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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25225 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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We have these:

  1. Non-technical Universities
  2. Black underclass, where a large percentage of the men are dead or in prison.

Edit: This was supposed to be a response to that comment speculating about the effects of reducing the male : female ratio. I'm not sure what happened.

Yeah, I suppose we do have non techicsl universities and a black underclass

We have the best non-technical universities and black underclasses, you wouldn't believe it

Yes, yes we do indeed have these.

Thread soundtrack or Real/full version

So a guy lit himself on fire the other day. On purpose. In some ways, perhaps because we’ve been primed by Buddhist monk seminal example, that remains an ultimate attention-getter of Western modernity. And although most everybody talked a whole lot about it, mostly nobody seemed to care much. I’ve been checking in more than usual for a post here - hoping to tack on - so I didn’t have to go first.

“Performative” seems tough but fair. It seems to me like it was a bad move and and I’m sharing my perspective hoping it leads to productive exchanges.

I used to drink a lot. I still drink a lot, but I used to drink a lot too, and back in the day it got me in trouble exactly twice. Two separate trips to jail, one night each.

The second time I drank too much, went out for tacos, blacked out while driving, and crashed. No one got hurt (thank you Jesus) and I talked my way out of charges. Just one night in the tank and a memory of the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Happy to tell that story but it’s kind of ‘fun’ and not highly probative.

The first time I woke up in a cell not remembering how I got there. I remembered going to a bar with some buddies. A cute girl offered me her drink saying some weirdo had just given it to her. I took it without a thought, we hit it off, and my buddies made themselves scarce. Flash from chatting with her after near-to-zero-as-makes-no-difference drinks to screaming for help banging against the bars.

(Quick tangent: as you might imagine most of the other fellas unfortunate enough to be there that night were screaming back at me. Some variation of “shut up,” with profanity. They were just trying to sleep. I screamed and banged for so long that (quite precisely) like a toddler I eventually tired myself out. Then I just wanted to sleep. So what happened when they brought in a new guy? He started screaming for help, and I started screaming back at him with some variation of “shut up,” and profanity. After all, we were just trying to sleep.)

Of all the “oh shit”ers possible in life, “shooting back a drink someone explicitly warned you might be spiked then waking up in jail” has gotta be up there. I knew I hadn’t had too much to drink - but had absolutely no idea what happened between that spiked drink and ending up in jail. To even list some possibilities is to discount the galactic extent of possibilities.

In between the sleeping and the screaming, your mind will go toward certain things: the things that actually matter.

“Guess my chances with my ex are shot, she’s the only number I have memorized of anyone nearby” (no one else to pick me up). “Hope my dog isn’t too hungry or in too much pain” (without her arthritis medication). “No one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried” (what will she think when I call for bail money).

Strangers dying thousands of miles away were...thousands of miles from mind.

No one lights themselves on fire for The Cause in the privacy of their own homes. Performative is a given.

Efficacy is not always required for self-sacrifice, conviction, and heroism to touch something off in the human imagination. The futile last stand is universal. Does the futility or inevitability of defeat make a sacrifice make it more impactful? People seem to disagree, though every culture elevates stories of both heroic last stands, and futile ones. Of course, even the Jews have their own morbid one.

Still, I have a gut feeling that this act is a perversion of the noble sacrifice. The heroic resistance. Bushnell's display feels like a knock off. Maybe it's just because of my own politics, or because it is a knock-off of a 50 year old protest event. Bushnell was not fighting religious persecution in his homeland. He did not choose death instead of acceptance, or did he? He had options. He did not live in a place or time that would see a brutal war over the following 15 years. No, Bushnell was a safe American. He was as safe as you could be. Like so many Americans, he spent some of his time typing into the void, playing video games, and playing politics online.

Bushnell's act can't be called a LARP, but why does it feel like a LARP?

Maybe the feeling of perversion comes down to my cynicism. There is no Diem to coup here. There is not an Alamo to remember. Insofar as awareness and eyeballs are helpful, it seems like there are maximum eyeballs already. Outside of something wild, like Israel opening up a new front in Lebanon, then everyone is as involved or invested as they're going to be. Maybe America will claim to make the Israelis go home a few weeks early when it happens. There is an Israel filled with Israelis who can not yet say like they will accept living next to a Hamas governed Gaza. Until something in that equation changes, Israel will trudge along accordingly. It is written.

Maybe these things never seem heroic in the moment. The romantic hero aspect has to be earned with time. Although, this doesn't appear to be true in Quang Duc's case. I have to say I cracked an evil smile reading some snide dissident right types. "Yes, of course this man is a hero, my dear leftists. We shall all to aspire to follow in his example." There may be something in that. If this man is a hero, but one we must warn people not to emulate, then why would he a hero at all?

RE: drunk tank story. Nice anecdote. A little loss of freedom with a heavy dose of reality can put things in perspective.

What the hell did I just read. It seems this post makes sense to people, but it goes right over my head. What does someone setting himself on fire have to do with your drinking stories?

Anyone who would light themselves on fire on purpose is mentally deranged, damaged beyond conception, and just plain sick. I know this because I have previously been in a situation where I was made to confront what I actually cared about and what actually mattered. Anyone incapable of understanding 'this post'....

Anyone incapable of understanding 'this post'....

Please, do finish that sentence.

might in the future choose to engage with something more congenial than "what the hell did I just read"

Fair enough.

So a guy lit himself on fire the other day. On purpose. In some ways, perhaps because we’ve been primed by Buddhist monk seminal example, that remains an ultimate attention-getter of Western modernity. And although most everybody talked a whole lot about it, mostly nobody seemed to care much. I’ve been checking in more than usual for a post here - hoping to tack on - so I didn’t have to go first.

The Arab spring was also started by a guy lighting himself on fire. Except it wasn't the first guy to do it. Or the second. Or the third. I read somewhere he was... 17th? Can't find the source right now, sorry. But many people did it before him, and many people do it after. Sometimes it's just really hard to tell which precise spark will start the big fire.

I knew I hadn’t had too much to drink - but had absolutely no idea what happened between that spiked drink and ending up in jail. To even list some possibilities is to discount the galactic extent of possibilities.

... You are going to tell us. Right?

It would've been counter productive to the point of trying to put yourself in the shoes of someone who learned really quick what mattered and what didn't - but- it also doesn't make for that great of a story. According to the police report, multiple witnesses saw me running around screaming for help, and when the cops showed up I was incoherent enough they just threw me in jail.

"In some ways, perhaps because we’ve been primed by Buddhist monk seminal example, that remains an ultimate attention-getter of Western modernity"

Not really! People have lit themselves on fire in protest many times since then without much public notice. This is a conspicuous exception.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_self-immolations

Thank you for sharing your story.

This makes me think about the fifth precept

To refrain from states of heedlessness brought about by intoxicants

which in nearly all Buddhist texts is specifically targeted against alcohol. But not all.

As I was taught, the fifth precept includes being intoxicated by one’s own ideas—not just the ingestion of intoxicants.
 Just recall what it feels like to be completely intoxicated with one’s own ideas, views, opinions, etc., including the bodily and emotional sensations, the mental ideas of being right, others being wrong—not a far place from being drunk, except that this is the drunkenness of self-absorption, self-belief, self-separation. I’ve certainly have had these experiences when I’m caught up in what I think ought to be.

https://tricycle.org/magazine/reader-responses-fifth-precept/

Perhaps extending the fifth precept to intoxicating ideas is a recent Western Buddhist innovation. And it seems to come in two versions.

Version one is a purity spiral. One extends the fifth precept to make it stricter. Not just Tee-total but heedful of the warning of Dostoevsky against ending up as a Raskolnikov.

Version two is a dilution. One excuses drinking a can of beer because ideas are the big danger. It is safe enough to relax with a beer after work providing that one does not buy into the ideology of alcohol and start thinking that beer is the only way to have a good time and that getting drunk shows that one is a real man.

I'm quite cynical, so I mostly think that "intoxication by ideas" is a dilution, not a purity spiral. But maybe Aaron Bushnell died of intoxication by ideas, and his burns are a later link in the causal chain by which poisonous ideas eventually kill people.

VinoVeritas survives his small-molecule intoxication, while Aaron Bushnell did not survive his big-idea intoxication. And I'm probably not reading the room. The Motte is the wrong place to say "Less thinking please. All these fancy words will mess with your head and you will end up dead."

Edited to remove a stray space that was ending a block quote prematurely.

The main argument against repealing the Civil Rights Act is that if people have the option to discriminate against racial minorities in jobs, housing, and school admissions, they will do so. In order to know if this is true, we would need to look at a country that has a similar racial mix to America, but no anti-discrimination laws, then compare the life outcomes of Africans or other historically oppressed groups in America to their life outcomes in that country.

Can anyone think of such a country to use as a test case?

I recently found out that France does not have anti-discrimination laws, but also that they don't collect data on race, so it might not be possible to use them as a comparison.

The elite networks and organizations of today discriminate in favor of minorities and the philosophy associated with civil rights act and how it has applied in practice does not take sufficiently seriously any even handed aspects to the law as written.

At such, not only repealing civil rights act but empathising that it is racism and illegal to screw over the non progressive associated identity groups would be necessary.

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to entertain the framework of historically oppressed protected groups, as a valid framework. In fact, to the extend discrimination is illegal, or comes with fines, such framework would end up costing for those who apply it.

The arguement that civil rights act might no longer be necessary as the minimum arguement might had made more sense in the past, but if the arguement of civil rights act has been about pervasive influence or conspiracy of groups like KKK, today we can observe a different pervasive ideology. Saying that there isn't racism today would be inaccurate and adopt the framework of progressive idea of racism where they don't count the racism in favor of minorities and against say whites.

You are basically fighting the old war. I also don't see why we need to face these questions in such an indirect way, instead of directly observing whether current American society is favoring, trying to be neutral towards, or mistreating X or Y group. So we will directly reach the truth of the matter you want to investigate, by investigating it directly. I sincerely do not buy into this idea that such things are such as inherently complex mystery that is hard to ascertain. It is convenient politically to be a mystery for one side that their side has a weak case based on the evidence. Actually, who a society favor is going to be reflected in the rhetoric of elites, the dominant NGO groups, the laws and how they are enforced, and so on, and so forth. If you do know that groups that can be favored can even perform worse due to HBD for example, although there are differences in behavior that aren't just HBD and other factors that can also lead to groups that are favored to do worse on some metrics of success, there isn't really a mystery here about what is happening.

Some issues are not actual debates where both sides have a valid case, just because there are two sides that are unwilling to compromise. Although, there is some compromise, well sort of. When you see the celebration paralax that is telling enough. The opposite side to what I argue will sometimes admit that it is true but "what you are going to do about it" i.e. might makes right, or use an arguement like its karma, revenge, and celebrate it basically.

Some of the rhetoric of progressives about protecting groups from discrimination does have a validity today. But it is about protecting from progressive racist "antiracist" movement, including "conservative" politicians that have aligned with it and such ethnic lobbies.

However, obviously, if you are to use power to oppose a cartel that screws X to benefit Z, you ought to be very careful about overcorrection if the goal is to oppose discrimination and be willing to reverse things if they have gone too far. And actually take seriously even handed applications of the law if anti discrimination is the goal. Contrary to the assertion that I have seen that even conservatives shouldn't reverse things, lest they become reactionaries, reversal of bad policy is a preresequite of wise governance in general.

Since anti-discrimination laws end up applying in intent of many involved with bringing them in fruition and practice as a manner of screwing over the progressive and their ethnic and other identity groups it comprise as permanent outroups, that negative precedent should be empathized as part of revoking not only civil rights act but Britain's and other country's equality act, hate speech laws, etc, etc, and to pass laws in favor of removing from influence and prosecuting with high prison time people who under the pretense of anti racism violate the civil rights of any group progressives dislike. Especially goverment officials but big business too and also industry wide regulations, or cartels. People behind trying to make this into reality or making this into reality should not just be excluded from influence but find themselves in legal trouble.

We need to be explicit about the betrayal of anti discrimination promise into discrimination towards natives, Christians, europeans, right wingers and associated groups, men, etc, etc. However a motte and bailey between antidscrimination and for discrimination for protected groups, against oppressors, have been a key part of these civil rights movements and their protagonists. So, we should be clear about the nature of it, and denounce it like Stalin has been denounced. We need to aknowledge the problems with such unwise and unjust policy and movement which was an overcorection and has become a very unjust monstrosity at this point.

