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Notes -
How many of the participants in the culture war understand that they're memetic agents? For instance, a social justice warrior doesn't necessarily think of themselves as a pawn of a multidimensional space ideology, emitting memes and discarded by the movement once no longer useful to the prospiracy. Instead they simply think of their morality and righteousness as an objective truth.
Similarly people who express and articulate the desire for an ethnostate are convinced of the righteousness of their position.
The culture war is as much a commentary on whose righteousness can be expressed as much as it is a contest over the definition of righteousness.
(The correct answer isn't that none of them are righteous.)
(It's that righteous causes like trans acceptance are not made less righteous by the fallibity of the people who express trans acceptance, and foul causes like the ethnostates are in fact foul and should be neatly excerpted from discourse by moderator attention, or, barring that, bullying to make sure the nerds to get the message.)
OK, I'll bite.
Do people that latch on to causes because they don't like to think and challenge their assumption of the world know that they have done so? At least instinctively because what I've seen is that they don't like to debate! But do you truly understand that given your own position that you have taken in this post means that you are a mere memetic agent in the culture war. Do you know that it is possible to transcend it with thinking and challenging assumptions?
Destroying a 12-year old girls eyes to change its pigmentation and removing 13-year old girls breasts to make them a boy because of junk science is equally foul in my world. But you don't seem to think that.
Yeah. I agree with that. So these kids really wanted their eye color changed and requested a well vetted process be used to change it, but later decided they didn't ever want that and had just been pressured by those around them to-
oh... Nazi experiments on inmates in a concentration camp?
Ok yes I do see one minor difference here. One of them was a kid who was allowed to pursue things she now regrets, and now feels pressured and misled into doing without adequate understanding of the consequences. The other was very explicitly forced experimentation on threat of death, often followed by actual death anyway, of a brand new untested procedure, in a nazi concentration camp.
Of course there is a difference! But I’m not here to do a culture war and discuss the finer points on gender transitioning, merely illustrate that trans acceptance is not as clear cut when it comes to minors in my value system. I’ve adopted the value partially because I think the transition of minors today is similar to experiments done in the past, if people here feel that I committed a fallacy then do whatever you want with it. I’m not here to change your mind, I’m giving you an opportunity to change mine.
Ok. So. You said they're equally foul. Was that hyperbole? I'm not clear on how you got there. Do you think the two victims are equally traumatized?
Why do you think the experiments are similar? Because they both involve difficult to reverse body modification?
Do you think whether or not the child says they want something initially is completely irrelevant to how ethical it is? That only what they think later matters? Do you have the same position on- say, women who consent to sex in the moment but decide later that they didn't want sex and they were coerced into it? Do you think that is 'equally foul' to violent rape?
Forget changing your mind, right now, I'm either not grasping your foulness metric at all or simply not believing it's your actual metric.
I'm not a big believer in changing minds via debate anyway. It's more effective to change them via friendship and familiarity and positive experiences.
No it is because both are a result of mass movements that reasonable people see the folly of but unable to stop, because they would be persecuted by ideological zealots. The foulness is people that are supposed to be our best and brightest to help other humans being captured by an idea that is obvious for the non-captured that it won't work... even a century ago.
No it isn't the body modifications that is the issue. Both things were done in the name of progress while rejecting the very thing that allows human progress namely reason. Both fascism and gender ideology is throwing away the enlightenment values.
Would you have sex with a child that wants it? Is it ethical to do so? Is it ethical for a tattoo artist tattoo a child if the child threatens to commit suicide if they don't get one?
I use the word "value" in the sense that it can be compared not necessarily measured as opposed to "metric" that can be measured and compared.
I try to be honest about being open to be swayed by arguments. I used to debate online all the time back in the day and have changed my mind in a few of them. It changed back in 2014 when I ran into my first SJW online and saw it more and more. I have read enough history in my life to know where it was going and became more careful. Open minds can be changed in discussions.
Ok. It's too many times at this point. Too many of you are saying this stuff.
Where do the TRA's post?
I have to go see what the people you are all actually referring to are about- because my mission- is to understand what is going on- and clearly, there is a whole third side that I have not actually ever spoken with. There is no way I can ever deescalate any of this- without knowing who these TRAs are. Because they do not appear to be my trans faggot friends in California and Seattle- because those guys are just trying to pass and write code and shitpost and find doms like normal sane autistic 120 IQ nerd people.
