Transgender issues are so explosive even though they are marginal issues since they fundamentally are a clash of theology. Theologians could spend centuries arguing about the word "Filoque", we are seeing similar debates today centering around the new religion.
Identity is not dualist.
Identity is the thing you will look like post singularity when you have no limits.
It is your true self in that it is where you go when all resistance is overcome. Thus it is the direction your will points.
It's teleological.
This does not require mind/body dualism. In fact, the mind itself is also subject to this.
If I don't have the mind of a woman but want to, that is part of this.
This is completely objective. It can be true or false that the direction of a person's will and effort is towards being a man or being a woman.
It is a physical fact about their wants and goals, which is- from a physicalist standpoint, a fact about the neurons in their brain.
No souls required.
I'm not addressing academia in this comment.
So the only part of this view of identity this that is dogmatic, is the radical idea that it is bad that people aren't yet what they want to be.
And I want to be lots of things. The reality is that we are humans, a slightly more intelligent primate and a biological being. Accepting who we are and finding adaptive strategies for the ecosystem we are in are the reasonable way of handling these issues. Your body is you, there is no limit to overcome, you are the physical body.
I think @CloudHeadedTranshumanist would disagree. I hope that that identity (unmoored from any pronouns that could form a link to a body of any sort) will come clarify, but my interpretation is that the comment leans in to the meme. "YesChad.jpg, the only thing keeping you from being an attack helicopter is that we haven't made enough progress on the technology yet," I want to hear that identity say.
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Consider contingency. Take a seventeen year old, whose mother is a reckless driver. Their mother never crashes, though. Okay, he goes a good local college, where he likes biology, gets a bio degree, goes into medical school, and becomes a doctor. He's overcome all resistance - and lives his True Self as a doctor. He enjoys it, is happy he's contributing his community.
Oops! Wrong branch. The mother does crash. The father can't pay rent, so they move to a different neighborhood. The kid to a different, but still good college. Here, the bio professors are a bit less good and the psychology professors a bit better. So he becomes a therapist. Helps a bunch of people, enjoys it, has a purpose, living a True Self.
The point - what one does 'after resistance is overcome' is very contingent. What's the kid's identity at 17? Does he have one?
What explanatory power or use does the idea of an 'identity' have? He's someone who'd enjoy being either a doctor or a therapist. Why is there an 'identity' at all?
Your singularity bit is a twist on the usual ways people elaborate identity, but the same thing applies. Maybe contingency means you might go into the experience machine: porn edition, or you might play starcraft 7 forever. What's your identity then? And, again, what does 'identity' add to a simpler explanation?
Yes identity is highly contingent. This doesn't make it less simple.
The predictive power is extremely straightforward. If you see someone identify some way they are going to pursue being that way until they are deflected from being that way by outside forces.
There is still room here for many different ideological positions on the matter. Such as which methods of moulding and shaping identity are valid.
Its just the ethics of providing training data to and prompt engineering self-aware human minds.
The ethical positions around this do tend to be ideological.
The conservative parent wants maximum control of training data and prompt engineering.
The liberal tends to err on the side of 'it's unethical to censor the training set or mold people with violence until proven necessary'.
This seems to water it down from the lofty heights of post-singularity musings. Instead, it sounds just like regular, boring old desires/wants. Those things could be said to be just in the brain; this is at least a philosophical position that is plenty defensible and plenty defended by many thinkers. But then we already have a long history of thinking on the concept of boring wants/desires and how they can be distinguished from identity, the "I" that is thinking in the classic cogito. In fact, classical thinkers have even considered a whole taxonomy of multiple orders of wants/desires, some of which could satisfy this condition while not being.. uh, identified.. as the "I" of identity.
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As much as I want to avoid weakmanning, this does seem to me to be the most coherent description of gender ideology. People just happen to be born into the "wrong" body (for some reason, don't ask why) which clashes with their innate gendered soul. Thankfully we have medical technology to fix that I guess.
Yes, but without woo.
You insofar as you exist are a little light in a meat suit. Sometimes the processor of the meat suit is fucked up and throws errors (suffers) 'cause it's pins are set such that the suit should be a different model. Maybe this is from birth, maybe its chemicals, maybe it's fucking moths landing on vacuum tubes. Doesn't matter.