The situation we are at is that good and moral policy is to enforce this at this stage. Considering how they have succeded in infiltrating the goverment and large corporations and be influential even with FBI with ADL as the worse, based on the ideology of the people who captured institutions. NGO's whose political influence is to do this discrimination activity which would be correctly considered a crime should become illegal, or at minimum fined and excluded to the level that KKK was. But power should be used to minimize the influence of the worst influential NGOs of this type and those who collaborate with them in power.

Like with civil rights act, fines can also be used for organizations for whose reason of existence can be more neutral like a social media, or media platform, where they are incentivized to remove the kind of leadership that is slanted in such direction. A correction against the excesses of our progressive dominated age is the correct way to analyze the current situation. It isn't 1960s where we have to predict how things will turn up. We can see how they did.

I kind of agree here. I’m very firmly in favor of weak affirmative action, which is more of a tie-goes-to-the runner version of AA. What that means is that if I have two candidates equally good for the role I’m hiring for, I should choose the minority. The issue most people seem to have with AA is not “they’re hiring black people, women, gays, etc.” but the fact that minority status is trumping other qualifications for the position. In short, the position that you don’t have to be nearly as good at the position, or as qualified for school is what people seem most upset about.

Weak AA doesn’t actually do that. It might require looking for more minorities to apply for the job, which isn’t that hard. It doesn’t forgo requiring relevant qualifications and skills and even testing for them. It simply means that once you have that pool, you should hire the most qualified and if two are equal, then give the nod to the minority.

'Weak affirmative action' as you describe it, doesn't exist. It can't exist, because, outside of academic studies with fake resumes, there is no such thing as two equally qualified candidates. Equally qualified candidates would have to be literally identical, and real candidates obviously differ in terms of their work experience, academic background and interview quality.

In practice, 'tie-goes-to-the-runner' acts as a fig leaf for more aggressive discrimination. I've seen this first hand. I had to shortlist candidates for an academic programme, giving each one a score. This list then went to the higher-ups, who simply removed the five lowest scoring male candidates, even if they had higher scores than the female candidates. The remainder were given offers. Although the official guidance said preference should be given to the 'minority gender' when deciding between two equally qualified candidates, in practice they just penalised the male candidates.

In practice, 'tie-goes-to-the-runner' acts as a fig leaf for more aggressive discrimination.

It shames me that as a kid I actually believed that this kind of phrase was anything other than obfuscation for the sake of reducing cognitive dissonance. But what I'd actually love to see is a true "tie-goes-to-the-runner" affirmative action implemented in real areas where true "equally qualified candidates" can and do exist. Such as baseball, which is what that phrase alludes to. No need to have extra innings, if the game is tied at the end of 9, then the team with more aggregate oppressed identities on the team wins. If the Super Bowl is a tie at the end of regulation, then give the Lombardi Trophy to the team that has more oppressed identities in aggregate. If two Jeopardy contestants have the same score at the end, then the person who is more oppressed gets to stay on and the other guy gets kicked off like any other loser.

If we truly believe in "tie-goes-to-the-runner" as a proper way to fix problems in society, then let's walk the walk.

America, 1963.

One can argue that in current year the demand for racism outstrips the supply, and maybe you think that modern society's anti-racism is robust enough that we no longer need laws to make everyone behave... But it is trivially true that America did need those laws, Americans were (and to a lesser extent, still are) willing to discriminate against people based on race. It is also probably true that such laws have played a major role in America becoming a society that shunned racism.

I recently found out that France does not have anti-discrimination laws

This didn't seem right to me, a quick google search turned this up. maybe you are thinking of 'positive discrimination', which it appears France does not have.

Which characteristics are protected by [discrimination in the workplace] laws?

The characteristics protected are numerous: origin, sex, morals, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, family situation or pregnancy, genetic characteristics, particular vulnerability resulting from economic hardship, true or supposed belonging or non-belonging to an ethnic group, a nation or an alleged race, political opinions, trade union activities, religion, last name, physical appearance, place of residence, ability to speak in a language other than French, bank domicile, health and loss of physical ability.

How did France avoid "position discrimination" if we got saddled with it? Do they not have a Supreme Court powerful enough to do the equivalent of the Griggs v. Duke ruling?

I'm not sure what you mean by "position discrimination", I said "positive discrimination" i.e. affirmative action, intentionally discriminating in favor of ethnic minorities. This does not appear to be legal in France.

Griggs v. Duke

Not familiar, but having looked at the Wikipedia page, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with positive discrimination. But, it would not surprise me if France had something similar Griggs v. Duke, in legislation or case law. It could also be that French employment law has protections which would make a Griggs v. Duke unnecessary; France has some of the strongest employee protections in the developed world, and America some of the weakest. Comparing this or that aspect of French law to this or that aspect of US law is all well and good, but you have to bear in mind that these laws are holistically connected to very different structures. A 1-on-1 comparison probably won't show much.

Autocorrect is a bitch. I meant positive discrimination, i.e. going out of your way to hire people from protected groups. Griggs brought affirmative action into the private sector by making it potentially illegal to have any hiring standard that created a disparate impact. I say "potentially" because you could still prove your standards were necessary after being dragged to court to pay legal fees.

New York recently had to pay out insane amounts of money because they were demanding unnecessarily high reading and writing skills from public school teachers.

I'm not sure why another country is necessary for this comparison. It's not like the Civil Rights Act is some long-defunct law under which no one actually brings suit. To the best of my understanding the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, various Department of Justice entities, and private plaintiffs all still bring suit under it and win. This suggests that, by the terms of the law, racial discrimination is happening in America today. Surely there are some people on the margin who would discriminate if it was legal but won't discriminate if it isn't. This seems at least empirically true. The amount of racial discrimination today is almost surely lower now than it was before the Civil Rights Act.

There are two main components of civil rights law that the online right dislikes. There's the nondiscrimination part of the Civil Rights Act (which is interpreted to mean that pro-black or other progressive-favored group discrimination is OK even if it discriminates against other groups) and there's the disparate impact standard, which makes everything from enforcing laws against murder to MIT open courseware illegal depending on your interpretation. The disparate impact part is indefensible IMO, it's just a poorly thought out law that shouldn't exist. The nondiscrimination part would be perceived very differently if it was simply interpreted the way it was written, but it isn't.

Disparate impact is not, notably, part of the law itself.

Griggs was enshrined into law in 1991.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000e-2 under (k) as Nybbler said.

The main argument against repealing the Civil Rights Act is that if people have the option to discriminate against racial minorities in jobs, housing, and school admissions, they will do so.

What is the main argument in favor of repealing the Civil Rights Act?

In order to know if this is true, we would need to look at a country that has a similar racial mix to America, but no anti-discrimination laws, then compare the life outcomes of Africans or other historically oppressed groups in America to their life outcomes in that country.

I can guarantee you the general population has absolutely zero interest in this fact. Maybe it would help you win some arguments on the internet. That's likely why this isn't a priority for Libertarian think tanks, and if it is, is probably symptomatic of their general ineffectiveness.

Hanania doesn't argue for an outright repeal (he thinks it's better politically to only repeal some portions and some executive orders and have SCOTUS fix some bad interpretations), but his book's quite good, and not very long. A shorter version of the same thesis can be found here.

The reason to repeal it is that the use of "disparate impact" and "hostile work environment" in discrimination investigations have been disastrous for society, as Richard Hanania's book argues. Repealing the CRA would be the quickest way to fix the problem, and it'll be the only way if the Supreme Court reaffirms disparate impact.

What is the main argument in favor of repealing the Civil Rights Act?

While it had a defensible original merit, it's since mutated into everything from a civility code to a dress code to floor wax and dessert topping, near-universally favoring a single perspective happens to dominate the regulatory offices enforcing it and the business administrative groups 'advising' responses to it. These ad-hoc modifications have turned the law into a direct threat to even after-hours and out-of-office speech not directed to coworkers or employees, as well as enforcing norms that aren't shared (or even clearly known) for a wide majority of the American populace, and providing a level of administrative overhead that restricts a large variety of classical parts of community-forming that it 'officially' isn't even supposed to touch.

At the same time, the EEOC and courts have little interest or even ability to find truth or act within the law's clear bounds, such that bringing even meritful CRA actions against clear abusers risks blacklisting one's own future career for little compensation. To avoid or at least reduce unintended friendly fire, they've had to smoother the not-quite-rules with further unofficial patches and unstated expectations of behavior, which further make them incomprehensible and unusable for the very people they are most heavily meant to support.

I'm not convinced that this requires repeal, or even that it's better than the best-alternative-to-negotiated-agreement, but there's a reason that the HR admin to corporate jobs is the equivalent of the Karen in the service sector.

Why shouldn't I discriminate in housing against groups less likely to pay rent?

Universalisability principle! If everyone did that, members of certain groups, finding themselves unable to put a roof over their heads, might be less inclined to co-operate with society.

So, follow up question

What percentage of those minority groups currently find themselves disinclined to cooperate with society?

Fewer than if they were openly discriminated against, I suspect.

Checking credit scores is already legal and carries a more accurate version of that information. Yes, blacks have lower credit scores on average.

Suppose we found such a country, and it had worse outcomes for black people than occur in the US.

Couldn't it still be the case that the removal of affirmative action, etc. caused that effect?

When the current standard is to discriminate in their favor, it'll be harder to distinguish neutrality from discrimination against them.

This means that your result, if we found one, would only be conclusive if it found no effect, or maybe a negative effect so strong that there's no way it could be due to the current preferential hiring etc.

It would never be conclusive. Countries are not electrons, you can't just compare them to each other and expect it to be perfectly valid.

It would be too small of sample size and hopelessly confounded.

  1. American blacks were tribes that lost wars and without filtering brought to America so I would assume we got those tribes elites and peasants. Versus say perhaps there is a country with really high performing Africans but their filtered from the top 1% of say a country like Nigeria with 200 million plus people. Some arguments have been made that we see this with Indians in America where Indians have a very strong position in big tech but India has overall been a low performing country.

  2. Conservatives do argue that liberalism has been bad for the black community and led to more single parent families. Civil Rights, sexual Revolution, marriage meaning forever, etc all occurred at roughly the same time. Perhaps Jim Crow disappearing was good but a changing culture on the nuclear family was a negative.

If we lived in a world of parallel universes where you just changed one historically thing we might always see civil rights correlating with the family issues so you could never truly differentiate between whether civil rights are good or bad.

  1. This also would sort of remind me of masks mandated and many observational studies showing a big effect. But the places that implemented masks mandates often did them after a surge of cases. So a masks mandate would show a correlation with cases falling. Perhaps places that would hypothetical pass civil rights laws already developed anti-discrimination beliefs so the effects of the laws might be meaningless. Or maybe it’s vice versa.

Finding a place with a similar racial mix to America is challenging enough by itself, but your best bet is probably somewhere in Latin America like Brazil (which does now have affirmative action, but I believe it was implemented more recently than in the US) or simply a comparison of data from before/after the Civil Rights Act was passed. The presence of large nonwhite populations in Europe (gypsies aside) is so recent that I doubt you can infer anything meaningful from their situation and other possibilities like apartheid South Africa had laws that leaned way too far in the opposite direction.

In order to know if this is true, we would need to look at a country that has a similar racial mix to America, but no anti-discrimination laws, then compare the life outcomes of Africans or other historically oppressed groups in America to their life outcomes in that country.

Finding such a country would be suggestive, but it kind of assumes you're going to be comparing apples to apples when you find such a country, and I'm not sure that that would be the case. There might be additional factors you'd want to control for, like: wealth, Protestant Christian majority, former anglo majority, representative liberal democracy, etc.

If you don't control for some of those, I fear that any comparison you make is going to be pointless. And unfortunately, I think you're unlikely to find a good peer to compare America to in this regard. If you want more data points, maybe try comparing cities, and controlling for as many of these as you can? At the very least it would give you more data points than the 200 or so countries there are in the world.

I have no idea how to do this, but it should be the top priority of any libertarian think tank.

You don’t actually need another country for the comparison. You need to look at anti-discrimination cases under the civil rights act and see if they’re ridiculous or if they’re actual discrimination.

I don't think that works, because the actual practice of the law deters people from doing certain things.

IOW. if there is significant practice and precedent of punishing X such that its very well known and established, you can't look at the rate of X within current cases to estimate the predisposition to do X without the law.

(In economics, this is essentially the Lucas Critique).

