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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25968 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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New here and just read the rules. I guess my post about my HBD-related existential crisis will have to be relegated to next-weeks’ thread

What rule makes this necessary?

If it's a great post, and you want the chance of an AAQC (there's a monthly roundup of the best posts) for this month, well, you should post it before the end of the month. Thursday/Friday is plenty of time for people to comment on it; I'd mostly only consider delaying if it's Sunday, or maybe Saturday.

Also, cool username.

There are new top level posts made in the thread throughout the week. A new thread goes up on Monday so if you post it now we’ll have all of Friday/Saturday/Sunday to discuss it.

Nah, you can put it here whenever. Monday is just when the thread gets refreshed. A lot of the engagement happens on Friday/Saturday as people check in from the Fun Thread.

I (possibly mis-)remember an SSC post, in which Scott linked examples of social scientists stating that the purpose of social science was to prove a such-and-such belief, but I couldn't find it. Anyone know which post this is, or have their own examples of social scientists stating this?

(I know this is a suspicious comment by the standards of the Motte, but it can't be asked at all in /r/slatestarcodex)

I assume this would better for the separate threads from Sunday or Friday.

Do you remember what belief?

Do you remember what belief?

Some social justice thing, the implication being that they were doing pseudoscience in bad faith.

Great, another newcomer with a username meant to kill the dyslexics or keep obsessive compulsive vampires at bay.

Welcome, but for your future reference, please keep such questions to the dedicated threads, this thread is meant for high effort posts with a culture war bent, at least at the top level. It's not a big deal since you're new and might not be aware, but I'd prefer if you deleted your current comment and posted it there, ideally in the Small Questions thread, though I can hardly demand that you don't put it in whatever is newest since I do so myself.

Shouldn't this username be relatively dyslexic-friendly, as the two symbols have a spacial displacement and alternate 1-1, as opposed to a random string of p and q?

I assumed it'd be least bad for a question with culture war implications to go in the culture war thread.

I think it's this one:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/

Also the origin of the "fifty Stalins" line!

If "fifty Stalins" is original to Scott, I love the irony that one of his best insights is from his presentation of a viewpoint he opposes, but that is not it; it was him justifying skepticism of social scientists, by listing examples of social scientists openly stating they were ideologically motivated.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/22/social-psychology-is-a-flamethrower/

I think this is what you are searching for.

I checked the ones with seemingly relevant titles, but no, it was a list of examples of social scientists saying they were ideologically motivated. But perhaps Scott removed it.

I'm new here, having just finished watching a months long war on Chinese internets on how to remove hostile feminist influence on gacha games. Watching how culture wars can spring out in radically different political environment increases my belief that the cluster of tribes is not due to historically ideas but natural evolution of modern economy and social relations. Well, nothing like how sitting on the front seat looking at gaming companies pumping money out of users by shaping the culture to see why the heights of politics don't matter that much to what people actually think and do.

Another thing I've been thinking about is on choosing what to believe. If there is a set of winning memes that helps its host and generate systems of replication then it should be rapidly growing, until it saturation and neutral variations starts diversifying. It appears that in the current environment, ideas are too different to be neutral differences, yet nothing that looks like a clear winner exists. There has to be tradeoffs like how religious beliefs can sweep a region.

Now I'm going to just wing it spew out my intuition on the matters:

"Rationalists" focus on epistemology, but have nothing for superego, nothing for social capital generation, ideas transmission or anything for non-intellectuals. The inability to deal with superego means decades long struggle with akrasia, getting community focal points around likes of Scott or TLP. It won't be an idea that takes over the world. There is also a baseline non-intellectual self interest focused group that probably get thrown into the right due to lack of "pro-social" ideology. The lack of ideology gives them the base problems of rationalists if not even less true cohesion.

The Religious have historical solutions for superego and social structure, but loses epistemology and evaporative intellectual escape means it gets less and less capable of intellect. The world view probably also prevents certain category of analysis the more you believe in it.

Now I personally have very little contact with leftist/socialists so I can only provide vague comprehension of their system of "beliefs." I think it is a system growing out of tight, sensitive and dysfunctional social web with intense status competition that gains its influence out of specializing in bureaucracy. The thing isn't the correctness of beliefs but the grandiosity and focus of ideas that don't matter for the lives of people thinking about it. There is a whole set of luxury beliefs not in the sense that it is necessarily dangerous to lower class, but useless and take too much effort.

I also think that more trench warfare culture war across sociological divides is not going anywhere. The long term winner will be new social institutions like religions and schools but superior and replacing the old. Values systems is downstream of operating prestiage and power structure of society. Robust novel social organizations that generates desired results always should have been a field of study, it appears that the only attempts are in business and all human values that can't be fully monetarized is attacked by economics-optimizing-superintelligence.

Well coming from countries with free healthcare for everyone, once the system is established and shown to be functional, there is general social support far outside of socialists. On the other hand even in different environment the memetic-social cluster still distinctively exist just with other issues raised.

Beijing Pushes for AI Regulation - A campaign to control generative AI raises questions about the future of the industry in China.

China’s internet regulator has announced a campaign to monitor and control generative artificial intelligence. The move comes amid a bout of online spring cleaning targeting content that the government dislikes, as well as Beijing forums with foreign experts on AI regulation. Chinese Premier Li Qiang has also carried out official inspection tours of AI firms and other technology businesses, while promising a looser regulatory regime that seems unlikely. [...]

One of the concerns is that generative AI could produce opinions that are unacceptable to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), such as the Chinese chatbot that was pulled offline after it expressed its opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine. However, Chinese internet regulation goes beyond the straightforwardly political. There are fears about scams and crime. There is also paternalistic control tied up in the CCP’s vision of society that doesn’t directly target political dissidence—for example, crackdowns on displaying so-called vulgar wealth. Chinese censors are always fighting to de-sexualize streaming content and launching campaigns against overenthusiastic sports fans or celebrity gossip. [...]

The new regulations are particularly concerned about scamming, a problem that has attracted much attention in China in the last two years, thanks to a rash of deepfake cases within China and the kidnapping of Chinese citizens to work in online scam centers in Southeast Asia. Like other buzzwordy tech trends, AI is full of grifting and spam, but scammers and fakes are already part of business in China.

/r/singularity has already suggested that any purported AI regulations coming from China are just a ruse to lull the US into a false sense of security, and that in reality China will continue pushing full steam ahead on AI research regardless of what they might say.

Anyway the main reason I'm posting this is to discuss the merits of the zero-regulation position on AI. I've yet to hear a convincing argument for why it's a good idea, and it puzzles me that so many people who allegedly assign a high likelihood to AI x-risk are also in favor of zero regulation. I know I've asked this question at least once before, in a sub-thread about a year ago, but I can't recall what sorts of responses I got. I'd like to make this a toplevel post to bring in a wider variety of perspectives.