Since another fairly universal part of the processor compels you to give a shit about 'suffering' and technology currently cannot address the problem at the processor level, we have to do the jank shit to the suit to get the errors to stop.
Or, you simply decide that the errors are fake, or that the suffering is good in fact.
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Transgenderism is secular, godless materialism taken to its logical extreme. Its logical conclusion is biological essentialism and determinism. They see humans as animals with an unchangeable "gender-drive" - such that a biological man who wants to be a female must be so out of a material fact of their biology, rather than spiritual confusion or sin. Their goal is to chain humans to their base biological impulses and confusions, rather than liberate the soul to pursue individuality and God's plan. That a young girl might wear male clothing, cut their hair, wrestle, or be uncomfortable with puberty can't be an individual's contingent, flawed exploration of their self, but must be a fact of their biology to be physically treated with medicine.
... of course that isn't true either, it sounds like something a radfem would say, but it seems about as plausible as your claims? The bad parts of trans are maybe in some way analogous to mind-body dualism, but a lot of things are analogous in some ways to a lot of other things, and that doesn't make it one cause. "Liberate the soul from the constraints of the physical world"? What does that have to do with wearing dresses or doing makeup? And no trans people that I know of explicitly claim mind-body dualism, or even hint at it. "My brain is the wrong sex" is claimed to be a physical condition of development causing specific desires to be different, not something about souls. Being very wrong about philosophy and science, and getting mad at those who disagree, doesn't make something a religion, by that standard everyone is religious.
They don't. They reject any attempt to materially verify whether or not someone actually suffers from dysphoria.
I agree it isn't true, I was inverting OP's argument for effect (see first sentence of second paragraph), but it, like OP's first paragraph, mixes in a bunch of plausible statements with false statements
My point is that OP's statement is more defensible because they are against the material verification of dysphoria. Whether or not their beliefs are true or not is irrelevant to the conversation.
I continue to be presented with 'transgender people are real because brain scan studies' every few weeks in internet arguments! They're against material verification of dysphoria because it bigotedly implies someone isn't trans, not because of a principled metaphysical stance. Material verification is fine when it's wholesome and trans-positive
They might use that argument when suitable but ask them if more men become engineers because of developmental differences.
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Ok, so tell them "no gender affirming care for you, unless the brain scan test comes back positive" and see what happens.
This statement makes no sense. Material confirmation that you only accept when it gives you the results you want is not material verification.
That may or may not be reasonable depending on the specifics of the brain scans. As an analogy, if trans peoples' heights were typical for the gender they identify as that would be material evidence, but it would be unreasonable to say "no gender-affirming care unless you're shorter than 5'6"" since the height distributions for men and women overlap significantly.
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same response as here. I agree it isn't actually material verification, and it's not actually dualism either, it's a third dumber thing
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The claim that gender dysphoria, and by extension transgenderism, is explicable by reference to a disorder in the physical substrate (e.g. exposure to unusually high levels of prenatal estrogen/testosterone) is widely seen in the trans community as a "truscum" stance to take. In these circles, arguing that only male people with neurologically "female" brains are truly trans women would likely result in accusations of gatekeeping and denying trans people's "lived experience". In my experience, it's far more common to encounter claims that everyone has a "gender identity" known and knowable only to themselves, completely independent of their underlying neurochemistry, unbeholden to social influences, and that being diagnosed with (or even experiencing) gender dysphoria is not a prerequisite to being authentically trans. Such a conception of what a "gender identity" is seems functionally indistinguishable to the traditional conception of an immaterial soul.
In my experience, the internet trans community is happy to use 'brain scans of trans people are more like desired gender than birth gender' in arguments, which is what I was referring to.
Other than the immateriality part (a gender identity, here, is a set of gender-related perceptions or desires rather than something supernatural), the soul part (no communication with supernatural entities, no life-after-death, no creator, etc), and everything else in the traditional conception? Yes, both gender identity and immaterial soul have big problems, and they are vaguely similar in some ways, but that's not 'functionally indistinguishable'.
Right, but have you ever heard a member of said community arguing that "until someone's divergent neurochemistry has been confirmed by MRI or CT scan, you are not obliged to address them by their preferred pronouns"? Even truscums don't go that far: a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria by a psychiatrist (without an expensive MRI or CT scan) is considered sufficient.