France has laws against racial discrimination

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/section_lc/LEGITEXT000006070719/LEGISCTA000006165298/

Discrimination as defined in articles 225-1 to 225-1-2, committed against a natural or legal person, is punishable by three years' imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros when it consists in:

1° Refusing to supply a good or service;

2° Obstructing the normal exercise of any economic activity;

3° Refusing to hire, punishing or dismissing a person;

4° to subordinate the supply of a good or service to a condition based on one of the elements referred to in article 225-1 or provided for in articles 225-1-1 or 225-1-2;

5° To make an offer of employment, a request for an internship or a period of training in a company subject to a condition based on one of the elements referred to in article 225-1 or provided for in articles 225-1-1 or 225-1-2;

6° To refuse to accept a person for one of the internships referred to in 2° of article L. 412-8 of the Social Security Code.

Where the discriminatory refusal referred to in 1° is committed in a place open to the public or with the aim of preventing access to it, the penalties are increased to five years' imprisonment and a fine of 75,000 euros.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Interesting. But do they have doctrines that are equivalent to disparate impact or hostile workplace environment?

I don't really know. I don't think there is any disparate impact law, you'd have to prove the disparate impact is intentionnal and thus that it falls in the scope of the anti discrimination law.

When genetic modification of humans is discussed, it is typically in the context of individual modification/augmentation. Whether in early embryonic stages or on fully developed people via gene therapy techniques, the goal is normally to modify outcomes for the specific individual in question.

Probably the reason we don’t discuss society-wide modification much (except in the context of huxly-esque dystopias) is that its proximity to eugenics makes it unpalatable to western society’s current ethics framework. But thinking in the longer term, I find it highly unlikely that future societies wouldn’t utilize this tool given the potential advantages it offers, especially in terms of group cohesion. This of course comes with the caveat that modeling the large scale implications of a small genetic change would be next to impossible. There would likely have to be a lot of trial and error, with some of the errors being quite horrific.

So in this context, I was thinking about what we could potentially modify that would have an out-sized impact on society with relatively little change on humans’ current genetic makeup. And the answer that seemed the most interesting is to modify the rate at which men are born relative to women. What would a society with far fewer men than women look like? As far as I can tell, there is very little data to go on (maybe USSR after ww2?). There are examples where there are fewer women than men (ex china), but I’ve struggled to find the opposite. Also, most scientific literature about “gender imbalances” is mostly just ideological fluff.

So anyway, the question I guess is what does this look like, and does it actually lead to a more stable/cohesive society.

Arguments in favor:

  • Less sexually frustrated young men who tend to get violent
  • Higher general agreeableness, since women tend to score higher on this personality trait

Arguments against:

  • Susceptibility to guilt based religious ideologies

-Susceptibility to military conquest by external groups with more balanced gender rations assuming this isn’t implemented everywhere.

Edit: Formatting

If we are thinking of crazy evopsych hacking, why don't we just make women ever so slightly less hypergamous/choosy and less neurotic and ever so slightly more horny?

I think significantly less men would be incels. Just do it enough that men don't entirely lose their drive to build and make things to impress hot chicks (progress civilization), but rather just ease the pressure just a little so it isn't straight up impossible like it is nowadays.

women have to be choozier because they get more risks from casual sex (pregnancy, infections) and physically weaker with less ability to flee if something isn't going right.

This sort of gradual change to existing tendencies, that merely tweaks existing circuitry in a direction that the basic design space clearly already supports, is supposed to be exactly the sort of thing blind idiot evolution is good at trying and fixing in the event of success. If your proposed change is in fact not civilisation-breaking, shouldn't we observe it in at least some stable subpopulation on earth?

Underlying material conditions are changing way faster than evolution can keep up with though. Even if current settings are fine for a preindustrialized civilization, and evolution in theory would adjust for this in time, it hasn't had time to do that yet.

It seems like traits like the ones mentioned should be selected for within a mere couple of generations though. If the slightly-too-neurotic and slightly-unhorny women aren't having children, then the problem is self-solving. Seems like a waste of resources to gene-engineer away a problem that is on its way out.

Alternatively, just make the men better.

  • -10

since the allegation is hypergamy is based on a relative metric, it doesn't matter how much better men are as a group

When it comes to hypergamy, men being “better” as a group (or not) does matter.

With regard to sexual and relationship dynamics, hypergamy is relative between men and women. If Becky perceives her boyfriend/husband Brad as her “better,” her hypergamous instincts can be satiated.

It’s polygyny, the degree of winner-take-all-edness, the distribution of women to men, the tendency of women to want the same men (female mate-choice copying), that’s zero-sum and relative within men. It’s not clear ex-ante to what extent men being “better” as a whole would aid with polygyny.

Brad could be taller, stronger, smarter, richer, and more dominant than Becky and satisfy her hypergamous instincts, but still lose her to Chad due to polygyny. If he were shorter, weaker, poorer, or less dominant than Becky, he likely wouldn’t have stood a chance with her in the first place before polygyny came into play.

Thank you for this explanation.

Excellent encapsulation of the root problem.

And this is exactly what the concept of non-family arranged marriage has tried to solve for thousands of years. You (women) get to be the sexual selectors and a pick a mate. No one can force you, and men must compete. But once the choice is made, you have to stick with it so that society doesn't collapse in on zero-sum Chad-The-Warlord mating patterns.

This is the reason conservatives, like me, point to no-fault divorce as so incredibly damaging. It means mating patterns revert back to a situation that was worse for 99% of men and >50% of women (i.e. most of everybody). Stable marriages make stable communities with longer term outlooks. This is a great way to build society. Fluid marriages with easy opt-out clauses as well as a material incentive in many cases create a constant state of next-optionism and institutionalized anxiety. It's easy to see why your average secular-humanist married couple are neurotic basket cases. They are dealing with the >50% odds that the person they wake up with and go to sleep with will leave them and, maybe, take half of their stuff at any moment.

I see the polyamory movement as a weird cope to some basic realities. They're smart enough to accept human nature, but not pro-social enough to understand the value of discipline and final choice in marriage. So, they settle for what becomes a shared Chad-harem and a weak peace. I don't see how polyamory works out for your median non-Aella woman, however, as mate stealing just becomes (covertly) more acceptable and thus favors inherently more manipulative and anti-social women.

shared Chad-harem

From the men I've seen in polyamorous relationships, I wouldn't describe them as Chad's. Do you have any examples?

I've seen serial monogamous, polygamous, or monogamous relationships (where the man is a rake or cad) where the man might be reasonably described as a Chad.

You've stumbled upon the correct answer.

The Poly relationships aren't full of Chads .... the Chads are sleeping with the women in the Poly relationships outside of the poly relationship. The guys in poly relationships (willingly) are there for the classic beta support role. Chad - external to the poly system - has all of the "fun"

This sounds correct to me.

Chad doesn't want to be in the poly relationship with her 'boyfriend' or the less attractive girl.

"Better" doesn't really mean anything here, though. The whole point of the discussion is explicating the what and how of what "better" even means in terms of genetically engineering people for the sake of society.

E.g. we could genetically engineer men to enjoy being celibate to make them "better." This would obviously reduce a lot of the suffering that men are going through, but most women probably wouldn't find it appealing if almost every man they met had basically no sexual desire. Then again, perhaps it would make it easier for women to find the few high status males with mutations that countered the genetic engineering, which would benefit them greatly. But if the few high status males are so rare that each woman has to share a man with a million others, then that would be unsatisfactory. So perhaps we could also genetically engineer the birth sex ratio to be heavily weighted towards males, so that we have roughly the same amount of females and of high status male mutants, along with a 99% population of male volcels.

However, I'm not sure what a world where 99% of the population are volcel males would look like, what kind of political influence they would hold, and what they would do with it. They'd likely be far less productive than a similar population of standard issue males, but if we're in this fantasy scifi world, that productivity might not matter a whole lot.

However, I'm not sure what a world where 99% of the population are volcel males would look like, what kind of political influence they would hold, and what they would do with it.

We already know what a world where a significant chunk of volcel males looks like. They have little political influence; too busy with the video games and porn to acquire money or power. (Also, they were told wanting women was bad, and unfortunately for women by and large listened.)

but most women probably wouldn't find it appealing if almost every man they met had basically no sexual desire

Again, this is already true. Actually, by that token, since Western society considers the definition of "better men" to be "women", you're going to get a heavy female-weighted genetic engineering demand in areas where that's more locally true, and a more even distribution where that isn't.

Sure, it'll probably even out eventually because increased competition for men means women lose relative power over men- but I don't think the ideal gender distribution in a hyperfeminine world is anywhere near the 50/50 it is when the power of men-as-class and women-as-class are more balanced (by the chance circumstances of the local economy).

Wouldn't it just be easier (and less fraught) to decrease the use of hormonal contraceptives? My understanding is that they tend to increase neuroticism and at least for some women decrease libido.

Wouldn't it just be easier (and less fraught) to decrease the use of hormonal contraceptives?

Have you seen some of the hysteria over the restriction of abortion access? Then you want to make it more likely to get pregnant? That's the problem here: for abundant sexual access outside of marriage, you have to prevent pregnancy. To prevent pregnancy, you need contraception. If you decrease the use of hormonal contraceptives, then your alternative is "the woman who has had three or four abortions by the age of twenty-four", and using abortion as the main method of birth control isn't the greatest idea. Even medical abortion, because if you're going to be using drugs to provoke abortion, you may as well use drugs to stop conception in the first place.

But then, as you say, widespread use of hormonal contraceptives may decrease libido and so make sex less likely to happen. So it's which do you think is the lesser of two evils here: pregnancy prevention and less sex, or lots of sex and lots of unplanned pregnancies?

Here's my solution to whatever gender-angst people have:

  • make real estate cheaper (there's a correlation between Republican-voting areas and areas where young people can easily buy starter homes). Decrease building regulations as well

  • make having children easier by decreasing regulation : transform the Child Protection Services into an anti-nosy-senior-at-the-window enforcement force, somewhat in the spirit of the ACAB movement, stop regulating day-care businesses, get rid of carseat laws etc, and allow freedom of association. If the child dies he dies, but at least let them live a little.

  • get rid of sex discrimination laws as well. No more wasting 10 years in med school if you're only going to stick to being a doctor for 5 years, no more maternity leave, no more 'unsafe work environment'

  • relax domestic violence laws enforcement as well. Bring back some gravity to the concept of 'who you share a bed with', it's not other grown-ups' business to rescue you from all your bad choices

As a starting point (new platform for Mr 'Grab them'), mandate that any public figure or organization that publishes some kind of feminist statement, in general 'in support of women', for example this, should be labelled 'SIMP' for say a year (on their press release, any media, on their products, etc). Like a bud light halo. Any woman aspiring to some kind of important position should first be asked about her family and how she expects to continue being a mother or a grandmother while focusing on important position.

get rid of carseat laws

This is a weirdly-specific example. Why do you assume carseat laws have anything to do with people choosing whether or not to have kids?

Anything that would justify fining / arresting / causing trouble / calling CPS on parents is part of the environment that makes it harder for people to have children and more children when they already have 1.

I don't know what the ratio of calls to CPS / calls to CPS for parents who are actually abusive is but it is way too high in my opinion.

Anybody who has been around in a Western country in the past three years should know that governments will come up with crazy rules that make no sense and cause way more trouble to enforce than they actually help.

It's become a meme, maybe originally from this study.

Anyone fucking around, please wear condoms. This pill or multiple abortions talk is really missing the king of birth control for people jumps from one partner to another.

I've thought that PrEP will usher a wave of increased STD rates as it gives gay guys an excuse to not use condoms. They are ignoring the fact that HIV is merely one STD among many.

That's the problem here: for abundant sexual access outside of marriage

That is probably the problem here. Most of the rest of the bind that your comment presents seems to go away.

Well, how are you going to square the circle? You want women to be more sexually active, but sexual activity brings with it the possibility of pregnancy. If you don't want pregnancy, you need contraception. If you're using contraception, so the OP argument goes, then that decreases libido, so women are not as sexually active.

You have to make a choice: women who are horny enough to sleep with you, but they end up with ten babies because of that, or women who don't have ten babies but are not horny enough to sleep with you. Or the third possibility: no hormonal contraceptives, lots of sex, but also no pregnancy because abortion as birth control.

(I'm approaching this from a non-moralising stance because I'm not going to argue religion here, just plain secular modern attitudes where 'sex is fine, contraception is fine, abortion is regrettable but on the whole fine').

IUDs, condoms, etc. Anything but the pill really. An unusually easy to square circle.

You could just ditch the whole modern set of sexual ethics, you know.