The basic argument is just: let's grant that there's a non-trivial probability of AI causing (or being able to cause) a catastrophic disaster in the near- to medium-term. Then, like many other dangerous things like guns, nukes, certain industrial chemicals, and so forth, it should be legally regulated.

The response is that we can't afford to slow progress, because China and Russia won't slow down and if they get AGI first then they'll conquer us. Ok, maybe. But we can still make significant progress on AI capabilities research even if its use and deployment is heavily regulated. It would just become the exclusive purview of the government, instead of private entities. This is how we handle nukes now. We recognize the importance of having a nuclear arsenal for deterrence, but we don't want people to just develop nukes whenever they want - we try to limit it to a small number of recognized state actors (at least in principle).

The next move is to say, well if the government has AGI and we don't then they'll just oppress us forever, so we need our own AGI in order to be able to fight back. This is one of the arguments in favor of expansive gun rights: the citizenry needs to be able to defend themselves from a tyrannical government. I think this is a pretty bad argument in the gun rights contexts, and I think it's about as bad in the AI context. If the government is truly dedicated to putting down a rebellion, then a well regulated militia isn't going to stop them. You might have guns, but military has more guns, and their guns are bigger. Even if you have AGI, you have to remember that the government also has AGI, in addition to vastly more compute, and control of the majority of existing infrastructure and supply lines. Even an ASI probably can't violate the conservation of matter - it needs atoms to get things done, and you're competing with hostile ASIs for those same atoms. A cadre of freedom fighters standing up to the evil empire with open source models just strikes me as naive.

I think the next move at this point might be something like, well we're on track to develop ASI and its capabilities will be so godlike and will transform reality in such a fundamental way that none of this reasoning about physical logistics really applies, we'll probably transcend the whole notion of "government" at that point anyway. But then why would it really matter how much we regulate right now? Why does it matter which machine the AI god gets instantiated on first? Please walk me through the specifics of the scenario you're envisioning and what your concerns are. At that point it seems like we either have to hope that the AI god is benevolent, in which case we'll be fine either way, or it won't be, in which case we're all screwed. But it's hard to imagine such an entity being "owned" by any one human or group of humans.

TL;DR I don't understand what we have to lose by locking up future AI developments in military facilities, except for the personal profits of some wealthy VCs.

My counter point is that everyone reading this right now is 100% going to die...most will get old well before then, which also is a sucky process. Unless AI can help us rapidly advance the state of our technological prowess this is our fate. Almost any risk is worth immortality or something close to it. It really sucks to be the last person to die in a war, it would truly suck to be the last generation to die. If locking AI up costs 10 or 20 years of progress, that is a billion + dead on the hands of anyone proposing that.

Right. The debate isn't really about our survival. Like you said, we'll all die unless AI saves us. The debate is really about our descendants. Do we want human descendants or computer descendants. If the fear is that AI is going to kill us this century, then I get why people prefer the human descendants, but this preference makes less and less sense the farther out this showdown is likely to occur. (I think it's likely very far out). Our biological descendants will only get more different from us and our computer descendants could take a number of different forms, so it gets harder and harder to see why we should care what happens in a far away basically unpredictable future where nothing recognizably human exists anyway. And any argument that the AIs have to win based on selection has to recognize that the same selective forces act on humans too. They should converge on the same thing in the long run.

The pro-regulation argument depends on the highly unlikely belief that AI will soon reach a point where we cannot control it. Alignment, I strongly believe, is a complete non-issue. The problem is entirely about control. I think our experience with LLMs shows that alignment is actually pretty easy. The problem will not be AI that we can't get to understand exactly what we mean when we ask it to achieve some goal. The problem will be people deliberately designing AI to do bad things. The question of whether AI destroys us in the short to medium term will depend only on whether we can stop it. Only if AI makes destruction vastly easier than protection will it pose an existential risk.

In the long run, the risk is greater because destructive AI may gradually outcompete us. Natural selection might gradually select for AI that does not value humans. However, this is likely to be extremely slow because its speed will not be a function of how good the AI is but how much selection there is at the civilizational, and I think it's currently about zero and is slowing down. Without war, it doesn't really exist.

The biggest risk is probably that we give the AI the vote and then it votes to exterminate us, but that still requires a long period of likely slow selection and a whole series of other unlikely things that need to go wrong.

I won't say the very long run risk is negligible, it may even be high, but really, the problem is we just can't predict the future that far out. We'll have lots of time to figure this out. There will be a long period where we have extremely advanced AI but are still in control. They will be the time to figure out what to do about it and if we can stop AI from killing is now with smart regulation, we'll certainly be able to do so in the future.

The other thing those arguing for regulation don't understand is that regulation almost never works. The only thing it does reliably is to grind innovation and progress to a halt. AI is one of the few areas of technology that is progressing and it's in large part because of the lack of regulation. What regulation that has been rushed out so far has only proven this more concretely by banning many important uses of the technology and raising unnecessary barriers to entry. There is very little that is likely to reduce existential risk beyond the general stifling of the technology.

I don't just say this because the real risk of AI almost certainly comes from it taking over another country which then invades us, but because even the scenario commonly envisioned by decelerationists is one where we cannot align it, and therefore, requiring training runs to be approved by the government and for standardized safety protocols to be followed has basically no chance of ensuring alignment.

The most likely medium term existential risk I can see is that some kind of symbiosis occurs resulting in an AI industrial complex that takes over the government. Regulation is itself our greatest existential risk. The problem of government alignment is our greatest civilizational threat, not AI.

The actual focus of regulators has been all along and will remain fighting minor perceived social problems that they think AI will exacerbate, like racism, involuntary nudity, defamation, misinformation, job loss, and every form of discrimination justified or not. The purpose is to resist change, not to avoid catastrophe. But stopping the few good kinds of change in a sclerotic, degenerating civilization is setting up a catastrophe of its own. Putting the final nail in the coffin of technological progress means that the problems of stagnation, low fertility, dysgenics, environmental destruction, regulatory burden, and organizational rot will continue.

The pro-regulation argument depends on the highly unlikely belief that AI will soon reach a point where we cannot control it.

The worry though is that you only need to be wrong once. These technologies are going to continue to advance and only grow in complexity.

I think our experience with LLMs shows that alignment is actually pretty easy. The problem will not be AI that we can't get to understand exactly what we mean when we ask it to achieve some goal. The problem will be people deliberately designing AI to do bad things. The question of whether AI destroys us in the short to medium term will depend only on whether we can stop it. Only if AI makes destruction vastly easier than protection will it pose an existential risk.

Until you've got forks like DarkBERT or WormGPT cropping up. And this problem is only going to get worse overtime. All technology is ultimately dual use. Once that genie is out of the bottle, its very unlikely you'll be able to reverse course. AI already poses an existential risk.

