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Notes -
At a Q&A I asked Scott Alexander if he was going to circumcise his kid and said he was in favor of it and his wife was against it. I'll be honest, I'm kind of shaken. I'm sometimes able to argue persuasively against male genital mutilation, but I wasn't on that day. I sort of made a fool of myself, I guess. It's a painful subject for me.
It's also just kind of shocking and dismaying, because I think that noticing that male genital mutilation is bad is something almost anyone with basic rationality skills should probably be able to notice, and he didn't. Now I want to ask Yudkowsky. I'll choose my words more carefully.
He mentioned the adversarial collaboration on SSC on the subject, which to me had a lot of obvious holes and flaws in it.
Purposes of the foreskin:
Prevents the covered skin from contacting clothing. Clothing contact desensitizes the penis through a process called keratinization. If you're circumcised, you'll notice that the circumcision scar and the places below the scar are what's sensitive, and everything above that isn't very sensitive. That's not normal.
The foreskin has densely packed nerve endings.
The foreskin provides lubrication, both through natural lubricant and through a gliding motion.
Protective against health conditions including meatal stenosis.
I can also rebut the purported positive outcomes of circumcision, and talk about the risks of the procedure. I have videos of men with botched circumcisions talking about their suffering.
I don't really want to get into a debate about circumcision here. I just wanted to provide an example of what someone arguing the point looks like.
My question is this: Is anyone else shocked/saddened that Scott is pro-cutting?
From yud:
Life is suffering -- might as well get used to it early. (I speak from experience, and not circumcision related either -- circumcision is trivial compared to the pain experienced by some infants.)
The sense in which life is suffering calls us to be terribly careful, like trying to solve an almost impossible problem that you can’t help but accurately register your current progress at.
Craving for a lack of suffering is still a craving -- not to mention impossible to provide. The (physical) suffering only increases as you age. I say again, you might as well become accustomed to it as soon as you can.
This seems like a fairly distorted rationalisation for circumcision. I experienced quite a huge amount of pain myself, both in infancy and in adolescence (neither of the instances I'm referring to were circumcision-based either, since I haven't ever had it done to me), yet I would not in any way condone a situation where suffering is purposefully inflicted on an infant. Especially by the very people tasked with caring for it. That is effectively what circumcision is, regardless of the true intent of the individuals involved.
The idea here isn't "It is feasible to eliminate every source of suffering from a person's life". Even if you hold the belief that some amount of suffering is inevitable in any human life, that's not incompatible whatsoever with "You should not be intentionally adding to that by inflicting suffering on someone against their will". Any line of reasoning that states that suffering is inevitable, thus it is trivial and of no consequence whenever it is inflicted, can literally be used to justify not only circumcision but also torture and all manner of atrocities.
"So what, I pulled off your fingernails? That's trivial compared to the pain experienced by other people!" Technically true, but it makes it no less morally reprehensible. And disregarding the physical and mental toll it can take simply because of the existence of other potentially unpreventable sources of suffering is incoherent. If someone had to endure one painful, traumatic event as opposed to two, I think anybody would prefer the former.
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Good catch! I should have done a twitter search.
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