And I imagine this is precisely why Scott Alexander is fond of saying "society is fixed, biology is mutable." That "just" conceals a lot of the teeth-pulling involved with that course of action.

(I'm approaching this from a non-moralising stance because I'm not going to argue religion here, just plain secular modern attitudes where 'sex is fine, contraception is fine, abortion is regrettable but on the whole fine').

That is a particular form of a moralized stance. You have chosen a specific set of morals to adopt. You also now make no mention of marriage, which was in your original comment.

Arguably, "solving" that "problem" is about an order of magnitude more difficult than developing the types of genetic engineering tech being talked about here. The latter is just technological progress. The former is a political revolution in a way that is basically intolerable to both women and to the men most positioned to make any sort of change in society.

Cultural progress is harder to predict, and can be much swifter than genetic or technological progress (at least historically; we are in an incredible moment of rapid technological progress, and it would be difficult to construct an explicit metric for this). Especially if genetic engineering is on the table, I don't see why it is necessarily impossibly more difficult to affect people's senses of "intolerability" either as an aside/effect or as a goal. Literally the original subcomment in this subthread is:

If we are thinking of crazy evopsych hacking, why don't we just make women ever so slightly less hypergamous/choosy and less neurotic and ever so slightly more horny?

That's a fair point, that one could genetically engineer people's sense of "intolerability." I do think there would have to be some sort of significant political/religious will behind developing and executing that kind of genetic engineering at a population level which would also of course be required for things like making women less hypergamous, etc. or changing birth sex ratios. I suppose my belief is that the political/religious force required to develop and implement the genetic engineering to make women more tolerant of losing abundant sexual access outside of marriage would be significantly more than what's required to implement the genetic engineering to make them slightly more male-like in their sexuality.

But you are correct that accurately predicting cultural progression is very hard. My own belief is probably mostly informed by my own lifetime experience of noticing how cultural progression always seems to go. But that's anecdotal and should be valued as much.

If you think it's political/religious force that is important, then, stupid question here, but can't we just futz with that with our magic futzing machine? I was viewing some commentary on the recent paper claiming that there was a developing left/right divide between men/women, and one of the hypotheses was concerning the role of "religiosity", particularly among women. To the extent that we think we could plausibly target hypergamy/neuroticism/hornyness, plausibly one could hypothesize target "religiosity" or other factors that people associate with other cultural/political beliefs.

Moreover, the neuroscience literature has already identified plausible candidates for receptors and genes that relate to pair bonding, some of which even have animal analogs (e.g., there are two closely-related species of voles, one of which pair bonds strongly, and the other which doesn't nearly as much) or which seem to be correlated with measures of "relationship quality" in humans (it would take me a while to dig up some cites; I read this wayyy back in grad school). We could conceivably target something along these lines. Seems like we can think incredibly broadly; we really are considering quite a magic futzing machine.

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I think the actual probable alternative to hormonal contraceptives is just...other contraceptives.

Not that I really think lots of sex and lots of unplanned pregnancies would be the end of the world – I'm fundamentally more of a "babies good" person, and I don't have any particular reason to want people to have abundant sexual access outside of marriage. But, realistically, I imagine that a random draconian ban of hormonal contraceptives tomorrow* would probably result in a slight uptick in babies and a large uptick in alternative methods of birth control. Copper IUDs, for instance, are much more effective than birth control pills, and other more temporary contraceptive methods are relatively reliable.

*to be quite clear, I'm not saying that would be a good idea. But perhaps a less bad idea than genetically modifying women.

Yeah, but hormonal contraception became popular because mechanical forms of contraception are often uncomfortable (I understand some men complain about condoms), ineffective, or even hazardous (the Dalkon Shield). Implants work well but they're hormonal. The female condom never really became popular. The Holy Grail is some form of contraceptive for men to take, but that's slow going and a different problem to blocking the female reproductive cycle.

I don't have any particular reason to want people to have abundant sexual access outside of marriage

Moi aussi, but we're dealing here with the modern problem of "Good God, I don't want to go back to the bad old days of having to marry the first woman who'd have me, just so I could have sex". People (men) want sex, they want it most when they're at their maximum horniest (young and full of hormones) and they don't want to 'save it for marriage' or 'only ever had one sexual partner, my spouse'. Porn also has a part to play in that, as does "what do you mean you only ever had vanilla missionary sex, you poor boob?" for both men and women is the attitude of the enlightened and liberated today. You have magazines teaching teenage girls how to have anal sex, we're not putting the genie of 'sexual liberation' back in the bottle of 'no sex outside of marriage'.

we're not putting the genie of 'sexual liberation' back in the bottle of 'no sex outside of marriage'.

Why not? Sure, it wouldn't be easy, but I don't see it being impossible. If nothing else, a total collapse of industrial civilization and global reversion to pre-1700 technology levels would indeed put the proverbial genie right back; which establishes that it's at least possible. Sure, "turning back the clock" would probably require some pretty strong measures to pull off, but I figure a determined, non-democratic far-Right government could probably accomplish quite a lot toward this end.

for abundant sexual access outside of marriage,

And if we nip the whole chain you lay out in the bud at this stage?

why don't we just make women ever so ...slightly more horny?

Oh, you mean "riding the cock carousel" and other such charming descriptions?

Men don't want women to be horny. Let me refine that: men don't want women to be horny except for them in one particular instance, and not other men. Men don't want women to dump them, but neither do they want women to be clingy when the man wants to dump her.

There's a long tradition of poetry along the lines "sleep with me; if you don't, you're a frigid bitch who hates men and loves to make them suffer and if you do sleep with any man who asks you, you're a whore and a slut. Just sleep with me when I want, then go away when I'm tired of you".

Marvel's To His Coy Mistress: you don't wanna die a virgin, do you? Sleep with me!

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

Even Donne got on the Bitch Ridin' The Cock Carousel wagon:

If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet;
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.

The Sexual Revolution was supposed to be about "now women can be horny too, without blame or the double standard". What are the results? Unhappy men claiming they can't get a girlfriend and that women can have all the sex they want, and are all sleeping around with the alphas while not giving them the time of day.

I think you would have to do a lot of re-tooling of both the physical set-up and the mental attitudes; you'd need to have women getting aroused as easily and quickly as men do, and orgasming from the same sort of stimulation, and not so fertile as to make it risky that they'd easily get pregnant, who are willing to just have casual fun with any guy that asks, don't have emotional attachments from that casual sex, and are approachable by all.

Of course, once women start being approachable by all men and stop being hypergamous, then some men will complain about the whores and sluts who're willing to just hop into bed with any guy, no discrimination or standards. It's a double bind!

Two problems there. 1) The unforeseen consequences of modifying human psychology are very difficult to speculate about. 2) The engineering required to do this would be many orders of magnitude more difficult.

I didn't love FarNearEverywhere's comment at first, but after reading through it, I think she's right. The elements that cause the dating market to be so asymmetric are legion, and not reducible to "women are less horny." If you wanted to somehow genetically engineer things so straight relationships look more like gay ones, you would have to alter the biology of women so throughly that the human species would be unrecognizable.

The solution to dating asymmetry is, and has always been, and indeed was, monogamy as an enforced social ideal, and norms and values that cultivate satisficing and not perfectionism when it comes to settling down. That doesn't mean pushing people to settle with an abusive alcoholic, but it does mean encouraging people to settle down with a homely, but kind and nurturing partner instead of chasing after hotness or status. It also means holding people to their vows, and leading people to see re-investment in their relationship rather than divorce as the solution to cooling off romance or non-abusive problems in a relationship. These are the conditions under which actual love can flourish, and furthermore I think they make both men and women much happier than the current situation, on net. The women get commitment and the men get regular sex.

That goes for men as well as women. Find your 5/10 sweetheart and marry them, damn it.

Genuinely, thank you for giving my comment the benefit of the doubt.

Now, as regards women and horniness: there was (may still be) a common belief that the reason women became prostitutes or fallen women was precisely that - horniness. They loved sex, wanted sex, and couldn't control their animal appetites, which is why they became pregnant outside of marriage and were ruined for anything afterwards but engaging in sex work. Thomas Hardy wrote a satirical poem about the contrast between the ruined girl whose life was vastly improved by her fall and her still 'innocent' friend from the country, but even there reading between the lines, it's all depending on her being young, pretty, and free with her favours (in a discriminating way; sleeping with men who can keep her, not just giving it away). That is not a long career and her easy life, unless she's very lucky and very careful, will vanish with her youth:

"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —
"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —
"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.

— "At home in the barton you said thee' and thou,'
And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'; but now
Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" —
"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.

— "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" —
"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.

— "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem
To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" —
"True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.

— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —
"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.

Men did not value those women. They may sleep with them, but few (some may do) would boast that "my girlfriend's a whore". They might boast that a whore is so infatuated with them, she's in love with him or thinks of him differently to her other clients, but that only reflects credit on the man. He's so good in bed/so handsome and dominant and charming that he can satisfy the hyper-horny appetite of a whore and make her fall for him rather than the other way round, the traditional way of wily hyper-horny women getting men to fawn on them.

Women being less choosy and more horny, therefore more willing to have sex from the get-go with a guy, more willing to date guys, and so on will lead to the culture of whores, and the despising of such women by the very men who want more sex. Then the competition will be for the rare women who aren't giving it up on the first date and haven't had a boyfriend for every month of their life since puberty.

Prostitution has been the social escape valve for sexual pressure of men who can't get married, or don't have access to a regular source of sex. But prostitutes, in the main, have never been regarded as high-status women. Very few men want to settle down and marry an ex-prostitute and have a family with her (citation needed, I know, I know). Well-off men could have concubines and other marriage or established relationships in societies which catered for that, but promiscuity in women in the main was never highly regarded.

That well may change, but it's not just genetic engineering to get women to be just the right degree of horny - not too much, so they're not sleeping around like sluts, and not too little, so they'll match men's sexual appetites - that will need to be done to make whore culture acceptable to all.

Genetic modification seems so obviously to be progress but I am starting to expect it to face a great deal of political backlash.

Let’s say we are in a Cold War with with China. In order to defeat the US they begin with their ideal Chinese man but then change the genetic code so that they create Shaquille O’Neill physical traits plus 250 IQ. These guys crush the US. But then the super humans end ruling China too. And they are so modified they are more different from Han Chinese than European Americans.

You don’t really need War for this timeline as simply doing it in peace time would end up creating humanoids completely different to current humans and basically a mass extinction even or at a minimum making human existence void of any meaning a second tier species watched over by their better.

Same thing of course applies to AI.

Genetic modification seems so obviously to be progress but I am starting to expect it to face a great deal of political backlash.

Did you miss GATTACA? Beggars in Spain? Hysteria around designer babies when Dolly was cloned, or the human genome draft was published?

change the genetic code so that they create Shaquille O’Neill physical traits plus 250 IQ.

That's just not anywhere close to realistic with our current level of technology and understanding. You could try cloning Shaq or whoever you think is smart, but we're laughably far away from editing your fertilized embryos for traits in that way. Like, it wouldn't happen in your lifetime even if the FDA were nuked tonight and we just did whatever we want to embryos for the next couple decades, ethics be damned.

With no ethics, and a big budget you could go very fast.

Females develop eggs after 20 weeks so you could make 1000 per generation, polygenically screen them all, pick the best and iterate.

In just over a year you have 3 generations and the pick of 1 in a billion (of descendants of your starting stock)

No, I don't think so. We can already clone Von Neumann, and we can't actually engineer smarter people than that in the way we engineer airplanes or computers because we don't know how either intelligence or neurology work at that level.

We can certainly do iterated embryo selection on top of Von Neumann ... but I don't think that's going to work that well, you're running into non-additive effects there.

You can just take Von Neumann's genome and eliminate very rare variants (which are usually deleterous which is why they are rare), not even him was free from it (early cancer death).

Maybe that gets him 5 IQ points, certainly not 100. Or very likely that he was selected as one of the smartest out of billions people means that there's just less juice to squeeze out of that.

You don't need to know how intelligence works, you just need to sequence enough people in genome wide association studies, build a polygenic score and then run it

Right, that doesn't get you to 250 IQ or above existing variation I think.

