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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33023 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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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:

The imminent publication of Holly Lawford-Smith's Gender-Critical Feminism was announced that same month, and almost immediately no less than two petitions of complaint appeared, one from the OUP USA Guild (the union representing the New York staff of OUP), and the other from "members of the international scholarly community" with some connection to OUP. The latter petition expressed the scholars' "profound disappointment" at OUP's forthcoming publication of Lawford-Smith's book, and suggested various "measures the press could undertake to offset the harm done by the publication of this work." OUP needed to confess to a mortal sin and repent. None of the scholars had read the book that they so confidently denounced (since no copy of the book was available for them to read), but this is a mere detail.

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:

Publishers often commission reviews of a manuscript from (anonymous) experts in the relevant field, and I had to go through that time-consuming process yet again. It was also rather risky, since—as by now you are well aware—the experts in the philosophy of sex and gender tend to brook no dissent. Responding to the (hopeful) publisher’s question, “Will it make for an outstanding book in your view, or simply a work of average quality?”, one expert wrote: “Neither. It is of extremely poor quality.” Another question: “What would you highlight as the ONE feature about this book that might make you recommend it over other titles available?” “None. It shouldn’t be published.” Lastly: “Is there anything superfluous that could be left out?” “Everything—see above.”

Of course, there is nothing wrong with harsh criticism; I have doled out plenty of that myself. Maybe my book deserves it. But a reviewer is expected to give reasons for her verdict—that helps both the author and the publisher. If I had made, as the reviewer said, “sweeping claims” that are “often false,” or had “seriously misunderstood” arguments on the other side, it would be a simple matter to give examples. But the reviewer supplied none: not a single quotation, page number, or chapter reference. From my experience publishing in this particular area of philosophy, this lack of engagement was par for the course. In fact, I found the reviewer’s hyperbolic report reassuring: if I had made mistakes, at least they were not easy to identify.

"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:

Look, I’m gonna level with you here. Like the vast majority of leftists who have been minted since Occupy Wall Street, my principles, values, and policy preferences don’t stem from a coherent set of moral values, developed into an ideology, which then suggests preferred policies. At all. That requires a lot of reading and I’m busy organizing black tie fundraisers at work and bringing Kayleigh and Dakota to fencing practice. I just don’t have the time. So my politics have been bolted together in a horribly awkward process of absorbing which opinions are least likely to get me screamed at by an online activist or mocked by a podcaster. My politics are therefore really a kind of self-defensive pastiche, an odd Frankensteining of traditional leftist rhetoric and vocabulary from Ivy League humanities departments I don’t understand. I quote Marx, but I got the quote from Tumblr. I cite Gloria Anzaldua, but only because someone on TikTok did it first. I support defunding the police because in 2020, when the social and professional consequences for appearing not to accept social justice norms were enormous, that was the safest place for me to hide. I maintain a vague attachment to police and prison abolition because that still appears to be the safest place for me to hide. I vote Democrat but/and call myself a socialist because that is the safest place for me to hide. I’m not a bad person; I want freedom and equality. I want good things for everyone. But politics scare and confuse me. I just can’t stand to lose face, so I have to present all of my terribly confused ideals with maximum superficial confidence. If you probe any of my specific beliefs with minimal force, they will collapse, as those “beliefs” are simply instruments of social manipulation. I can’t take my kid to the Prospect Park carousel and tell the other parents that I don’t support police abolition. It would damage my brand and I can’t have that. And that contradiction you detected, where I support maximum forgiveness for crime but no forgiveness at all for being offensive? For me, that’s no contradiction at all. Those beliefs are not part of a functioning and internally-consistent political system but a potpourri of deracinated slogans that protect me from headaches I don’t need. I never wanted to be a leftist. I just wanted to take my justifiable but inchoate feelings of dissatisfaction with the way things are and wrap them up into part of the narrative that I tell other people about myself, the narrative that I’m a kind good worthwhile enlightened person. And hey, in college that even got me popularity/a scholarship/pussy! Now I’m an adult and I have things to protect, and well-meaning but fundamentally unserious activists have created an incentive structure that mandates that I pretend to a) understand what “social justice” means and b) have the slightest interest in working to get it. I just want to chip away at my student loan debt and not get my company’s Slack turned against me. I need my job/I need my reputation/I need to not have potential Bumble dates see anything controversial when they Google me. Can you throw me a bone? Neither I nor 99% of the self-identified socialists in this country believe that there is any chance whatsoever that we’ll ever take power, and honestly, you’re harshing our vibe. So can you please fuck off and let us hide behind the BLM signs that have been yellowing in our windows for three years?

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.

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.

It is your true self in that it is where you go when all resistance is overcome

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'.

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.

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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