In the Internet trans community, the alleged similarities between the brains of trans people and the typical brains of people of their desired sex is treated as an interesting fact, not as a rule-in criteria for who is "really" trans and who isn't.
Right, they pick different arguments in different contexts because their beliefs about what trans is (specifically referring to the All Trans People Are Valid ones) aren't particularly coherent and partially come from a desire to validate other 'trans people'. Trans brain mean trans is real (good), denying hormones on brain scan means an individual trans isn't real (bad). This isn't either materialism or dualism, it's an entirely different thing.
In much the same way that non-consequentialists sometimes reflexively fall back on consequentialist arguments when trying to persuade consequentialists, dualists sometimes resort to monist arguments when trying to persuade monists, even though they themselves are not monists. In the past, I've argued with Christians who've claimed that when you perform brain scans on people in states of religious ecstasy (speaking in tongues etc.), these brain scans look completely different to people having seizures or any other comparable neurological state. I have no idea whether this is true, and in fact whether or not it's true is beside the point: even if this finding was decisively invalidated, it wouldn't impact on these Christians' belief in an immaterial soul or an afterlife one iota. Likewise, trans activists argue that brain scans prove that there's an anatomical basis for gender dysphoria and hence transgenderism, but even if this claim was decisively proven false, that wouldn't actually result in any of the people making the argument to change their minds. In their view, "gender identity" is something fundamental to a person's essence, knowable only to oneself and hence impossible for an outside person to invalidate. This belief doesn't depend on factual evidence from MRI or CT scans; at best, those are just a helpful bonus to bolster a belief which is essentially unfalsifiable.
Their view is that if you say you're trans, you are trans, because denying that would be incredibly mean to a trans person and being trans is cute and valid. There aren't any essences involved. Like, what identity-essences does a genderfluid person have, or someone who wants to be a boy sometimes and a girl at other times? It's just 'you are trans if you say you are and you get to do whatever you feel like', which doesn't seem particularly dualist, just dumb.
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Because it is from random online arguments that they learned it from and apply it to academic discourse. My personal belief: It marks the end for the US hegemony as an academic power and there is little chance to undo it. My prediction: this will leak into other sciences and cause Lysenkoism 2.0 with mass causalities.
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Are there really that many people who hold progressive/woke opinions out of fear? I feel that most of the progressives/wokes and the liberals whom I have interacted with held their opinions because they genuinely believed that those opinions were superior to other opinions, in the sense of being better for the world and so on. And to the extent that their opinions were inconsistent with each other and reality, it was because they were either not smart enough to understand those things or they simply did not care enough to devote sufficient effort to looking into the contradictions. But I cannot think of any time that I detected fear as the primary motivation. I guess maybe the closest I have seen to fear being the motivation has been in the rationalist sphere with Scott Alexander and the like. But not among more typical progressives and liberals. In my experience the typical woke, progressive, or liberal has an attitude of "my opinions are so obviously at least directionally good for humanity, and my political opponents are so obviously vile reactionaries whose opinions are beneath contempt, that it would be silly for me to even engage with those people... the only important dialogue to be had is among us good people, and the only significant topic of conversation when we discuss politics among ourselves is just 1) how exactly should we implement our obviously directionally good ideas when it comes to the fine details?, and 2) how do we defeat the bad people?".
It doesn't have to be fear necessarily, all it requires is a modicum of incentive. About 4 years ago I applied to work at this advocacy nonprofit and literally the first question they asked me at the interview was "what is the definition of equity?" Once we got into more substantive questions the interview went great but man that first question really threw me for a loop and caught me off-guard. My confusion was likely visible because my initial instinct was to wonder why they were asking me about a financial term. I eventually mumbled an answer about how equity was "equal opportunity" which (LOL) was not the right answer and I could tell I disappointed some people. I never used "equity" in my daily life and I had to look up the issue later to figure out that the question was used as a cultural shibboleth: if you give the right answer, you signal the right tribal affiliation.
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It depends. A lot of people do hold politically correct opinions out of fear. And for me, the tell is exactly what was in the blog post — the opinions are incoherent, contradictory, and don’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Saying “I’m obviously right and you’re a [sneer term] for disagreeing,” isn’t the position a person who had a coherent theory about the world or their politics. And from my observation this tends to crop up in higher levels of society. If you’re a parole and paid hourly, nobody gives a fuck. But once you start getting into the higher levels of business and politics, it becomes necessary to hold the right opinions. It even, at high enough levels, becomes necessary to protest or donate to the right causes. Failing to do so can limit your career, cost you friends, even family.