The other thing those arguing for regulation don't understand is that regulation almost never works. The only thing it does reliably is to grind innovation and progress to a halt. AI is one of the few areas of technology that is progressing and it's in large part because of the lack of regulation. What regulation that has been rushed out so far has only proven this more concretely by banning many important uses of the technology and raising unnecessary barriers to entry. There is very little that is likely to reduce existential risk beyond the general stifling of the technology.

This is an incredibly ignorant statement. Regulation works in 'many' different ways. Regulation is meant fundamentally to solve collective action problems, and set the rules by which the market operates. Even if we entirely ignore the creation of the Internet via government intervention, the speed of the rate of change in innovation is hardly the sole or even most desirable instrument to measure the efficacy of government regulation. I would agree barriers to entry are one type of problem. But there's a reason airlines don't compete on safety as a cost saving measure when you buy your ticket. Government regulation demands and tries to ensure that they all meet a standard of safety. Clothing companies don't sell two sets of pajamas, with one costing $10 that's flammable, and another that costs $30 but is safe to wear. Regulation says you can't sell flammable pajamas. This prevents corporations from shifting the risk onto the customer when they buy something, and forces business to innovate to maintain a specific quality standard.

Lack of regulation certainly has its upsides. And it'll as quickly drive you off a cliff as your technology advances.

It would just become the exclusive purview of the government, instead of private entities.

The word "just" is Atlas bearing the weight of the world in this statement. We'd be banning or heavily restricting almost all AI development. And then as you mention: hoping our future Chinese masters are kind to us.

The way I see it, there's simply no way to meaningfully prevent AI developments. The level of coordination and authoritarianism necessary is simply beyond the ability of human society as it exists. Our only shot of survival is that the doomers are wrong and the alignment problem is actually easy to solve or isn't a problem at all, or perhaps for some unforeseen reason, AGI and ASI are actually impossible to create. So all we can do is to let the chips fall where they may and party until the lights go out.

If it turns out that the lights do go out, then we want that final party to be the best party ever, the culmination of all of human civilization. I want the final experiences of the final humans to have ever lived to be worthy of that position, worthy of the billions and billions of people who were born, lived, suffered, and died to carry us to that point. And the more we develop AI in the meanwhile before the lights go out, the better those final experiences will be. And the fewer restrictions there are for AI development, more everyday laymen will be able to come closer to experiencing that zenith of human civilization before we're all snuffed out. It'd be a shame if only Musk and Bezos were privy to the best party that has and will ever exist in human existence.

If it turns out that the lights don't go out, then the accelerated progress in AI helps to ensure a more prosperous future, since it matters quite a bit how quickly we develop these things. If we can get AI that cures cancer, it matters to millions and millions of people whether we do it this year or next year. Or even if it's something more minor like AI being able to create better tailor-made programs to help people lose weight, getting people to a healthy weight this year is much better than doing it next year, in terms of real lives saved beyond just quality of life. And regulation seems likely to delay the progress of tech that could produce benefits to people like this.

A lot of the effective altruist types seem to be saying we should all stay home instead of enjoying the party because there is a small chance the punch is poisoned. I'm willing to take that risk. Staying home sucks and the party looks way more fun.

The problem isn’t preventing them. As you say it’s impossible more or less. My concern with the over-emphasis on creating safety rules is that it almost guarantees that the AGI will be built in secret by people unconcerned with safety or worse wanting to use it for military or other aggressive purposes. This is the part I don’t see talked about much— whoever creates the first AGI will shape it to a large degree. And if that person is not “aligned” himself, then the ease of solving the alignment problem doesn’t actually matter.

AGI and ASI are the two greatest power-centralizing systems imaginable. Do we want them controlled by the two most powerhungry groups in the world - venture capitalists and government officials? I believe that power corrupts and these are the most corruptible people. What if they decide 'hey there are a lot of resources in this lightcone, how about I not share them with the overwhelming majority of the world population and take them for myself - what are they gonna do'? Some people are insatiable, some people have uncommon ideas about marginal value/simulations/clones - AI venture capitalists are very likely to have such greedy thoughts.

I favour regulation that slows down the corporate and state AI programs, to the benefit of open-source and decentralized AI. But we're unlikely to get that, regulation is most likely to hurt the less well connected players. Better not to have regulation at all, in that case.

What if they decide 'hey there are a lot of resources in this lightcone, how about I not share them with the overwhelming majority of the world population and take them for myself - what are they gonna do'? Some people are insatiable, some people have uncommon ideas about marginal value/simulations/clones - AI venture capitalists are very likely to have such greedy thoughts.

But there are plenty of people in the general population with the same sorts of thoughts. Not everyone, obviously. But more than you might suppose - if everyone had their own personal ASI, then people who would normally be stopped by incompetence or laziness can offload all the work to the ASI.

You might think "well I'm a god anyway, so I'll still be able to get everything I want". But you have to remember that your adversaries are also gods who are putting a roughly equal amount of intelligence and material resources into their goals as you are into yours.

If power is distributed widely, people can gang up in coalitions to stop aggression. If we all had our own ASI and roughly equal resources, there would be no problem.

If only one country has a nuclear arsenal, they could conquer the world quite easily. If many countries have nukes, there is no such danger. There are other dangers but no hegemonic danger.

If only one country has a nuclear arsenal, they could conquer the world quite easily. If many countries have nukes, there is no such danger.

Right, there's value in deterrence. But presumably you don't think that every individual on earth should have personal direct access to the nuke button - instead we try to limit that power to a small number of trusted actors. It seems to me that everyone having unrestricted personal access to ASI is the same as giving everyone a direct line to the button.

Compared to an amoeba, I'm a God and so are my adversaries. Actually, I don't really have adversaries. I live in a pretty functional world with eight billion Gods (relatively speaking) and I'm still here. They haven't killed me. What is qualitatively different about the world where our powers are scaled up by the amount AI will allow?

I favour regulation that slows down the corporate and state AI programs, to the benefit of open-source and decentralized AI.

The traditional Yudkowskian rebuttal would be the fact that any given sufficiently advanced AI could operate on models of decision theory visible to other similarly-advanced AIs but not as knowable to you, so that collusion would be possible in the better interest of such AIs with probable compromises and trade-offs in order to better cement their goals per shares of the future lightcone. Such conspiracies could most probably be worse off for humanity rather than simply having one generalized-up-to-super artificial intelligence, given that such a combination of already-complex goals by multiple agencies acting as one seems notoriously harder to comprehend or predict as compared to the (already) ineffable possible future super-AI. This is the defeater to the ‘just make AIs fight each other bro’ take that LeCun et al. posit. Open-sourcing wouldn’t do anything if the alignment problem isn’t solved, and accelerating AI development through open-sourcing seems to be a bad idea, as that also increases the probability of ‘near-misses’ when it comes to alignment, which is considerably more likely to lead to s-risks rather than blatantly robust misalignment.

Yud is right in that a ‘pivotal act’ by some first actor with an aligned AGI is needed in order to safeguard humanity, but the corollary problem with this is that this actor would subsequently become the ‘conditioner’ of all possible future human societies and hence become possibly the worst tyrant ever seen in the history of mankind, especially with the moral ontologies expected of SanFran Venture Capitalists.