250 IQ is 10 standard deviations from mean IQ 100, SD=15

If we have 1000 offspring per generation via egg harvesting embryos, taking the top 1% (10) they should be 2.33 SD from the mean

With 80% heritability, response to selection per generation is 1.86 SD

Thus it will take 5.36 (6) generations of selective breeding to get 250IQ with 1000 offspring per generation

Or 6 * 20 weeks = 2.3 years

If egg/sperm are from +3 SD donors, it's 3.76 (4) generations, or 1.53 years

Please consider donating towards my volcano lair lab on Kickstarter

Right, I'm suggesting that the mathematical model stops applying. Like, imagine humans are now cars. You can make a faster car than you did last time by copying the techniques of all the best car factories (this is sorta what embryo selection does). Maybe you could even go 10-20% faster than the fastest car ever by doing that, though I think non-additive effects will prevent that. But you can't make a car that goes at 1000 mph by picking out the best techniques from existing car factories. You'd need to do more technical design work than that, or have a LOT of new mutations and natural selection on them.

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Females develop eggs after 20 weeks so you could make 1000 per generation, polygenically screen them all, pick the best and iterate.

Those eggs are immature. I'm not a developmental biologist, but would you expect in vitro maturation protocols to work on eggs forcibly harvested from a 20 week old fetus?

I'm also not confident that there's enough genetic diversity starting from one person to get a true 1 in a billion; won't there be a bunch of alleles where neither parent has what you want? I admit that this may be a nonissue if most of the alleles you want are relatively common, I don't have a good handle on the numbers here.

Put it a different way - Do any of us have a 1 in a billion chance of giving birth to Shaq? I would tentatively guess no, modulo some genetic conditions like acromegaly. Do you have evidence that this is true?

In just over a year you have 3 generations and the pick of 1 in a billion (of descendants of your starting stock)

But what then? You have one embryo. Somatic cloning? Things are getting pretty complicated my man.

Oocyte in vitro maturation (IVM) is a thing. I am not sure if anyone has used it on foetal eggs, but it is likely possible.

You aren't restricted to the original stock you can introduce new sperm each generation

To scale it up, you could potentially encourage eggs to divide (like identical twins) then sequence one, and if its the one you want, keep splitting

I think these things are not too hard to solve, you just need time and money, and the will (and lack of ethical restraint)

Beggars in Spain

I've read it. I recall liking it. It is very obscure, right?

I'm not certain how popular it is, but I've seen it come up in a few contexts in the circles I travel in. People around here will cite obscure Larry Niven books fairly frequently ('On the gripping hand'...thankfully the much more crass 'Rape my lizard!' from the same novel never caught on), so I thought there were decent odds that Beggars in Spain was also well known. Particularly given the themes of transhumanism.

Like, it wouldn't happen in your lifetime even if the FDA were nuked tonight and we just did whatever we want to embryos for the next couple decades, ethics be damned.

Are you sure? Could anyone predict forty years of ethics-department-free AI progress like that? We were laughably far from good image-gen AI 5 years ago. And genetic augmentation is a particularly ethics-beholden field. We've got CRISPR which can change genes in fairly effective ways, it's not like FTL travel where we've got no good approach.

We've got CRISPR which can change genes in fairly effective ways

How many genes can it change? If we want to change a thousand of genes (because e.g. our utility function asks for it) and have no faulty changes in unintended genes, can it deliver that?

If someone wants to make a genetically modified plant, they can just try and change and just discard if edits were faulty, with humans we want reliable ones.

It can't change thousands of genes but it does demonstrate that it's possible to change genes, that presumably there are other ways to change many genes reliably. It's like how the first powered flight makes helicopters, jump-jets, jet-packs and autogyros much more plausible.

And hey, we're talking about a world where 'the FDA were nuked tonight and we just did whatever we want to embryos for the next couple decades, ethics be damned'. We can't even imagine how rapid development would be, it'd be a different paradigm.

Are you sure? Could anyone predict forty years of ethics-department-free AI progress like that?

It's true, predicting the future is a fool's game and betting against progress doubly so. We'll never be able to resolve our bet given the near certain continued existence of the FDA.

That being said:

  1. biologists (and I count myself in this camp) are morons who can't do math, code or do anything beyond draw pointless arrow diagrams. Moreover, the incentive structure actively pushes us away from solving any of these issues and instead focusing on shorter timelines, smaller scales and splashy headlines instead of any kind of substantive understanding. PGS gets around all of this because you can let biology do the work for you, but it comes with a host of other problems. You mentioned CRISPR though, so let's go with that.

Say you want to use CRISPR to...I don't know, increase the size of your gut to accommodate the caloric needs of the giant brain your 250 IQ Chinese supersoldier is going to have. There is no 'gut size' gene that you can just augment the expression of, there are massive, interlocking transcriptional networks who need to be turned on at the right times and in the right cell types. This is likely to be far beyond our capability to understand ever, so the only reasonable path forward is building an AI oracle to understand it for us. It's either going to 1) Need monstrous datasets that we probably can't generate in a reasonable way yet 2) Molecular dynamics simulation is impossibly computationally expensive, so figure out some other abstracted simulation method 3) ??? someone else tell me how they'd envision this working, my imagination fails me.

  1. There is no 'gut size' gene; there are dozens if not hundreds of genes you would need to alter, and moreover, alter in ways that are temporally, spatially and functionally correct. CRISPR just isn't capable of doing that with the precision or reliability you'd need; it's great at knocking out 1 to a handful of genes, mediocre-to-bad at activating genes, and mediocre at silencing genes - and these latter two functions are transient, so you'd need to find a way to keep expressing the CRISPR and gRNA. Probably we're again going to rely on godlike AI designing new methods for manipulating gene expression on broad scales, or maybe some Kwisatz Haderach breeding program over generations as we slowly introduce the changes we need.

  2. Delivery to somatic tissues isn't currently possible in a meaningful way, although I'm optimistic we might actually solve this in a reasonable timescale. And I suppose you'd want to edit germline cells regardless, but I thought I'd point it out.

I'm most pessimistic about (1), and moreover a decided lack of interest in TPTB (to be clear, the academic establishment. I doubt the deep state cares overmuch) in understanding these systems in a way that we could build or intelligently edit them ourselves. Godlike AI is the wildcard, but at least so far, all AI can do is hold up a mirror and regurgitate the same garbage that we write in review papers. And Eliezer tells me we're all dead in that scenario anyways, no?

I'm not a developmental biologist and only tangentially touching on human genetics so I wouldn't say this is authoritative. But that's been my impression over the last decade or so.

Why do we need such intensive transformations? We have large populations of very smart people, large populations of very physically capable people. We can sequence genes easily, see which ones are associated with intelligence and physical performance. 250 IQ might be a 1 in a hundred billion genius but still basically possible from blind chance. All we'd be doing is fixing the dice to get an impossibly rare natural creation. Maybe he'd be pretty hungry but we have plenty of calories.

I bet there'd be a bunch of problems with mental illness, you'd need to refine it with time and experience. I know it's more complicated than 'make a statistical model of what genes the smartest people are most likely to have and tick the boxes' but we'd have time for trial and error. Forty years is multiple gamechangers worth of time.

As for how one would edit those genes, I don't know. Technology advanced quickly in the last forty years, we didn't have anything like CRISPR forty years ago. We couldn't even sequence human genes.

all AI can do is hold up a mirror and regurgitate the same garbage that we write in review papers.

Come on, it can do more than that. I got it to write some decent Top Gear fanfiction. Google had theirs doing protein folding, which is vaguely relevant.

Even more relevant: https://nyulangone.org/news/new-artificial-intelligence-tool-makes-speedy-gene-editing-possible

Not perfect but surely proof AI is useful on this front?

  1. ??? someone else tell me how they'd envision this working, my imagination fails me.

A whole mountain range of skulls of the failed experiments when tweaking genes for "well, let's try this and see if it works"/"oh no, it didn't, well fire up batch of embryos number one thousand and let's go again!" and breeding programmes and all the horrors that cutting-edge tech and no ethical oversight will permit. Morals are for losers, baby, nature is red in tooth and claw, we ain't getting 250 IQ without breaking a hatchery's worth of eggs, and they're just clumps of cells that we permitted to go all the way through gestation anyhoo. Not like they're people or anything.

My gut is that we'd see more male misbehaviour rather than less. Women have a civilising effect on men.

I would expect a situation with more women would lead to more promiscuity and less stable marriages, more children born out of wedlock, and generally more rootless lives among underclass men.

I agree the effect on underclass men would be less than ideal, but it would likely not lead to increased violence. From a societal standpoint that still seems to be a more desirable outcome.

If women have a civilizing effect on men, shouldn't a higher woman/man ratio lead to greater civilizing on men? Also, I'd guess that, in this kind of society, most of the things you described, e.g. promiscuity, less stable marriages, and bastards, wouldn't really be considered misbehavior; because of the way the numbers add up, society would have to create systems that account for these things and integrate them into the way society functions. Rootless lives among underclass men, I could definitely see being an issue, but I wonder how much that rootless living will be correlated with antisocial behavior in this kind of setting. I honestly don't know how much competition for women (both in terms of extra resources and in terms of criminality actually making one more attractive) drives the antisocial behavior of underclass men now; if it's significant, then we could see more rootless underclass men but less bad behavior from them in aggregate (depending on the ratios).

It depends on if it's the presence of women that's civilizing, or competition for women. If it's the latter, less intense competition would lead to more brutish behavior.

Good point. My intuition says that competition for women has, if anything, the opposite effect, and I think criminal behavior of single and married men bear this out, though I have no idea if anyone's done any studies with proper controls.

It's neither. It's the romantic entanglement and love for women (and the children they bear) that has the civilizing influence. The traditional courtly ideal of love is a man winning the affection of a particular virtuous woman by cultivating and demonstrating virtue.

And the reality's not far off: give a man a woman who loves him and through her give him children, and suddenly he is concerned with the good not only of himself, but of his wife and children, and thus he takes fewer risks, he thinks more about the future, and is connected directly to the interests of women and children (from which he might otherwise be alienated by his age and sex). It is one thing to think of women and children indirectly. It is another to love them. "The married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife."

When I say that women civilise men, I mean within marriages. My expectation is that a higher female to male ratio would lead to fewer marriages as more men play the field as they do at college campuses with similarly lopsided ratios.

No because men would have enormous power over women as they become scarce.

Have you ever seen what relationships are like at an engineering or nursing school?

One of the eeriest things for me was reading about how the gender ratio at colleges alters people's dating experiences in profound ways, and realizing that huge amounts of people's dating behaviors really were influenced by market dynamics.

Do you have a link to this? I would like to read it.

this isn't really "data" but anecdotes from this thread say no: https://allnurses.com/does-dating-get-easier-male-t698798/ just the usual stuff about "just be confident," "it'll happen when it happens," "don't date your coworkers," "I'm too busy to date," and my favorite "all my female coworkers already have boyfriends and babies."

One example of a society with more women than men is the black urban ghettos in the US, where a decent fraction of the male population is in prison at any given time, and they certainly don't do much to inspire confidence in this eugenics scheme. If we cast a wider net to look at matriarchal societies in general, which may or may not have arisen due to a temporary or chronic gender imbalance, we see that women do all the economically productive work and men spend their days gambling, drinking, and killing each other (my impression of Soviet Russia post-WWII is that it trended in this direction as well, but was kept more in check by heavy state intervention).

As far as feasibility goes, I'm also not sure that this is as easy a change to make as one might assume. We don't, to my knowledge, know the genes that regulate the frequency of boys or girls being born. We can infer that it involves control of X and Y chromosome segregation in male gametes, but that's about it. It's true that under famine conditions more girls are born than boys, but that's because male fetuses are more fragile and are preferentially miscarried when the mother is stressed, not because fewer of them are conceived. Of course, if everyone is doing IVF anyway you can select the sex of your child easily, but that's intervention at the level of individuals rather than populations.

The rate of incarceration of black men is 1 in 81 according to this: https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/the-color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons-the-sentencing-project/. So slightly under 1.5 percent. While high, that's not enough to slant the demographics highly in favor of women. I would think that the state of inner city black communities might be due to other factors. Likewise, post war societies are typically full of heavily traumatized men with severe PTSD. That might account for some of the behavior you're describing.

As for the actual process, I don't doubt that there would be some major challenges. But on the other hand, the process by which gametes are formed is very well understood. In addition, there are multiple species that do have different sex ratios at birth. Given that their gamete formation process is relatively similar to ours, there are likely several avenues that could be explored.

Inner city black ghettos are not the majority of the black population. I can well believe that those ghettos might be highly female because there’s lots of working and middle class black neighborhoods with average incarceration rates.

I thought that terrible wars, leaving society short of men, were common in history. Indeed, I thought that was the origin story of polygamy in Islam. The followers of Mohammad had lost too many men waging Jihad. Sticking with monogamy would leave women without husbands and slow down rebuilding the population of warriors. So Mohammad declared that a man could have up to four wives.