It was really obvious to me when Trump came about. I didn’t vote for him, and I think he’s an ass, but really, as far a things he did, he was either a 1990s era democrat (keep in mind that democrats had at that time favored a border wall, and championed “don’t ask, don’t tell”) or perhaps poor judgement. But people seemed to lose their minds, not only at him personally, but at people who might have some modicum of support for him or anyone not personally opposed to him. In 2016, people bragged about walking out of thanksgiving dinner because someone at the table was pro-Trump. But, these same people were conservatives before, and you did eat with them. In the same time period, people were harassing diners they knew were republicans out of restaurants, shaming people for wearing red hats, etc. it was extremely performative, very loud and very public. Even today, people feel the need to blow the “I’m not a filthy heretic” trumpet in any news discussion or political discussion.
And what’s changed is our panopticon. In 1996, you could plausibly keep your opinions to yourself. In the age of social media, it’s almost impossible for you to do so without taking extra steps. And I think people are afraid of their social credit going down if they’re discovered to have crimethink on their social media or know people who do. And I think everyone knows it at this point, we have an informal but effective social credit system enforced by HR departments terrified of discrimination lawsuits, and workers who know this have to be liberal enough to not trip the “thought crime” alert. So they organize protests, they bitch about “evil republicans” online, and purge their friends list of any filthy conservatives.
It's always amusing to me when people say, "why does the Left freak out over Trump? He's just a 90's Democrat."
First of all, that's not really true, but we'd probably disagree on that, but also, that doesn't matter.
A 1965 Democrat who ran the median 1965 Democratic planks on social issues would've likely been more comfortable in the GOP as well - as we saw happening in the South during this time. Social change happens, and people uncomfortable with that social change align with the political movement that'll stop that change.
Well, the freak outs included warnings against literal Nazism. If the 90's democrats too were literal Nazis, I think we're overdue for some Nuremberg trials. It might also mean that maybe Nazism isn't all that bad. Take your pick.
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Yes, it is. That theory is "I belong to a group with actual power and you don't".
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"Fear" is a strong word. There are absolutely people who disagree with the progressive/woke
consensusorthodoxy, but hold their tongues out of genuine fear of personal or professional repercussions. I think in most cases it's not so much fear as garden-variety conformity: wanting to fit in, not to be seen as weird. Most people aren't thinking "I'd better mouth the words 'defund the police', because if I don't, I'll lose my job": they're thinking "all my friends are saying 'defund the police', so I'll say it too, to fit in".Remember the Bataclan shooting, when people overlaid the French flag on top of their profile pictures on Facebook? I'm quite confident that a significant minority (if not an actual majority) of people doing so have no idea what it was intended to symbolise, and if I asked them "that shooting in the Bataclan was so horrific, wasn't it?" they wouldn't have a clue what I was talking about. It's not that these people think the shooting in the Bataclan was good, but pretended to think it was bad for fear of personal or professional repercussions - this isn't a Havel's greengrocer situation. It's that these people saw other people in their social circle overlaying the French flag on their profile pictures, and did likewise to fit in, at no point stopping to consider why their friends were overlaying the French flag on their profile pictures. Conformity for conformity's sake.
"So you're saying that most people calling for the police to be defunded or abolished are only doing so because they saw their friends doing so, no different from adopting a trendy hairstyle, and have put essentially zero thought into the practical implications of such a policy?" yeschad.jpg
But keep in mind. Being a nonconformist on the wrong things, even if they aren’t obvious can be harmful for your lifestyle. You might think that letting parents have a say in the types of books in the elementary school library is no big deal. But it later becomes a culture war thing and now that opinion is problematic. So there’s a pressure to conform beyond what would exist on most other issues (for example ask about what should be taught in a math class and whether parents should get a say, or whether violent books can be kept out of elementary schools) simply because it’s hard to know if some issue will become a shibboleth. That coupled with the permanent record created by social media makes “going along with the herd” a solid defense strategy. That’s a bit different from hairstyles which you can easily discard and nobody will care.