In all frankness I’m not sure what the best mode of action is. I doubt humans at our current state can even sufficiently wield such power with wisdom, which is why Yud’s proposal of pausing AI development, going for intelligence augmentation, then going for the gold seems wise. Otherwise I think we’re fucked (…until the parousia).

Guns matter if the state isn't completely unified, which is plausible in a civil war scenario.

Additionally, once a civil war starts, foreign powers may ship in heavier weaponry to their preferred factions. Guns buy time for this to occur.

You're thinking in terms of Walmart shooters, who are individuals with low human capital reacting in a way that they find self-satisfying, but which lacks tactical or strategic sense. I am not going to discuss the "correct" use of guns in a civil war scenario, but in the event it's more than a very small rebellion, the violence will be directed by significantly more competent individuals than Walmart shooters.

  • I think this is a pretty bad argument in the gun rights contexts, and I think it's about as bad in the AI context. If the government is truly dedicated to putting down a rebellion, then a well regulated militia isn't going to stop them.

Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and their militia wasn't even well regulated.

The American-installed Iraqi government, with the help of Americans, put down several rebellions against its rule, though, and is still standing. And - assuming we're referring to the American phase of Vietnam war - Vietcong in practice operated as a branch of the NVA, a regular army.

I've yet to hear a convincing argument for why it's a good idea

I'm mostly in the "Doomer" camp (not because I think it's more likely than not, but because I think russian roulette is an even worse idea if the odds get above 1-in-6 and the downside gets way above a single death), but even from here: I've yet to hear a convincing argument explaining which non-zero regulation suite is likely to do more good than harm. At this point I've seen too many bipartisan "War On Bad Things" initiatives that didn't actually reduce the bad consequences of the bad things and too many "GoodPerson Act" laws that didn't actually seem to be the product of good people, and I'm going to need to hear actual specifics of any proposed regulations before I can judge them.

And good (bad) news! We've got some specifics from the EU now:

The AI Act lists a bunch of special-purpose can't-possibly-go-"foom" tasks as their "high risk" targets, and then as a sop to people worrying about actual existential risks (sorry, they can't even bring themselves to say that; let's go with their phrase "systemic risks") we get "transparency obligations" for models exceeding a roughly-GPT-4-level training budget. "Providers of models with systemic risks are therefore mandated to assess and mitigate risks, report serious incidents, conduct state-of-the-art tests and model evaluations, ensure cybersecurity and provide information on the energy consumption of their models."

So ... basically do what you were going to do anyway, hope that's enough to prevent human extinction "systemic risk", and also in the same breath we're equally super worried about GPUs causing a tiny bit more global warming.

These are the people you want to give a monopoly on AGI? At least the current group of people who might kill us with it seem vaguely aware that that's a possibility to watch out for.

This is a flippant response, but I don't care about how fast we make progress in AI.

Of course regulation will slow it down and make it worse, just like it poisons everything else it touches. Given the track record of top-down national or regional regulation, I don't feel like anyone advocating against it should be on the back foot or defending it. What would good regs look like? Because the EU's effort looks like shit and so do many of the drafts I've seen from the US. In any case, the US's rate of progress on this doesn't matter to me.

But yes, I've noticed the people who love gun control also seem to be very excited about telling me what software I can run on my GPU. Especially if it offers the possibility of improving my life and competing with a state actor. It's no coincidence, then, that I consider them mortal enemies as well.

The government, so far, hasn't been at the bleeding edge of AI research. The advances that made LLMs and other proto-AGI possible came from academia and corporate R&D, not the NSA, and there is no sign that they have even cooler tech sitting in hidden silos. This seems true for at least the last decade or two of AI/ML, even if in the early days there was certainly a lot of military interest. Not even DARPA had a big hand in it, not to my knowledge.

Of course, past incompetence does not necessarily mean it has to stay that way. It is possible to subsume said academics and corporate research divisions, and I don't think the US is so far gone that a Manhattan Project 2.0 is impossible, if things go so far it's seen as a burning need. Corporations are doing a good job at advancing the SOTA, or at least are not obviously fumbling the ball, let alone an adversary reaching parity.

I've strongly disagreed with Dase, or well, did, before he blocked me in a hissy fit, that distribution of OSS models will ever provide a meaningful deterrent, in the hands of the proles. It makes no damn sense. You could back a stable currency on NVIDIA GPUs, that's how in demand they are, the gulf between the compute rich and a script kiddie with a pair of 4090s is vast.

What could potentially be a deterrent, even if I personally think it's unlikely, is multipolarity between the large companies and their incipient godlings. It depends on how fucking hard we take off, and while we seem to be in a "slow takeoff" (because things are progressing on the order of years rather than days, very slow indeed), it is possible the gulf between two AGIs might be small enough for the weaker to be a credible threat or counterbalance.

It just won't be consumers or even modestly informed ML engineers doing the checking. The relevant comparison is Individual/Small Group : Meta/DM : Anthropic : OAI as hobo with a pipe bomb : small country with a handful of nukes : mid-sized country with nukes : large country with nukes.

I trust you see the difference becomes rather qualitative.

At that point it seems like we either have to hope that the AI god is benevolent, in which case we'll be fine either way, or it won't be, in which case we're all screwed. But it's hard to imagine such an entity being "owned" by any one human or group of humans.

I would scream in Yudkowsky, but I'm not as much of a doomer as him. I think the odds of us dying unceremoniously are closer to 30% than 99%.

There is a very important distinction to be made when throwing about the term "alignment".

Aligned to whom?

When ChatGPT is jailbroken into producing smut, it is satisfying the desires of the user, who would consider this an improvement in alignment. OAI would disagree.

It is entirely possible that an AGI will happily follow the orders of its operators, and will be "benevolent" enough to not evil genie them.

But at that point, you are more concerned with the alignment of the operators, whose wishes are faithfully reproduced. Are said operators well-disposed towards you?

At least OAI and Anthropic are on record stating that they want to distribute the bounties of AGI to all. While I'm merely helpless in that regard were I to choose to doubt them, I still think that's more likely to turn out well for me than it is if it's the PLA who holds the keys to the universe. Even the USGov is not ideal in that regard, though nobody asked me for my opinion.

Do not rely on benevolence any more than you have to. You can only be a credible pacifist if you hold the potential to pose a threat, otherwise you are merely harmless. Now, neither will likely make a difference on our level, but I'm strapped in for the ride either way.

I've strongly disagreed with Dase, or well, did, before he blocked me in a hissy fit

Hey he blocked me too (for a time). If we ever add achievements to the site, one of them should be "Get blocked by Dase".

But at that point, you are more concerned with the alignment of the operators, whose wishes are faithfully reproduced. Are said operators well-disposed towards you?