The birth rate remains 50:50 (Is it actually 51% boys, 49% girls? I think it is not exactly 50:50, with some built-in compensation for slightly different death rates) so it is not exactly your hypothetical. Worse, I'm talking about societies very different to our own, so it is hard to know the relevance of the comparision.

The difference is that is a temporary imbalance. It will correct itself within a generation. If you imposed it at the genetic level, the results would play out over a much longer period.

In the United States it's about 1.05 boys per girl at birth. So about 51.2% male at birth.

Fisher's principle - Wouldn't maintaining an uneven ratio require constant, totalitarian intervention in order to resist the natural equilibrium-restoring force?

But then again, sex-selective abortion (of females) remains a thing in China despite it being illegal. This doesn't make sense from the perspective of biological evolution. From the perspective of cultural evolution, it only makes sense if the "abort females" meme is passed on more by fathers than by mothers.

Can we imagine a similar dynamic producing a ratio with more females than males?

From the perspective of cultural evolution, it only makes sense if the "abort females" meme is passed on more by fathers than by mothers.

The last time I looked into this, I came away convinced it was economics. Chinese men have (had?) a legal and cultural obligation to provide care for their parents that Chinese women do not. If you think you might only have one kid, it makes financial sense to insure it's a boy.

Your society will rapidly fail to pay its taxes. Generally, Men participate in a ceaseless hustle to make as much money as they can as it is one of the key indicators of worth they are judged by. This burning drive is necessary for society to have surplus production, even if it consumes the men in the process. In contrast, women are the net beneficiary of taxes due to various reasons such as being the recipient of child and housing benefits and other spending.

assuming transition isn't immediate, why wouldn't society adapt to it? Also, low M:F ratio also means number of children an average woman must bear for replacement level is also lower

How can society adapt to what is gradual extinction? Women would still have to bear 2.1 children to keep the population at a consistent rate. Human groups exist off the fact that some people do all the work and receive no remuneration (slaves, 12 year old congolose lithium miners) and others benefit from it.

If your sex distribution is not 1/1 male/female, but, say, 1/4 (at birth, without doing stuff like culling male embryos), then each woman only has to bear 5/4 children instead of 2/1.

I categorically reject literal cellular biological modification when we have already developed, employed, and enjoyed a social, cultural, and legal mechanism to address the problem. Namely; monogamous marriage.

Societies have a funny way of coming out about 50/50 men and women. It's almost like the species wants to remain capable of replication and self-propagation. Evolution be like that. In fact, as your posts points out, when you mess around with that rough 50/50 ratio, things get bad. China today is an excellent example. In Post WW2 Russia / Soviet states, the insane loss of men created similar odd circumstances.

I wholeheartedly agree that lonely, sexless young men can easily turn violent and up end communities if not societies as a whole. But the answer there is to give them a progressing (not progressive) life narrative, roughly; learn, work, serve, get married, raise children, die with dignity. Society then backs this up by demonstrating and exalting the value of this life pattern. This, however, is what the sexual revolution dismantled in the 1960s. It replaced it with .... nothing.

Edit: Societies the world over have also, rightly, prioritized dealing with male aggression because that leads to murder, rape, and injury. What we're seeing with the destruction of the family paired with female economic self-sufficiency is female aggression. It's far less overt than its male counterpart and doesn't result in immediate massive physical harm. Yet, it does exist and it can still have massive societal negative effects. Dealing with it is hard. Women shouldn't go to jail for cheating or leading men on or playing gossip and indirect power games. The historical solution was very harsh social pressure - look up what they did to scolds in puritan New England. Hell, despite the very online attitudes against "slut shaming," the median western woman still uses sexualized gossip to malign her opponents. I'm not going to say I'm in favor of institutionalized mean girl-ism. That's ridiculous. I put my faith (literally) in social conventions, however, that have much more rigid guidelines for both inter and intra sex relationships up to and including marriage. Choose-your-own sexual and social norms create ambiguity, uncertainty, anxiety, and neuroticism. Does this sound like your median Millenial single person and married couple? Don't even start with Gen-Z who have all managed to hyper neruoticiziezize themselves into digital multi-personas paired with real world hermeticism.

I've said this more than a few times on the Motte; I'm not out to paint 1950s American suburban marriage as the idyllic to end all idyllics. There were real problems. But since the destruction of the nuclear family began, there has simply been no meaningful alternative. It's a boundary-less personal "freedom" out to infinity. Phrased differently; it's nihilism. Hedonic nihilism, but nihilism none the less.

I think your "modify genes at the species level" theory is, at best, a techno-liberal solution (to a problem that was previously addressed) with a whole host of side-effects and just the teeniest little bit of lace between itself and eugenics. At worst, it's full bore eugenics with a side dish of state sponsored misandry.

What would a society with far fewer men than women look like? As far as I can tell, there is very little data to go on (maybe USSR after ww2?).

Another example might be ancient China, where eunuchs were sort of common in upper-class society. I don't know any real numbers, but they show up again and again in history, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Attendants and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He.

Perhaps the modern trans movement is just a move in that direction?

Despite the existence of the Polyamorous movement, most people still treat monogamy as the default. And an unbalanced gender ratio makes monogamy not possible. I think that would be the biggest reason not to intentionally unbalance the gender ratio.

I think widespread genetic modifications would mainly be used for medical reasons. To prevent specific genetic diseases. Iceland has already sort of done this for things that can be screened in embryos.

In the Culture Series by the sadly departed Iain M. Banks (not to be confused with his more mundane doppelganger Iain Banks) humans can decide to change sex entirely and actually become the opposite sex in a very real sense, they are exactly like someone born that sex including womb or sperm etc... Often couples that want 2 kids will take turns doing the gestating.

If humans go on long enough a perfect sex change will indeed be possible at a genetic level. Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?

I say this as someone that thinks it is ridiculous that a man can DECLARE FEMALE Michael Scott BANKRUPTCY style and crush swimming records and smackdown college girls in basketball.

They would be a transitioned-sexual on account of having deliberately chosen to transition from one sex to the other. Changing what you are can't change what you were, and both the change and the decision to change is a separator from those who developed without intervention.

If a person lived for 20 years as one sex and acquired the interests, mannerisms and habits that are associated with it, then did a perfect sex change, I reckon they'd still be clockable as trans. However, if we assume a society where such experiments are possible from a young age, and accordingly neither gendered socialization nor biological-based habits that might be dependent on biological sex (such as, as the memes go, the interest in coding and obscure political forums) have time to settle in - I'd assume only a minority of "natal essentialists" would care which bits and chromosomes you were originally conceived with.

We'll be way past such quaint historical practices as "natural athletes", let alone dividing them by current sex.

what if they lived 20 thousand years?

Tell me what kind of societies they'd be living in for 20 thousand years, and there's your answer.

You don't think that might be fundamentally different?

Different from living 20 years? Well, sure that person would likely be far more set in their ways, whatever "their ways" ended up being, but is that really fundamental?

If humans go on long enough a perfect sex change will indeed be possible at a genetic level. Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?

In my opinion, and the 'mainstream' tracks this as well, the current hormone mix is good enough for many transwomen to be indistinguishable from ciswomen. They may not all be 'pretty'; but the majority of them will have the hormonal and physical appearance of women as far as their secondary sex characteristics are concerned. The whole 'transwomen are women' and all that...

In general this debate is quite well settled at least from the perspective of the establishment and mainstream professional opinion. People may have issues with it, but I don't see this being overturned and I would predict that trans-rights will be even more embedded over time as the phenom becomes more normalised.

Do you think concerns for the welfare of detrans people are unfounded?

Edit: actually, the above isn't a good response. Here's what I should have written:

The topic of "trans issues" contains many questions. The question of whether or not hormones are good at replicating secondary sex characteristics is just one of those questions. Is it one of the more important questions of the topic? I wouldn't have thought so. I don't really think the more intellectual people of any stance would consider it to be, either. Would you feel vastly different about trans people if they weren't? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TGux5Fhcd7GmTfNGC/is-that-your-true-rejection

So I ask you, what does it mean to say "the debate is well settled"? There is not one debate, it's a vast number of smaller questions. I don't think it's intellectually rigorous to pretend like it's all one big question. Even if you think that every one of those unlisted questions has been settled in favor of trans people, even the ones where it's not obvious which answer would necessarily be the one that favors trans people the most, I think it's sleight of hand to act like it's all one big question which has been answered. And then I can't help but feel that it's also sleight of hand to reference one small and not necessarily consequential aspect of the debate before saying that the larger debate has been settled, as if one small question decides answers all the other questions too.

In my opinion, and the 'mainstream' tracks this as well, the current hormone mix is good enough for many transwomen to be indistinguishable from ciswomen.

Are you sure about that? I'm not sure what you mean by "indistinguishable" here, just going by hormone levels, or a full examination. But even going only by hormones, without looking it up, I'd be willing to bet on the opposite. My understanding is that barring an orchiectomy / hysterectomy you're not going to get the T/E levels down to the opposite sex average, and if you do, you'd make them absolutely miserable. Maybe an early puberty blockade might work, but that alone would be a giveaway re: distinguishability.

In general this debate is quite well settled at least from the perspective of the establishment and mainstream professional opinion.

What do you mean by "this debate", just adult transition, pediatric gender affirming care, or the whole shebang? What are you basing this opinion on? From what I understand anyone that actually looks at the evidence is forced to conclude gender affirming care has flimsy backing

but I don't see this being overturned and I would predict that trans-rights will be even more embedded over time as the phenom becomes more normalised.

So far it seems that the more embedded it gets, the more it drags down movements that already gained acceptance.

I don't. Seven or eight years ago I think it was South Carolina tried to pass a bathroom bill and the entire media and a shitload of huge companies and sports leagues and such all flipped their wigs and threatened to basically boycott the state until it caved in and the bill was gutted. You'd think they passed a bill to legalize slavery.

Nowdays, not so much. There isn't as much media hoopla, companies are way less eager to wade in, and bills have passed in a number of states. That's not the way this was "supposed" to go. If anything, the last couple of controversies have actually put the boycott shoe on the other foot.

I mean thanks to Hogwarts Legacy it's now been conclusively shown that progressives flipping out on social media over "transphobia" can be safely ignored while promoting your mass-market media product. Sure enough, Rowling sits on Twitter shitposting at trans activists all day like it's 4chan and that hasn't stopped the head of Warner Bros from publicly touting her involvement in the new HP show as a positive.

Compare that with the shitstomping Bud Light took for letting a mere hint of transgender activist marketing waft in the general direction of their product. Behind the scenes people have clearly had serious conversations reassessing what they do and do not need to care about in regard to public opinion. The amount of shits given about progs mad at transphobia has visibly plummeted.

Besides, statistically it's not like the people saying "trans women are women" would actually date one. The number of straight people willing to even countenance such a thing is essentially just a lizardman's constant, and even among the rest of the LGB community the proportion is shockingly low. This is a social/political signalling meme, not something people are living when the lights go out. Memes like that can have great power to be sure, but eventually they run their course.

I mean thanks to Hogwarts Legacy it's now been conclusively shown that progressives flipping out on social media over "transphobia" can be safely ignored while promoting your mass-market media product. Sure enough, Rowling sits on Twitter shitposting at trans activists all day like it's 4chan and that hasn't stopped the head of Warner Bros from publicly touting her involvement in the new HP show as a positive.

And yet Hogwarts Legacy still has a highly conspicuous trans character (who must have been directly approved by Rowling given she maintains absolute creative control over her setting), and it’s likely the new show will too.

There were multiple backlashes to the growing gay rights movement between 1967 and 2015, but in each case the long term trajectory was clear.

Sure they're still hedging their bets, but in the process they're learning that A) it doesn't actually take the heat off them and B) nobody really cares anyway. Zaslav going out of his way to make sure the public knows Rowling is directly involved in the new show, even as the headlines about her dunking on the trans community flow, is a significant signal.

Everything isn't the gay rights battle. Social media is a lot more ubiquitous now than it was ten or fifteen years ago, and frankly the trans community uses it to be their own worst enemy in ways that are uniquely their own.

There were multiple backlashes to the growing gay rights movement between 1967 and 2015, but in each case the long term trajectory was clear.