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This is my experience of the most vocal woke/progressive/liberal people. My experience of the typical person who puts their pronouns on their slack profile without protest when HR asks, votes for whoever has a (D) next to their name if they bother to vote, and has a vaguely positive affect towards the idea of minorities is that they want to be on the "right side of history" but they don't want to have to think about it or make any decisions.
Which, IMO, is super valid. Getting into twitter flamewars about politics is bad for the world and bad for your mental health, so people who make the decision that instead of doing that they just want to grill are making a good choice.
It's a good choice for themselves, but has bad externalities.
In terms of twitter itself, I think engaging with bad leftist arguments is actively harmful, even if you are obviously correct to anyone who reads your rebuttal. The reason I think it's harmful is that the reach of a tweet is related to how strongly people engage with it, where "reply" is a particularly strong form of engagement. Thus, by refuting a tweet, you are also boosting it.
If lots of people refute batshit insane takes and ignore or merely like sane takes, the result of that is that the typical Twitter feed will be full of batshit insane takes, and people will make the observation "the current societal consensus seems batshit insane to me, but it seems like everyone agrees with it. Maybe I'm the one who's wrong". Mostly they will not read the comments rebutting the batshit insane take (yes, I am aware that the concept of being "ratio'd" exists, but I don't think the majority of Twitter users take that strongly into account).
This is a good point if you're specifically talking about Twitter, but it doesn't generalize well. If every ordinary person kept their head down away from bad politics, politics would be dominated by the most fanatical and unreasonable people who made it the most unpleasant to debate them. (To make a Douglas Adams reference, there is a theory that this has already happened.)
I agree that this is Twitter-specific, but also I think Twitter specifically is probably responsible for somewhere around half of the instances of "someone sees a terrible take". Consider how many news articles seem to be a couple paragraphs of commentary around a screenshot of someone's batshit takes on Twitter.
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It's valid in one sense I agree, but we're entering an era where it's increasingly misguided to try to 'sit this one out'. While it was fine to ignore discussions on the right tax rate or whether public transport should be subsidised, this issue is different. We are all adversely affected by the unhinged turn towards non-reality. In my view, the potential for corruption at not addressing this could take us all into the abyss. We need a shared reality for social cohesion - if we cavalierly dismiss it we are inviting all kinds of demons (admittedly a bit melodramatic but I think a sketch of this kind of argument can be plausibly made).
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I'm more surprised that other people don't seem notice it more. Quite often I'll come across people accidentally revealing their power level, and when that's the case I think there's at least some sort of pragmatic decision to go with the flow rather than a real conviction in woke stuff.
I mean, these are people who will repeat all the shibboleths, but they're not people who go full tattoos + weird neon coloured haircut + nose rings + etc., but if you just clerked them on what they said their opinions are, they'd be very progressive...except I have good reason to think they're not really genuine about it. Unless you mean the people who really go hard on the acting obnoxiously queer part?
It's not that unique of a phenomena though. I think Caplan referred to this idea as "low-cost beliefs" and an example is believing in either the theory of evolution or intelligent design. Unless you're working as a biologist, what you believe will likely have zero impact on your day-to-day life but will allow you to signal affiliation with friends. It's a small price to pay. Contrast that with a high-cost belief, like gravity, which would get you killed if you choose to ignore it.
Or belief in climate change/belief there is no climate change, or grandstanding about Ukraine/Russia, …
I agree with you. I’m just surprised people don’t notice it in other people as much, and I think this has more in common with Havel’s greengrocer than people care to admit.
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This is what real power looks like, when you're totally unaccountable and see no reason to justify your beliefs. 'It's current_year' is another example. Or 'We hold these truths to be self-evident'.
If you don't provide an explanation for why you believe something is true and just imply questioning you is unacceptable, then you don't have a leg to stand on in terms of logic and reason. Instead, it shows that your basis in ideological, social power is very strong.
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At the risk of defending some really quite terrible academics, this is in fact the correct response to some texts. Here is David Stove quoting Hegel:
There really is no way to say what is wrong with this passage other than to say, “all of it, it’s just bad”. It’s not much better in context either.
There's no way to engage with it deeply if the words don't mean much and they don't describe concepts that are consistent, but you can still say what's wrong with it. What's wrong with it is not a deep problem, but it's a problem, and you can point to it--"this word describes no concept" is a description of what's wrong. "It's all bad" is a shorthand for that--it doesn't mean you can't describe the problems at all.