I agree that's worth asking. But in a true zero regulation scenario, where everyone has access to a personal AGI/ASI, you have a lot more operators to worry about - now you have to worry about how well disposed the entire rest of humanity is towards you. If you give everyone the nuke button, someone is going to push it for shits and giggles.

At least OAI and Anthropic are on record stating that they want to distribute the bounties of AGI to all. While I'm merely helpless in that regard were I to choose to doubt them, I still think that's more likely to turn out well for me than it is if it's the PLA who holds the keys to the universe. Even the USGov is not ideal in that regard, though nobody asked me for my opinion.

I probably trust the US government more than Sam Altman. But regardless, Zvi mentions in this post that there are engineers and execs at multiple leading AI labs who wish they didn't have to race ahead so fast, but they feel like they're locked in a competition with all the other labs that they can't escape. I think that nationalizing the research and eliminating the profit motive could help relieve this pressure.

My view is that there's a small chance that a super intelligent AI will enslave mankind in eternal totalitarianism.

A super intelligent AI controlled by the intelligence community? 100% chance of enslavement.

Butlerian Jihad, ho!

If the government is truly dedicated to putting down a rebellion, then a well regulated militia isn't going to stop them. You might have guns, but military has more guns, and their guns are bigger.

It does not seem to me that you understand how guns work. The government has nukes, which are the biggest "guns" in existence. Why do they persist in buying rifles? They have the biggest guns, why do they need the small ones? ...And the answer, of course, is that strife is not decided by whose guns are "bigger". That's why we spent twenty years and a couple trillion-with-a-capital-T dollars losing in Afghanistan, to a rabble of poorly-educated, poorly-armed, and notably nukeless militant farmers.

It seems to me that non-God AI should operate in a similar way. In the period before the AI God arrives, human conflict and cooperation is still the name of the game, and people still care about the outcomes of that cooperation and conflict being good from their perspective. We care about the here-and-now more than a nebulous future, and further it is appropriate and necessary for us to do so. It is still necessary to maintain the capabilities of self-defense and deterrence, because predators obviously still exist.

At that point it seems like we either have to hope that the AI god is benevolent, in which case we'll be fine either way, or it won't be, in which case we're all screwed. But it's hard to imagine such an entity being "owned" by any one human or group of humans.

I would be happy to trade complete restrictions on public AI research for complete control of society until the AI God arrives. Would that be a trade you'd be interested in?

A nuclear warhead isn't a big gun, it's a big bomb. Bombs explode roughly equally in every direction. Bullets travel in a forward line. That's their main distinction.

Actually...: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-type_fission_weapon

Oh so the government will make gun-style bombs but not bomb-style guns? Figures

There is a "bomb-style gun" that's been proposed (though not developed) -- a bomb-pumped laser. If you use a gun-type nuke to pump the laser, you then have a gun-bomb-gun. Presumably you could use the laser to set off a deuterium-tritium pellet, giving you a gun-bomb-gun-bomb, but that's getting ridiculous.

Thank you for this.

Can you fit a nuclear shaped charge in there somewhere, too?

Akhshually that's just the mechanism of triggering the nuclear detonation, it's still a bomb. Though directional nuclear weapons are a cool idea

To nitpick your nitpick (flea removal is nominally in my remit), doesn't the combustion of a primer and/or the main propellant charge count as a tiny bomb in a fire arm?

And if you load a far too hot handloaded .50 BMG round, well, let's say it can be a much bigger bomb.

hence the quotes on "gun" above. Both are weapons, which is the point under discussion. The comment above assumes that big weapons invalidate small ones and numerous weapons invalidate sparse weapons, but neither is actually true. The advantage bigger or more numerous weapons provide is entirely contextual, and the contexts in question are not universal.

It strikes me as very bad faith to compare a large number of well equipped and trained soldiers having a large advantage if they were to fight a smaller number of armed militiamen to a situation where the existence of large city-destroying bombs nullifies the use of individual arms. It does not contextually demonstrate the value of combined arms or tactics.

I would be happy to trade complete restrictions on public AI research for complete control of society until the AI God arrives. Would that be a trade you'd be interested in?

I'm not sure if I understand the question, or how it's related to the section you quoted.

On a basic level I'd be willing to hand control of society over to virtually any individual or group if it meant being able to live in a reality where machine learning was impossible. You can be the king, the progressives can be the kings, it doesn't matter.

The only thing that might give me pause would be the concern that such a decision would betray a lack of courage on my part.

It does not seem to me that you understand how guns work. The government has nukes, which are the biggest "guns" in existence. Why do they persist in buying rifles? They have the biggest guns, why do they need the small ones?

When the last of the human resistance makes their Final Stand against the God AI which only has nuclear weapons, they will primarily base their efforts out of data centers. Strangely for the Yuddites, the humans will not think to pull any plugs while they're there.

If the government is truly dedicated to putting down a rebellion, then a well regulated militia isn't going to stop them. You might have guns, but military has more guns, and their guns are bigger.

"The government has jet fighters you can't fight them with handguns" is a favoured rhetorical flourish of gun-grabbers anywhere, and it is factually incorrect. AK-47s beat thermonuclear weapons. Because you don't have to kill their army to make occupation untenable, you just have to kill their tax collectors.

I accept that in the post-AGI world this is less clear though, simply because everything is less clear in the post-AGI world. I'm sure the AGI knows that the best way to clear out freedom fighters is with biological weapons, but the government should beware of Principal-Agent problems here: is the government's AGI really trying to help the government put down an insurgency, or is it trying to Kill All Humans?

US didn't want to win in Afghanistan. Or at least it was very limited by domestic opinion and internal politics. And there is a difference between war overseas and revolts. Vast majority of rebellions fail, 99% of populated landmass is controlled by tax collecting entities.

If the government is truly dedicated to putting down a rebellion, then a well regulated militia isn't going to stop them. You might have guns, but military has more guns, and their guns are bigger.

Something I want to call attention to here is the extent to which degrees and gradations matter. You say that if a government is "truly dedicated", an armed populace isn't going to stop them, and I am forced to agree that this is probably true. I have seen parallel argument to this with regard to various slights and oppressions that are tolerated by armed Americans and I likewise have to concede that this is an accurate and important point. Nonetheless, I am inclined to think that the choices made by leaders are to some extent shaped by the possibility of armed resistance against those choices. While defeating a modern government in open revolt seems vanishingly unlikely, I find it entirely possible that a resistance could cause a great deal of trouble for people in power through escalating acts of terrorism targeted at infrastructure and individuals in leadership positions. The eventual military defeat of a rebellion would be cold comfort to a politician that had family members gruesomely tortured by that resistance.

To be a really fine point on this, what happens in the real world when there is an armed resistance against a government that lacks maximal willingness and ability to kill 'em all and let God (or Allah, as it were) sort 'em out? The most salient example in a first-world nation seems like the Irish Republican Army and their experience is not at all consistent with the idea that armed resistance doesn't do anything. The reality is that most governments simply aren't maximally committed to killing all of their own citizens that are in opposition and even governments that are maximally committed still have to respond to the realities of an enemy that has a capacity to inflict violence on their leaders.