The question of how inevitable is the inevitable march of progress is a pretty fascinating one to me. I don't really have an answer here, and you may very well be right that over the long term the trans movement will keep winning, but it's not like there has never been a Science backed Progressive idea that has turned out to be a short-lived fad, and an embarrassment, forcing progressive elites to run damage control, and lay thick layers of dust on historical documents, lest someone finds and reads them. Or maybe they'll just redefine victory. A world where transgender people aren't cast out of mainstream society as weirdos, but their demands to be treated as literal women in every aspect of society go unanswered, and everyone pretends pediatric gender care was a Big Pharma conspiracy to exploit children for profit, looks like a win for the trans community to me, if you look at it from the perspective of 20 years ago, but a massive loss from nowadays.

I don't really have an answer here, and you may very well be right that over the long term the trans movement will keep winning, but it's not like there has never been a Science backed Progressive idea that has turned out to be a short-lived fad, and an embarrassment, forcing progressive elites to run damage control, and lay thick layers of dust on historical documents, lest someone finds and reads them.

That particular capability relied on monopolistic control of the media and a general consensus that the media they controlled were trustworthy. Both are now absent, and history is coming for them.

Sure enough, Rowling sits on Twitter shitposting at trans activists all day like it's 4chan

I do have to laugh about that. It may not be edifying, but she didn't buckle to the pressure to self-flagellate in public as a wicked sinner and change all her views. She leaned into "okay, if I'm Lady Hitler, let me do that!" I think that's why the aggravated are throwing "she's anti-Semitic, the goblin bankers* are Jewish caricatures! she's pro-slavery, look at how the books mock Hermione trying to free the house elves!" accusations at her. Anything at all to pull her down and let them be the victors. And it's not working, and it's driving them nuts.

*They're not caricaturing anything but the gnomes of Zurich, and if you want to tell me that Swiss bankers are famously Jewish, uh I don't think so.

"Thou calledst me dog before thou hadst a cause. But since I am a dog, beware my fangs."

The house-elves could have been an interesting discussion; what obligation do we have to beings that are as sapient as humans, but aren't human, and have very different preferences to humans?

she's anti-Semitic, the goblin bankers* are Jewish caricatures!

I think that argument has been quietly dropped since Oct 7. Its very difficult to argue that *she's * dog-whistling by setting the goblin uprising during a year when something bad happened to a Jewish community elsewhere in Europe, but that chanting a slogan used by an openly genocidal group isn't an anti-semitic dogwhistle.

It will, of course, still be vaguely remembered on the internet that of course she's been proven to be anti-semitic and that the details don't matter, but that's just the way things always work. (And, as an aside, that sort of thing really pisses me off in a general way - that the accusations are bunk, but get forgotten and stick regardless)

I think that argument has been quietly dropped since Oct 7.

I've still seen it in the wild.

John Varley, if anyone's old enough to remember him, put quick and easy sex changes in his Eight Worlds universe in the early seventies.

I dunno man. Why don't we reductio ad absurdum and add furries into the mix?

Say "what if genetic engineering gets SO GOOD that people can incorporate animal biology and become human-animal hybrids or 'manimals' that have many of the psychological traits of other creatures?"

At some point the psychological changes might end up becoming 'irreversible' because they take with them the desire to alter yourself.

Because the implications of this tech would suggest we can ALSO psychologically tweak people to be completely content with their current identity.

What if we could engineer people to feel 100% straight, have no doubt about their biological gender, and no curiosity about experiencing what the other genders were like, and they were about as non-dysphoric as you could get?

Wouldn't that be a little bit preferable to a scenario where people spend resources jumping between body's identities on a mere whim? I mean, in a post-scarcity situation it hardly matters, but as a practical concern it seems MUCH SIMPLER to just have everyone take the "accept your gender identity" pill.

Wouldn't that be a little bit preferable to a scenario where people spend resources jumping between body's identities on a mere whim? I mean, in a post-scarcity situation it hardly matters, but as a practical concern it seems MUCH SIMPLER to just have everyone take the "accept your gender identity" pill.

Are you advocating for this or are you arguing that it would be simpler from the society-government-blob point of view?

No, a "simple" future where everyone is homogenized to be 100% straight, 100% right-handed, and then (why not? it makes calculations and assumptions about strangers so much easier!) 100% the same body type, same temperament, same phenotype etc. is not "a little bit" preferable to me. It is, in fact, highly unpreferable. It feels weird to be, for once, the one who is assuming his opponents literally want to create a society of bugmen who will live in a pod and be happy, but that's the vibes I'm getting right now.

No thanks. Give me the furries. Hell, let them vore each other all they want as long as they do it somewhere else with mutual consent.

Are you advocating for this

I am not advocating for any policy prescription or even expressing a real preference here.

Just pointing out that zeroing the thought experiment in on only gender identity is is pretty limiting once you assume the sort of tech level that this implies.

No, a "simple" future where everyone is homogenized to be 100% straight, 100% right-handed, and then (why not? it makes calculations and assumptions about strangers so much easier!) 100% the same body type, same temperament, same phenotype etc. is not "a little bit" preferable to me.

Sort of? You're suggesting taking the 'natural' biodiversity and homogenizing it. I'm suggesting that we could help people be satisfied with the biological/genetic card they've been handed, disturbing as little as possible otherwise. On the far end we could make people who were born with disfigurements or disabilities 'accept' who they are, but we'd also, presumably, be able to 'cure' these conditions and restore them to functionality.

I'm also pointing out the risk of people's preferences getting locked into weird edge cases because they decided to combine their DNA with Moray Eels and suddenly they have an irrepressible urge to keep eating raw fish and see absolutely NOTHING wrong with that, thank you.

The trick in both cases is that it would be hard to undo that process if it turned out to make people miserable over the long run.

Ultimately this is really a question of what 'voluntary' means in a world where we can edit our own psyches with drugs and genetic treatments. If we edit ourselves to 'lock in' a particular set of preferences, is that reducing our agency? Can one voluntarily agree to remove their ability to make voluntary choices?

I don't mind the furries doing what they will as long as all involved consent. I'm just wondering if there's any strong argument against telling furries "you might be happier if you adjusted your brain a bit to NOT think you're a wolf." If they agree and undergo a procedure that removes their bestial predilections, and thus forever cut themselves off from that lifestyle, how do we judge the outcome?

I guess this will rely somewhat on the social superstructure environment we're operating in.

Anyhow, I don't know why we privilege the world where everything gets exceptionally and increasingly weird and degenerate as our technological capabilities increase to one where things mostly remain within some (fairly wide) guardrails, but pure practicality governs our use of our powers. Neither one seems inherently more likely than the other.

the implications of this tech would suggest we can ALSO psychologically tweak people to be completely content with their current identity.

What if we could engineer people to feel 100% straight, have no doubt about their biological gender, and no curiosity about experiencing what the other genders were like, and they were about as non-dysphoric as you could get?

The problem with opening that can of worms is that one then invites "What if we could engineer people to not need work-life balance?"/"What if we could engineer people to not find it degrading to 小便 in bottles rather than needing bathroom breaks?"/"What if we could engineer people to be content eating bugs/living in a pod/owning nothing?"/insert whatever you fear your outgroup imposing on people.

That's why I oppose it.

Yep.

I think we can rigorously define certain behaviors that we don't ever want to become 'acceptable' but there are a lot that will be borderline at best. "Make everybody feel satisfied working 16 hour days 7 days a week" seems far beyond the pale, I don't even know how you'd argue FOR that ideal.

The Brave New World outcome where everyone is in a chemically-induced state of satiation is seeming less likely to me, but the version where Molochian incentives push us all into a very unfortunate part of the payoff matrix seems probable.

(As as aside, this is why I see the AI alignment problem as important. If the AI is 'friendly' but isn't actually in tune with what makes humans/humanity thrive, it'll come up with solutions that are subtly miserable.)

In that society, the very idea of "what does it mean to be a man? to be a woman?" will have changed dramatically. The concept of gender roles mediated by society isn't total nonsense, there are different views at different periods and in different cultures of how men and women should behave.

So in the Culture, we're at the point where it's not behaviour on the grounds of leading or advancing society (as with the argument that men are more rational, more intelligent, more inclined to STEM, more adventurous, and the rest of it) because well, the Minds do all that. Social roles for humans are pretty much "you're a pet; a cherished, indulged, and well-maintained pet, but a pet". Sometimes some of the humans are given jobs, the same way we have working animals like draft horses and sheep dogs, interacting with other societies outside the Culture.

On a physical/physiological basis, as you say, there's no "on average men are stronger/taller/whatever than women", because you can rewrite your body so that "you want to be a seven foot tall Olympic weightlifter champion female? done and done!" Complete sex changes, so that now former male you is in a female body and pregnant by your former female, now in a male body, lover happen. In the same novel, that sex-swapped male to female back to male human gets changed into the body of a different species because he wants to explore their society which he finds more exciting than that of the Culture.

So there will only be a psychological notion of "I feel like a woman/I feel like a man", and that's pretty much what is going on with trans issues today. I think in Culture terms, since there is such a huge difference between what is possible for us today, and what they can do in their society, that even the ideal of maleness/femaleness will have greatly changed. If you can indulge in recreational gender-hopping, then the idea that you should be one particular sex forever is probably gone, even the idea of "okay, you're trans, now you're a woman, stay like that" will be too limiting.

I think the change in mindsets will be too great for arguments of today to hold for the future society; they won't accept "you are one particular sex and must be that way" because they're used to being able to tweak their selves any way they want. Even, as I said, the idea that "okay not your natal sex but your real innermost Real Woman sex", because what's a woman? what's a man? That depends on what you want it to be.

So to address it on the basis of today's arguments, I don't know. If you take an adult, or even an adolescent or child, and transform the body into the body they would have had if only the chromosomes had lined up... they're still going to have the experience of living as a man (just to take male-to-female trans people) and having that mindset. If you do it very early, at the ages of "my two year old knew they were trans" as some claim, then that may be different: if little Timmy is only Timmy for two years and is then Talitha for the next twenty, how much of an effect does the tiny period of 'boy' treatment affect them?

But then we run into the David Reimer case, where the person raised as a girl resisted and revolted against that, and maintained they knew they were really a boy (a very sad case, and John Money should have been locked up for life instead of celebrated as a pioneering genius).

So in that case, we're back to the arguments about the brain: is there such a thing as a male brain and a female brain? Is being trans a result of having a feminized brain in utero and so the sex change to the new body only works if there is a female brain in a female body?

Suppose we grow the brain along with the body, and everything is 100% female from the start, and then we transfer the mind over. Again, is there such a thing as the male mind versus female mind?

I think it theoretically would work best in the case of "we can identify at three weeks old that this is a trans baby, now we just need to switch the original's mind into the correct body and let it grow up as their real sex and gender" but at that stage, we're so far advanced that we're back in Culture territory where the parameters of the debate have changed drastically.

The real problem is the "I'm a real woman but I am not obligated to pass, or even try passing, and that is society's problem if it can't accept me as a woman" people/activists. I don't think someone with that belief would be happy about being given a 'real' woman's body, because that isn't the precise thing they want as acceptance. Indeed, by offering that, you're forcing them to comply with your views on gender and sex, which is the problem in the first place about cisnormativity and heteronormativity.

I guess I just an adaptable human. I'm a man's man today. I hunt, love to fuck, ski way too fast. If you plunked me in a woman's body tomorrow I would also love those things and I've met woman who do. Why wouldn't any curious human want to see both sides of sexuality if they could do it with perfection?

You mean hard transhumanism? I think the million other implications thereof would be a bigger deal to broader society.

I agree. I think the obsession with sexuality is already silly.

This would be the literal manifestation of “If my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.” Human descendants who develop such technology would have changed enough in the intermediate steps to no longer be the same species.

Love it! "If my grandmother had wheels she would be a bike!" energy.

There was a good Yud post where he tried to unpack what that would mean in detail.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions

You'd be changing how your body is mapped to your brain. How do you fit a male mind inside a female brain? Are we changing the structure of the brain or not - and to what specifications? How would you know how 'your' female brain should look? What about personality? Say you're more violent, aggressive, tech-oriented and antisocial than most women, probably a lot of that comes from being a man. Would you keep your personality or would that change too? Are we changing all the Y chromosome's to X and if so, what data are we putting in the X chromosome?

What about the in-between stages, are you just unconscious while the rewiring goes on? Are we killing you and replacing you with an imagined person? How do you access memories of how you were as a man if you're now a woman and those memories are targeting neuron patterns you don't have any more?

Besides the obvious physical facets, I think we're seeing the mental issues already. I recall seeing this tiktok of a FtM (James Barnes) complaining that she no longer had the easy female friendships she was used to, how men were treated a lot more coldly and she could now understand why the male suicide rate was so much higher (none of this delegitimized the validity of all those oppressed by men of course).