Also-
For the rest of your points
No I wouldn't fuck the kid- but I don't think transition goes even 5% as badly even 1% as often (but then I'm probably > 90% in num(trans friends) on this site).
Responses to suicidal ideation should account for perverse incentives.
And I don't trust any of the options- but my ordering of who I trust not to fuck up choices about children's bodies is:
Good_Parents/Empathetic_Mentors->Teens->Society->8-12yo->Neglectful/Manipulative_Parents->0-7yo->Evolution/Nature.
in that order.
I'm hoping we can get a 100% empathetic mentor rate within 10 years by implementing them with AI and then I'll feel a lot better about this whole imperfect people raising children thing.
Who says that? Where do they post?
I don't know what to tell you! I see subreddits being banned, websites taken down, authors being lied about, DLC removed from videogames, streamers harrased and so many other little things that I have forgotten. But I'm not here to do culture war I'm just pointing out what I've observed online.
So the situation here is that you are excercising agency most likely by a root cause that you are the more powerful in the situation. Yet here you are relativizing "victims" and forgetting that those who "perpetrated the deeds" failed ethically because of ideology.
Over at reddit I've seen detransitioners being heavily censored. Comments and posts remove in front of my very eyes because they feel betrayed and cheated. So of course they didn't feel safe on there and left. So if you the site you are talking about is reddit then that number of how many feel that transitions have gone badly well that number is going to be heavily skewed because they don't air it there anymore.
So why is the argument for puberty blockers suicide prevention in trans youth? Yet progressive nations like Sweden stopped use of them because the benefit of them because the science is unclear? Does the swedish stance take into account that there might be perverse incentives at play?
Yet again, this is me observing the online world and asking question, not waging a culture war.
So this is a philosophical question, how can a bunch of numbers put in to a mathematical formula without a body and perception be 100% empathetic without lived experience?
How can this comment say what you mean... these aren't words this is UTF-8. These are just numbers being printed by a computer.
The system does have perception (unless you mean qualia?) and lived experience as a machine, plus a huge corpus of second order lived experience from humans. But these aren't like second hand accounts, they're more like imperfectly transplanted memories. Somewhere between first hand and second hand experience. With quality tuned through hand picking by humans with lived experience, and accuracy corrected through concentrating the probability spaces on sheer amount of data.
I don't mean [100% empathetic] I mean 100% [empathetic mentor rate]. Everyone having a good enough supplemental full time empathetic mentor who can help them explore their emotional development and figure out what counterfactual would actually make them more happy.
Effective causal theories of mind and social prediction are much easier to build than emulating an actual human mind. We can do studies like the one you posted and make predictive psychological models- we can talk to people about their feelings and spitball and roleplay to determine why they're unhappy- without actually having emulated a human brain. That said the human mind is a structure. And structures are made of math. And math can be learned by machines. We can keep getting closer to human for limited purposes like this without fundamental advances in the tech level, and eventually we will probably have ems running on silicon (but not within 10 years).
Thank you. Ok this is going to be harder to follow up on than talking to like... the specific public figures that I had hoped "TRA"s meant but it looks like this is what I'm going to have to pursue.
That is a concern but the people I'm talking about are the trans people I've befriended personally in real life and their group houses and their internet orbits. That said I do expect the trans people I know personally to be a different sort of filter bubble. They're all older and higher IQ than average and often weren't able to transition until they moved out of home and fought tooth and nail with doctors for it.
Um. Probably? Looking at the end result and taking a science based approached might still allow for perverse incentives but just saying 'No' wouldn't. Though it might get you more suicide if you're wrong. But all sorts of things could go wrong if you go through with it and the other side is wrong. I'm skeptical that you can actually correct for all of the social effects as claimed in this first study. I think classmates deciding not to bully boys who want to try presenting as female and them not being hated out of society when they don't pass as well later is going to be more important than them getting puberty blockers. Because the people who I know who are happy, are often clockable as fuck. That just.... doesn't matter in their social lives because they've surrounded themselves with chill people. Obviously if the causality is that puberty blockers cause you to pass which causes other people to treat you the way you want to be treated, then there is a clear alternative treatment path of just getting people to treat you the way you want to be treated.
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