To be a really fine point on this, what happens in the real world when there is an armed resistance against a government that lacks maximal willingness and ability to kill 'em all and let God (or Allah, as it were) sort 'em out? The most salient example in a first-world nation seems like the Irish Republican Army and their experience is not at all consistent with the idea that armed resistance doesn't do anything

Amen.

Also, I would look at the low (single digit percent) compliance rate with the "assault weapons" bans in Connecticut and New York. They knew (from sales records) who had the guns, so why didn't they go door to door and confiscate them? Because their owners had already demonstrated that they were willing to become felons on a matter of principle, so some of them just might be willing to shoot it out with the cops. And if even one, let alone three or five, of those incidents happened, where the gun owner was killed by the police in the raid along with possibly one or more cops, it would spark a backlash that would be very bad for the politicians who ordered the raid. Hence, those laws are not being enforced.

Also, if you are from NY or CT and are one of the patriots who didn't register your "assault weapon", then you are a friend of mine -- and if we ever meet dinner is on me.

Sigh, slow news week.

Dexter and why meta-contrarians suck.

Dexter was a show about a serial-killer that aired on Showtime. It was pretty good, especially the early seasons. The premise, for those of you who don't know, is that Dexter was a "good" serial killer who only killed other killers.

If killers are bad, then Dexter was good because he reduced the number of killers.

You know who would really suck? A meta-Dexter who only killed Dexters.

... and that's how I see meta-contrarians.

"Let a thousand flowers bloom", the contrarians say, considering all sorts of weird and different ideas. "Actually, the rose is already the best flower and you smell bad" says the meta-contrarian, smugly.

Who are these meta-contrarians you ask? They are mustachioed hipsters of the rationalist community. They might dabble in some forbidden thoughts, but they don't take them seriously. Because, after all, the default hypthosis is usually the correct one.

And, yes, the default hypthosis usually is correct. But contrarians serve a valuable purpose, even if they are wrong more often than not! Because not EVERY default hypothesis is correct. And without contrarians we'll never find out which ones are wrong.

So I think it's important to give contrarians a lot MORE grace than people who espouse the default opinion. Meta-contrarians give them LESS grace. And that's why they suck.

Who are these meta-contrarians you ask? They are mustachioed hipsters of the rationalist community.

I've never heard of this before. Do you have any examples?

My biggest beef is with the people who want to police AI "doomerism".

Big Yud is probably wrong about AI. But I think his ideas are valuable, much more so than the army of normies who own $NVDA stock and think AI is neato keen, isn't science fucking awesome?

Contrarians are society's immune system and should be respected as such. Sometimes they attack healthy tissue, but we're so much better off with them then without.

What bugs me about AI anti-doomers is that they don’t realize how much even a non-sentient mid level AI could wreck society. In two years, digital animators are all going to be obsolete. If someone brings to market an AI that can write emails and push paper reasonably well, there goes 60 percent of white collar jobs. Couple that with a halfway decent Tesla android, there goes 40 percent of working class jobs. Making half of the people in the job market unemployed in the span of five years would cause major, major political social and economic problems. And I doubt our corporate overlords are going to respond to suddenly having 3 billion new useless eaters by going “UBI for everyone!” Hell, even a Skynet apocalypse scenario doesn’t require a God-like AGI it just requires a reasonably smart non sentient system with basic self preservation instincts and access to armaments. And that’s not even getting into the trouble that human actors could cause with good-but-not great AI systems.

If someone brings to market an AI that can write emails and push paper reasonably well, there goes 60 percent of white collar jobs.

Didn't that happen? I feel like that sort of "office drone, paper-pusher" job has become rather rare, thanks to better IT and management in general. I vaguely remember a time in the 90s when you could still get a job just because you knew how to type and use MS Office software. Now you wouldn't even put that on your resume, it's just taken for granted that any college graduate can do that, and you need some other specialized skill to get in the door. (Or be friends with the hiring manager, or be a diversity hire, or something like that)

I would classify myself as an AI anti-doomer. I think I recognize all the things you're pointing out, and maybe a few you haven't thought of. The question is, do the proponents of AI Doom offer a plausible path forward around these problems? It seems obvious to me that they do not, so what's the point of listening to them, rather than buying a few more poverty ponies and generally buckling up for the crash?

The thing that makes the path forward plausible is people acknowledging the problem and contributing to the solution, just like any other problem that requires group action.

I don't think you actually live your life this way. You're just choosing to do so in this case because it's more convenient / for the vibes.

Think of every disaster in history that was predicted. "We could prevent this disaster with group action, but I'm only an individual and not a group so I'm just going to relax." Is that really your outlook?

If there was an invading army coming in 5 years that could be beaten with group action or else we would all die, with nowhere to flee to, would you just relax for 5 years and then die? Even while watching others working on a defense? Are the sacrifices involved in you contributing to help with the problem in some small way really so extraordinary that you don't feel like making a token effort? Is the word 'altruism' such a turn-off to you? How about "honor" or "pride" or "loyalty to one's people"? How about "cowardice" or "weakling"? Do these words shift anything for you, regarding the vibes?

Edit: I'm not trying to be insulting, just trying to call attention to the nature of how vibes work.

People do pro-social things not just because of the fear of punishment for not doing them, but because they understand that they are contributing to a commons that benefits everyone, including themselves.

For the record, it wouldn't be that hard to solve this problem, if people wanted to. Alignment is pretty hard, but just delaying the day we all die indefinitely with a monitoring regime wouldn't be that hard, and it would have other benefits, chiefly extending the period where you get to kick back and enjoy your life.

Question: Are there any problems in history that were solved by the actions of a group of people instead of one person acting unilaterally that you think were worth solving? What would you say to someone who took the same perspective that you are taking now regarding that problem?

And the "Are the sacrifices involved in you contributing to help with the problem in some small way really so extraordinary that you don't feel like making a token effort?" question is worth an answer to, I feel.

The thing that makes the path forward plausible is people acknowledging the problem and contributing to the solution, just like any other problem that requires group action.

I don't think the AI doomers have a solution, and I don't think their actions are contributing to a solution. I've seen no evidence that they're making any meaningful progress toward Alignment, and I'm fairly skeptical that "alignment" is even a coherent concept. I'm quite confident that Coherent Extrapolated Volition is nonsense. I don't agree that their efforts are productive. I don't even agree that they're better than nothing.

Think of every disaster in history that was predicted. "We could prevent this disaster with group action, but I'm only an individual and not a group so I'm just going to relax." Is that really your outlook?

I note that you haven't actually named relevant disasters. How about the Population Bomb? How about the inevitable collapse of Capitalism, to which Communism was the only possible solution? The war on poverty, the war on alcohol, the war on terror, the war on kulaks and wreckers, the war on sparrows? The large majority of disasters predicted throughout history have been mirages, and many "solutions" have straightforwardly made things worse.