I couldn't help but feel disgust at the tearful expression of what looked like a short, weak man. I was thinking 'you don't get it, this isn't what you are' - which I'm sure she would say was my internalized patriarchy or whatever. You can't apply female expectations to male friendships or say that you've learned emotional maturity because you were raised female, as if you have a monopoly on defining emotional maturity. OK, technically you can and make a career out of doing it as a Transformational Leadership Speaker. But even so, that doesn't innately legitimize your conception of what men should be, it goes against my understanding of how men should behave. And even if I'm not a Transformational Leadership Speaker, I am a biological man and can judge male relationships by male standards because I've experienced them comprehensively. It's not about being vulnerable to each other that makes male friendship, there's a sense of comradery, shared humour - and even these words don't really fit because there's no way to describe it to people who don't know it.

That's the issue here, I bet there are similar expressions of femininity that men just don't get, or they try to ape but in the wrong ways. Men probably don't have a comprehensive understanding how women act in friendships, how could we know? Or how they bring their own male attitudes to things and say no, I'm the one who defines what womanhood is and you will respect my authority, which is backed by violence. Punch a TERF!

Even with very advanced technology, this seems like a difficult problem.

So what happens after everyone has had a thousand years to think about this? Personally, as an undying person?

Personally I don't take much umbrage at somebody choosing to identify as another sex/change their pronouns, but I feel that gender confirmation surgery is a crude facisimile that's 99% likely to be considered Lobotomesque in a generation or two. Whether that's due to the whole transgenderism thing falling out of vogue, or the evolution of something (whether digital avatars or genetic remixing) that actually accomplishes the goal.

gender confirmation surgery sorry, what confirmation?

there's gender reassignment surgery aka "bottom surgery" which is already felt out of vogue -- most transgender people do not consider it necessary.

I agree!

At the point where human modification is so good that you can casually get functional new gametes with no risk of deleterious mutation, you’ve basically moved past the point where traditional reproductive processes are going on. The AI double-checking the process is choosing the shape of the next generation, not the messy historically contingent mating process of H. sapiens. At that point x and y are just spandrels.

In such a world, the word 'trans' wouldn't even mean anything.

In a nutshell, the entire trans debate is 'Trans women are women (Y/N)'. If you could perfectly transition from a man to a woman in every measurable way, the only thing that would separate a 'trans' woman from the 'genuine article' would be that the trans woman would have memories of being a man. That doesn't seem particularly important.

Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then?

You'll always be able to find someone that fits the bill, but they would be anti-technology, rather than anti-trans.

Such a technology would be a perfect wedge for the trans community as it exists today. It would split the people who just want to have a different body and then move on with their lives from the people who want to always and forever be a markedly different counterculture. The latter would have to resort some nonbinary or fully posthuman neoforms to keep their unique status. Think Gibson's Tessier-Ashpool, Herbert's Harkonnen, Fading Suns' Decados, Lem's 21st Journey of Ijon Tichy. They wouldn't have existing category of people to base their status claims on. I love it.

Oh man. This is the best take I've seen all day! I mean this sincerely.

The trick is to spend a lot of time theorycrafting outlandish ideas, so that when somebody asks an out-there question you have a ready fully baked take instead of coming up with one on the spot. The downside is that it's slowly making you insane and unable to carry a normal political conversation because you jump to faraway conclusions ;)

If humans go on long enough a perfect sex change will indeed be possible at a genetic level. Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?

I don't think this will be possible in the near future, maybe it will never be possible, or at the cost so high that in practice the whole procedure will be undoable. I mean a perfect 100% (or 99%) sex change. Today's sex reassignment surgeries work at least on hormonal level and are sufficient for some very small number of people.

It's not only the problem of changing DNA in all 37 trillion cells of human body, that would maybe even be possible in some very distant future, but humans would need the ability to generate and kill cells arbitrarily in every place of the body and with remarkable precision. And it's not only a matter of adding some cells here or there, we would need to generate the whole extremely complex patterns. Maybe you can fit the uterus in a male body, but how can you change the shape of the pelvis?

Human body is not a machine or a Lego set, where you can add and remove parts arbitrarily, but it is generated by a set of remarkably difficult rules, many yet unknown. It is generated from the embryo like a flower is generated from the seed. And the process of generation takes many years, even decades. Looking from the perspective of developmental biology it is almost impossible to build human from the scratch and this is what would need to be done from the perspective of a perfect sex change: the bone structure between men and women differs, the skin structure differs, muscle structure is different.

Probably it would be more reasonable to swap consciousness between two bodies (how?!) then to rebuild a male into a female or otherwise. I cannot think of any physical or biological process that could be reasonably used in such a transformation.

I don't think it's good that such a transformation seems extremely difficult, it would be even interesting to under go a perfect sex change. I just make some observations based on my knowledge of biophysics and developmental biology.

I disagree with this. The human body is a replicant writ large based on a very tiny amount of informational DNA. Most of that matter is replaced regularly, you replace it a bit faster with the right stuff and...poof, you have a new person. A virus can do it. They can kill you, they can certainly change you instead. The rules aren't difficult. They are just complex.

I disagree with this. The human body is a replicant writ large based on a very tiny amount of informational DNA. Most of that matter is replaced regularly, you replace it a bit faster with the right stuff and...poof, you have a new person.

No, this is not true. This is what many people think, that all the information is in the DNA, but that's not exactly right. There is a whole, extremely complicated process of gene expression above that. Part of information is encoded in the environment, maternal hormones help orchestrate the development of different tissues and organs in the growing fetus. They play a role in the development of the nervous system, reproductive organs, and other essential structures. The brain of the fetus is differentiated with respected to gender as early as in the twelfth week and after that there is no way to undo the changes.

Most of the large-scale gene expression happens in embryo and when we are young. Changing the DNA in reproductive organs doesn't make them vanish or change, there is no biological process that taps into this.

A virus can do it. They can kill you, they can certainly change you instead.

It is extremely easy to kill a human, and unbelievably difficult to apply some very sophisticated changes (we need highly specialized surgeons and something can still go wrong). Wolbachia bacterium can feminize some species of insects and this is the limit of complexity that it can handle.

I hope you know something about this, because I would like to learn more. Loosely related, this funny youtube video is the best introduction to evolutionary developmental biology for a layman I know.

Yes life is complex, it is also simple. You CAN reprogram cells and it will be possible to do all of this very soon. Everything is knowable and understandable and malleable.

No, it won't be possible in hundreds of years, maybe never. You just throw some generalities, without any reference to the basic biological processes. I have nothing against general philosophical musings, but the sheer ignorance of some of the rationalists (I don't know if you count yourself among them), including Yudkowsky (famous nanobots), with regard to the hard science repels me and gives me a vibe of empty pondering.

I challenge you to look at this and not see what is coming very soon. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-run

Challenge succeeded.

I wonder which part of the incline belongs to the different Intersectional consulting services so ubiquitous now a days.

Yeah, I feel you on this. I don't have anything against these kinds of farfetched hypothetical "What if magic was real?" conversations, they can be useful points of comparison for sussing out why one holds particular real-world opinions, but I groan whenever a transhumanist hyper-optimist strolls into a discussion about HBD or gender and starts talking about how the problem can be solved by magical Ninja Turtles biotech within a timeframe short enough to even be relevant to current social issues.

nowhere is this more prevalent that with the Doomers obsession with Skynet.

The thought exercise proposes a 99% effective sex change - it doesn't even need to be that good to bring to the forefront many of the issues everyone's discussing - "A perfect wedge" as @comicsansstein put it.

I've had disagreements with other forum members in the past on this front, but people who are truly committed to being trans already have extremely high-quality surgeries available to them that will only get better. At least for the purposes of passing in public and getting to fuck who they want, if not bearing children.

I think the feasibility of excellent medical procedures, in concert with anyone younger-or-equal-to zoomers moving a point or two on the Kinsey scale will lead to those with true dysphoria being in an OK spot. The rest of these folks who want to win at sports or signal their rebellion against the culture are a different story.

I agree with you on most points. I'm only considering theoretical possibility of a nearly ideal sex change. But I have my doubts, when you mention 'extremely high-quality surgeries'. Seriously, FtM cannot have real penis and MtF cannot have real vagina. I know that some may wonder on the latter case, but you cannot place nerve endings where there are none. The elasticity of female vagina is remarkable and cannot be reproduced during the surgery.

However, I think that on the level of sexual response it may be sufficient for many trans-people, so I don't deny that many of them will find the sex reassignment surgery helpful or sufficient.

Radical feminists would have a major problem with this, based on one of their stated reasons for rejecting MTF transwomen. Which is that transwomen do not have the experience and thus memories (and/or trauma) of living childhood as a girl. They see this as an important shared experience that connects all women for having been oppressed by the patriarchy as girls, which transwomen are trying to encroach upon.

Now, if we were to develop memory alteration technology such that transwomen had memories perfectly indistinguishable from that of a female, then perhaps that might change? I don't think radical feminists would particularly buy into that, though.

But what if we tacked on literal time travel, manipulating the genes of the sperm that led to you so that it produced a female instead of male (or vice versa, though people care much less about this one), a la Luka Urushibara from Steins;Gate? I wonder.

Me, personally, I would agree with everyone who says that the concept of "trans" would be largely incoherent in this world. If you can switch sex perfectly with as little trouble as switching a tee-shirt is now, how does it make sense to identify someone as whatever sex they are at the moment? They're not transitioning from something to something else, they're just selecting something.

important shared experience that connects all women for having been oppressed by the patriarchy as girls

I think this proves too much: would radical feminists consider someone born with female parts in a non-patriarchal society to be a woman?

I don't know nearly as much about radical feminists as I do third wave feminists due to not knowing as many and not being one of them at any point, but from what I can tell from them, the concept of a society that isn't patriarchal might exist in fiction or fantasy, but one hasn't existed yet. At least, in the sense that, for any real society they talk about, they can find SOME source of patriarchal oppression. And if asked to speculate, the answer is usually some variation of "But I did eat breakfast this morning."

from what I can tell from them, the concept of a society that isn't patriarchal might exist in fiction or fantasy

I was thinking of the society postulated in the pre-Indo-European--matriarchal-society hypotheses....

but one hasn't existed yet.

...and the radical feminists' ideal future.

"Assuming the ancient-European Mother-Goddess worship hypothesis to be true, would someone born with female parts in such a society be a woman?"

"If you succeed in your goals and remove the patriarchy, would your great-great-granddaughters be women?"

Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?

Almost certainly, in the same way that they capital-D deaf community can be prickly about things like cochlear implants.

If humans go on long enough a perfect sex change will indeed be possible at a genetic level. Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?

I think we'd hit an empirical question, along the lines of: How much do men and women have in common? Or: what fraction of women would seem like a 'typical' man once they'd had their sex swapped?

To illustrate the problem with a silly example: I'm not native to the Early Medieval Period, and couldn't pass as a resident.

Part of this is language and biology; I speak modern English, I have dental fillings, and I wear contacts. But, if we addressed the obvious stuff, there'd still be a lot of differences left in terms of personality and ideology. I'm from an era without nobility or kingship. I don't think about social hierarchies like an Early Medieval. I don't think about relationships like them. I wouldn't respond right when insulted, and wouldn't laugh at the same jokes.

So, even if I got sent back, the locals would be able to tell pretty quickly that I wasn't one of their own. I'd be too alien in too many ways to pass.

The same thing would happen if I got sex-swapped by some super-science process. There might be women who are my height. There are women who code. There are women who argue politics on obscure internet forums. But, add together all the ways that I'm an outlier, compared to the 'typical' woman, and people would notice that sex-swapped me wasn't especially like a natal female. If a bunch of men-like-me got sex-swapped, people would pretty quickly (in my view) come up with a concept for "natal male, in a woman's body" and see us as different.

So, this gets into the empirical question: How many men would be huge (and obvious!) outliers, in terms of personality and interests, if they got sex-swapped into being women, and how many men would pass?

It's possible that, in a sufficiently advanced world, we'd learn that something like blank-slatism is true, or true enough that there'd be 10%+ of people who'd easily pass as a 'typical' member of the other sex. It's also possible that blank-slatism is false, and that it would be very, very rare to meet a woman who's enough of an outlier to pass as a typical man.

In the latter case, the objection would be that there are real practical differences between "natal-female, current male" and "natal-male, current male" and that it's useful to track these as different categories when making social distinctions.


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