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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38184 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Does your argument apply to money? If it looks close enough it will do, and try not to look too closely?

Sure, I'd be okay with treating something like Bitcoin as money in some cases, since it bears enough of a resemblance to money.

He's asking if you'd treat something that looks enough like a hundred dollar bill as a hundred dollar bill.

Something that looks enough like a hundred dollar bill to be accepted as legal tender is a hundred dollar bill.

How would they send people to prison for making them if they are hundred dollar bills, and if fake hundred dollar bills aren't accepted as legal tender, why bother criminalizing them?

If the note was real enough to be universally accepted as legal tender, the forgery would never have been identified and reported, and nobody would go to prison. The history of paper money is full of examples of new security measures designed to combat the genuinely successful and broadly undetectable forging of notes.

However, as I note above, we’re a very long way from this being true in this situation.

If it was relatively inexpensive though nontrivial to switch sex - some kind of sci-fi lab grown body tier shit - what would happen? What would happen if it cost three months' wages to switch sex? That would be a hell of an interesting thing and an interesting environment to be in.

The issue is that's how likely something is going to be accepted is a question of how closely you look. A fake bill is no less a fake because someone accepted it.

We eventually found the Superdollars that most likely North Korea was producing, but those were good enough to remain in circullation until the Treasury drastically changed the look of the $100 bill.

I don't think I argued anywhere that the best tie breaker for money categorization is morphology.

Different categories have different kinds of resemblance binding them together.

It's just that arguing it's the best tie breaker for sex seems rather arbitrary. I don't see a good reason why it should work for sex and and not dollar bills.

Part of my argument is that this is de facto the standard you're using if you use your brain's sex determination module to get information about men and women in the world. Since the evidence on humans having pheromones is mixed, and the existence of porn seems to indicate that the mere visual presence of a woman is enough to arouse a man, I think the argument that there is something like a sex determination module that leverages visual information is pretty strong.

The visual information is based on a subset of the morphology of a person being looked at.

Now, it has been a broader trend in science to move away from morphology as a primary basis for classification, as we have developed more sophisticated tools for observing "hidden" things like DNA, hormones and microscopic structures, so I understand why genetic or gametic models of sex are popular among people who want solid and fixed definitions. But part of my argument is that the "hidden" things we can now measure are less psychologically fundamental than the visual (and thus morphology-based) sex determination module in the brain.

Part of my argument is that this is de facto the standard you're using if you use your brain's sex determination module to get information about men and women in the world.

I think that's a sleight of hand. It's like saying a stick bug is de facto a stick, because my brain's bug determination module is using that standard about bugs and sticks in the world.

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