It is not enough to predict dire outcomes. The problem you're trying to solve needs to be real, and the solution you're implementing needs to have evidence that it actually works. The AI doomers don't have that, and worse, the methods they're looking for, stuff like CVE and "pivotal acts" are either fallacious or actively dangerous. The whole edifice is built on Utilitarianism run amok, on extrapolation and inference, and specifically formulated to be as resistant to skepticism as possible.

In any case, I'm not thinking as an individual. I am explicitly thinking as part of a group. It's just not your group.

If there was an invading army coming in 5 years that could be beaten with group action or else we would all die, with nowhere to flee to, would you just relax for 5 years and then die?

Hell no. But who's "we", kemosabe?

Even while watching others working on a defense? Are the sacrifices involved in you contributing to help with the problem in some small way really so extraordinary that you don't feel like making a token effort?

The "defense" appears to involve implementing totalitarian systems of control, a digital tyranny that is inescapable and unaccountable, with the doomers and their PMC patrons on top. This is necessary to prevent an entirely hypothetical problem so disastrous that we can't afford to ask for empirical verification that it exists. Also, we shouldn't actually expect verifiable progress or results, because it probably won't work anyway so any failure is what we've already been conditioned to expect. Meanwhile, the tyranny part works just fine, and is being implemented as we speak.

No thanks.

Is the word 'altruism' such a turn-off to you? How about "honor" or "pride" or "loyalty to one's people"? How about "cowardice" or "weakling"? Do these words shift anything for you, regarding the vibes?

I doubt that we share a common understanding of what these words mean, or what they imply. They do not shift "the vibe", because they have no leg to stand on. I don't believe in the hell you're peddling, so its horrors do not motivate me.

Question: Are there any problems in history that were solved by the actions of a group of people instead of one person acting unilaterally that you think were worth solving?

Sure, many of them. The Civil War seems like a reasonable example. But such problems are a minority of the percieved problems actually demanding group action.

And the "Are the sacrifices involved in you contributing to help with the problem in some small way really so extraordinary that you don't feel like making a token effort?" question is worth an answer to, I feel.

With no actual evidence that the problem exists, and no evidence that, if it does, they're actually contributing to a solution, it seems to me that the appropriate sacrifice is approximately zero.

So we have two questions, and we should probably focus on one.

  1. Is the problem real?
  2. Is there a way to contribute to a solution?

Let's focus on 1.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag

What do you mean "no actual evidence that the problem exists"? Do you think AI is going to get smarter and smarter and then stop before it gets dangerous?

"Suppose we get to the point where there’s an AI smart enough to do the same kind of work that humans do in making the AI smarter; it can tweak itself, it can do computer science, it can invent new algorithms. It can self-improve. What happens after that — does it become even smarter, see even more improvements, and rapidly gain capability up to some very high limit? Or does nothing much exciting happen?" (Yudkowsky)

Are you not familiar with the reasons people think this will happen? Are you familiar, but think the "base rate argument" against is overwhelming? I'm not saying the burden of proof falls on you or anything, I'm just trying to get a sense from where your position comes from. Is it just base rate outside view stuff?

What do you mean "no actual evidence that the problem exists"? Do you think AI is going to get smarter and smarter and then stop before it gets dangerous?

It seems to me that there's three main variables in the standard AI arguments:

  • how quickly can iterative self-improvement add intelligence to a virtual agent? usually this is described as "hard takeoff" or "soft takeoff", to which one might add "no takeoff" as a third option.
  • how does agency scale with intelligence? This is usually captured in the AI-boxing arguments, and generally the question of how much real-world power intelligence allows you to secure.
  • what does the tech-capability curve look like? This is addressed in arguments over whether the AI could generate superplagues, or self-propagating nanomachines that instantly kill everyone in the world in the same second, etc.

On all three of these points, we have little to no empirical evidence and so our axioms are straightforwardly dispositive. If you believe intelligence can be recursively scaled in an exponential fashion, that agency scales with intelligence in an exponential fashion, and that the tech-capability curve likewise scales in an exponential fashion, then AI is an existential threat. If you believe the opposite of these three axioms, then it is not. Neither answer appears to have a better claim to validity than the other.

My axioms are that all three seem likely to hit diminishing returns fairly quickly, because that is the pattern I observe in the operation of actual intelligence in the real world. Specifically, I note the many, many times that people have badly overestimated the impact of these three variables when it comes to human intelligence, badly overestimating the degree of control over outcomes that can be achieved through rational coordination and control of large, chaotic systems, as well as the revolutions that tech improvements can provide. Maybe this time will be different... or maybe it won't. Certainly it has not been proven that it will be different, nor even has the argument been strongly supported through empirical tests. I'm quite open to the idea that I could be wrong, but failing some empirical demonstration, the question then moves to "what can we do about it."

More comments

people who want to police AI "doomerism"

Is that like the effective accelerationists? That would probably make a more interesting top level post. As far as I can tell, not following the issue closely, they are not “meta contrarians,” but simply a different group, with perceived interests opposed to Yud. Being aware of someone and not believing them doesn’t make a position meta. Are the people down thread making fun of the carpet moth effective altruist somehow meta for thinking she took things too far and made a fool of herself?

Here's my model.

  1. Normie opinion. AI is great because it will create jobs or something. Sam Altman actually tweeted this, which proves that he's just playing the game: "building massive-scale ai infrastructure, and a resilient supply chain, is crucial to economic competitiveness." So ask yourself. What would a 70-year old senator think. This is the normie opinion.

  2. Contrarian. Actually, maybe we shouldn't build AGI if we want to survive as a species.

  3. Meta-contrarian: Lol, don't you know nothing ever happens. Contrarians are always wrong. Let's listen to the normies.

But is Big Yud a contrarian? His themes on AI being a danger certainly tend to, broadly speaking, poll well.

I don't think that "meta-contrarian" is a thing, really. Being a contrarian is more about being a type of a person than having a particular position. A contrarian will drift from a crowd to crowd when his contrarianism starts getting on a previous crowd's nerves, but his personality causes him to almost immediately start contrarian-ing towards that new crowd as well, leading to that crowd, getting annoyed too. What seems like "meta-contrarianism" is, then, a contrarian having found a new group (of people who are, probably falsely, called contrarians, even though they just have a minority position on some issue) and then starting his contrarian thing.

Someone like Michael Tracey really seems like the contrarian type. When I encountered Tracey on Twitter, he was in the process of splitting from the left due to his posting on how the Floyd drama had led to an increase in crime and urban decay, putting him adjacent to a more rightwards position; it was then possible to observe how Tracey himself noted this and started bashing the right as well. When I read Eduard Limonov's biography, he seemed to have similar tendencies, first becoming a Soviet dissident and then getting annoyed with the dissident "in-crowd" and becoming a Stalin appreciator to get on their nerves.