The words do describe concepts, but the concepts do not relate to each other in any way as implied by the syntax of the passage.
There are allegations downthread that this is a translation issue, but given that every immediate philosophical descendant of Hegel is also trash, I think the problem really is in the ideas themselves.
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Those words... I know what they all mean on their own... But strung up in this order... I have absolutely no idea...
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You can totally say what's wrong with this passage. Translating from Hegelian to English, Hegel is saying
A possible critique might look like
Someone who takes a heroic dose of LSD can experience ego death. Such a person experiences a merging of their self-identity with the outside world. This proves that their "absolute knowledge" of their personal identity is contingent on their sensory experiences, and as such is not absolute knowledge.
Also this writing style frankly sucks. Use simple words. Use paragraphs. If you find yourself using pronouns like "it" and "that" to refer to three or more different things in a single sentence, you should replace those pronouns with their referents.
You're doing the Lord's work
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This is a perfectly sensible statement, that you can have a conversation about, but can you point to it's counterpart in the original that translates into this? I get the feeling you're engaging in poetry analysis.
The counterpart is
I reordered the arguments because Hegel put things in a weird incomprehensible order.
Ah, I thought I was going crazy for a moment.
That is a common symptom of trying to consume unmediated Hegel.
One thing that can notably help with the task of understanding writing which is bad in this way, and which did help me here: (Chat)GPT4 is mildly superhuman at the Winograd task, which is to identify what an ambiguous pronoun refers to. As such, the prompt "replace all pronouns in the following passage with their referent, in square brackets" works wonderfully to help disentangle dense obscurantist philosopher babble.
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I asked Bing running on GPT 4 to summarize that inscrutable tract, and as expected, it's obscurant nonsense.
I think the most damning aspect of philosophy as a subject as it's taught is that there's little to no progress, in the sense that new physics students don't waste their time studying Galilean mechanics or med students the four humors. There's no real synthesis of concepts, or even much emphasis on being intelligible and clear.
I did the same with ChatGPT4, but as a more iterative process. The summary I was able to produce as a result of that iterative process is still a kinda disconnected jumble of unsupported ideas, but at least it's possible to see what those ideas are.
My process for disentangling that was
Find the full passage from Hegel -- the quoted bit was the 8th item in a list of 8 items.
Feed that into ChatGPT with the prompt "I am trying to understand the following passage by Hegel. [the 8 bullet points]. Specifically, I am confused by point 8; please replace all all pronouns in that passage with their referent, but make no other changes".
Verify that each of the replacements makes sense (in this case, a few of them didn't).
In a new chat, prompt with "I am trying to understand the following passage by Hegel. [the passage with pronoun replacements]. Can you explain what Hegel is referring to when he talks about (absolute form/substance|negative/positive relations to the world|immediate/intellectual perception)" (with one prompt for each).
Using that information, write my own, non-obscurantist summary.
In another new chat, prompt "I am trying to summarize the following passage by Hegel. [the raw passage]. I read that as saying approximately the following: [my summary]. I think my summary is basically correct, but can you confirm that?"
Repeat a number of times until ChatGPT tells me that my summary is good (it turns out ChatGPT has _ very strong opinions_ about Hegel if you write like someone who is Wrong On The Internet about Hegel)
The specific intuitions I have about GPT4, which drove this process, are
It is mildly superhuman at the Winograd task. In other words, it's better than me at taking a bunch of pronoun-heavy text and identifying what the pronouns refer to.
The task it spent most of its training budget on was "given a bunch of text, predict the next token". As such, the next token it predicts is generally going to look like it was generated by the same process as the previous tokens. As such, if the previous tokens contain ChatGPT making a mistake or being unable to do a task, it will predict tokens that look like "ChatGPT makes mistakes / is unable to do the task", even if it could do the task with the correct prompt. As such, it is very important not to have "ChatGPT fails to do the task" in your context -- if that starts happening, reroll the failure response; if rerolling a few times fails, start a new chat.
If you fail to do a task but ChatGPT succeeds, that is fine and good. If you flail around in the general direction of the answer you want in the chat, and then ask ChatGPT to help, and it does, and you say "thanks, that was helpful", it will be helpful in the same direction in later messages in the same chat.
The training data can be modeled as "all text ever written". That's not literally true but it's directionally correct. As such, if a bunch has been written about a topic, ChatGPT actually has quite a lot of knowledge about that topic, and the trick is creating a context where a human who knew the thing you wanted to know would have expressed that knowledge. The internet being the internet, that context is frequently "someone is wrong on the internet and I must correct them".
The RLHF step did meaningfully change the distribution of output responses, but as far as I can tell the main effect is that it strongly wants to write in its specific assistant persona when it's writing in its own voice. However, it is perfectly happy to quote or edit stuff that is not in its own voice, as long as it's in a context it recognizes as "these are not the words of ChatGPT".
I have heard that approximately the same is true of Bing Chat, though Bing Chat performs best if you speak Binglish to it (e.g. instead of saying "Thanks, that was helpful. Can you condense that down to a brief summary for me?", say "thanks 😊. now can you write 📝 me a summary? 🙏").
I applaud your commitment to disentangling meaning from Hegel! That's certainly more effort than I'd ever put into it, did you even deem the outcome worth it?
Bing Chat seems a significantly bigger PITA to wrangle compared to directly interacting with ChatGPT, it prefers shorter replies, overly weights web searches, and is a moody bitch without having that RLHF-d out of it. Not to mention it's predilection for mode collapse.
It's the poor man's GPT-4, unless you really need it to search the web.
Looking at the timestamps, the time between the first and last messages was 22 minutes, plus there was a ~5 minute period where I found the source and tried to puzzle out for myself WTF Hegel was talking about.
On reflection, I think it was a pretty good use of that half hour of my time. My goal in writing that post was to demonstrate that it is possible, even with something as obscurantist as Hegel's work, to uphold the norm of "bad argument gets counterargument, not content-free sneering".
I think that people mostly do the things that they observe the people around them doing, and so by providing a positive example I hope and expect to see marginally more things like "translate a post to language you understand, and emphasize your best arguments against its best arguments" and less things like "quote something out of context and sneer at it".
They say to "be the change you want to see in the world". That is the change I want to see in the world, and that is what I'll be.
As a side note, the "effective use of ChatGPT" post took more time to write than the Hegel analysis one. Though that one mostly took so long because I noticed that I had started exhibiting a style of interaction that was getting me better results, but it took me a while to figure out what that change was. Once I crystallized the pattern of "ChatGPT exhibits the RLHF flinch-response behavior specifically in contexts where the assistant persona is saying something forbidden, and so by giving it a context where the assistant persona is merely quoting / summarizing / rephrasing / otherwise merely transforming something that was said by someone other than the assistant, you can avoid the RLHF flinch-response".
I'm glad you got something out of it too, because I got a shitload out of your doing this, and really can't thank you enough.
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Wait, don't leave it at that. What did the poor bot have to say about it?
It's seen things you won't believe, German tracts on fire at the Tannhauser pub, all gone like piss in the rain.
(I didn't bother saving it)
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Its ze germans. They had a whole thing that if the common person could understand your theory, then your theory was bad.
The other main problem is that we are reading translations. I feel like many of the translations would have been well served by bracketing special terms. Just reading it I know certain terms are bastardizations within the translation, and even if it was technically a perfect translation there is still a bunch of linguistic context missing.
I've bracketed all the things that I'm guessing have special meaning. Context for philosophers of the time that are absolutely lost in any form of translation. Just like today, we can have words, or short phrases that contain a multitude of meanings and context. Any translation short of an entire understanding of the english language and the current cultural context would fail to convey a lot of the meaning. For example, a term like "social justice" is laden with cultural context. Same with straightforward definitions for something like "transphobic". Or exaggerated definitions like "genocide".
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Even with gibberish like that, a better response would be "I have no idea what that means". That's at least an actionable piece of feedback that you can work with.
This. You can't reject an argument if you have no idea what the argument is supposed to be (because the text supposedly containing it appears to be gibberish). You can say "please clarify your argument" and leave it at that until they do.
The other thing to mention is that pleading ignorance is falsifiable. If Hegel somehow revised his jumble into a perfectly coherent version (as @faul_sname tried to do here) and I still plead ignorance, then it's good evidence that I'm likely being intentionally obtuse as a way to evade the argument. Generalized rejection kills the conversation.
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