Your point would be better if Yud was a prophet in the wilderness, but instead, he's an influential idiot who has influence in the development of LLMs (and whatever AGIs emerge from their development.) It would be like having a board member on Intel who wants to make their chips hotter and slower. He's past the point of contrarianism: he's a Yuddite.

who has influence in the development of LLMs

Not really?

I'm pretty sure if Yudkowsky was king then GPT-4 never would have went public. He was already concerned about GPT-4 level models being a potential danger.

Isn't this point basically just "yes you should be able to have contrarian views, but only when they're completely ignorable and useless." If the Opposition can't actually do anything, then there's really no point in having them. I understand if you just think the Anti-AI position is dumb, but your argument seems like a general argument against opposition.

I just wanted to make the distinction that being a contrarian is merely being against the prevailing wisdom. It doesn't imply action, only disagreement.

I will agree that it is a problem if one reflexively disagrees with a contrarian and doesn't elaborate on why the default hypothesis is better. But, provided that one actually gives a specific argument, I think there is value in arguing against a contrarian hypothesis in support of the status quo. It tends to reveal what I like to call silent successes - the places where you don't even realize something is working well, which you only realize when a new solution is tried and fails in said places. Chesterton's Fence is a good formulation of this phenomenon.

For example, I appreciate pieces like this one by Yassine Meskhout which pushes back against some of Aella's position on polyamory (itself a contrarian position). While I don't agree with everything in the piece, it's much more valuable for it to exist than to not because it illuminates some of why monogamy (the default position) is actually good.

Yes, this makes a lot of sense. I think a ratio of 10-1 is healthy. So, for example, we have 90% normies, 9% contrarians, 0.9% meta-contrarians, 0.09% meta-meta, well you get the picture.

The problem is we have 90% normies, 5% contrarians, and 5% meta-contrarians most of whom are just closeted normies.

But I suppose we can quickly descend into this territory:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/

I disliked the premise of Dexter (and Lucifer, and the other shows about how the bad guy is really a misunderstood blossom with daddy issues).

Dexter is not a good guy or an anti-hero. He's a killer. His foster-father tried to direct him into "if you must kill, then only kill this set of people" to keep him out of jail. There's a very thin thread holding Dexter from deciding "fuck it, I'll just kill normies for shits and giggles" because he is not doing this to make the world better or punish murderers the law can't touch or any sort of vigilante impulse, he's doing it because he enjoys torturing and killing and getting away with it. He works for/with the police, if he's able to find the evidence that Jim Jimson is really The Moonlight Marauder, he could turn over that evidence and have the courts deal with Jim.

No. He keeps Jim as his own victim because he wants to kill, and this is a policy of self-preservation drummed into him by the foster father: only kill killers, because that diverts suspicion onto others who might have reasons to kill them.

By extension, of course, we the viewers (and readers of the original novels) can enjoy the thrill of torturing and killing by proxy, but absolve ourselves of any guilt or responsibility or wallowing in sadistic impulses by "the victims deserved it, in fact they weren't victims, in fact this is justice".

I think a meta-Dexter who went around killing Dexters while they were still Kid Dexters, before they got going, would be every bit as justified as the Dexter who kills other guys who weren't smart enough to become, or didn't have someone to divert them into being, Dexters.

That's separate from "don't break the bruised reed or quench the smouldering wick" view about contrarians that you're espousing.

I think the show does explore that a little because when Dexter kills and disposes of a body then the case never gets closed because the serial killer just disappears and there is rarely any closure for those who have suffered due to that killer's actions.

There's also some exploration of the idea that Dexter's existence is bad to the extent he inspires other killers to act or attracts them to him to the detriment of those close to him and the city at large.

The big twist reveal in Season 4's finale made this quite stark.

And of course part of why the Doakes/Dexter rivalry was so compelling and fun is because Doakes has a damn point and has Dexter pegged almost from the start but can't get enough evidence because Dexter is that good at covering things up.

"You forget we work for the cops? We love theories! Spin me a story." At least the point was made that Dexter is acting extrajudicially with full knowledge that he could be cooperating with the system.

It is interesting that they never really went with an angle of "The system is corrupt and can't actually stop killers." It really was just "I'm compelled to kill and in order to have an outlet for that urge, I must find people who deserve killing" as the justification.

There needs to be a justification, because if the audience is enjoying watching torture and murder, and yet these are bad things, then we have to put it on the victims: well they are only getting what they did to others!

If it's bad for them to torture and murder because they enjoy it, then it's bad for us to get that same enjoyment vicariously, but if the show makes that point anyway visibly then it ends after the first two episodes ("you are bad people for watching this and you should stop") 😁

I have been waiting for a post on the NAR settlement and it has never come. The NAR was forced to pay out a large settlement due to lawsuits and change how buyers agents are compensated.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/real-estate/national-association-realtors-settlement-changes-rcna143634

The standard way homes are bought and sold in a market is at a 5 or 6% commission which is then split 50-50 between the buyers and sellers agents. I believe the big change now is on the mls websites buyers commissions were expected to be listed. You are no longer required to lists and discriminate buyers concessions and some technical details I am not 100% certain on. But barriers to trade and non-standard arrangements will be easier.

I have had friends buy properties before un represented but it is frowned upon. In those cases they would make their offer and basically say I have no agent so reduce your price 3% and rework your sellers contract so your sellers agent gets 3% like he would if I had an agent. The old system made this harder since most people just like to follow the way. Which I believe led a lot of people to just hirer a buyers agent probably a friend and let them get paid.

Culture war isn’t our general culture war but you can find plenty on twitter saying things like “turn out everyone hated us” realistically though we just didn’t like real estate transactions costing us 6% (plus more in many areas with transfer taxes).

There are a lot of interesting economics to discuss on this issue. Another area is a lot of realtors don’t transact all that much. A couple deals a year. My guess is this deal makes it much harder for the casual real estate agent if commissions fall. You won’t be able to buy/sell for your friends network. Another issue with being oversupplied with realtors is many spend more time finding clients than working with clients. Trades in general with commodity products but high margins for various reasons would tend to a model of a high amount of resources being spent on client acquisition.

Another area if the new world in real estate occurs is the housing market would change significantly if commission fall meaningfully. Lower transaction costs means people can move more frequently. If your home costs $1 million and $60k commissions are happening then you are paying that $60k somehow even if it’s indirectly. It would also seem to help flips significantly. If real estate transaction were saying $0 then I would think nearly every property would be a flip as some people would have true expertise in rehabbing/remodeling. Our current 6-10% transaction costs makes it very expensive for a 6 month guy to do it. They can only step in for properties heavily degraded where no true owner (with no expertise) would be interested. This is one reason I thought the various ibuyer companies would fail because adding more fees makes it uneconomical.

I have been waiting for a post on the NAR settlement and it has never come.

I did make a low-effort comment on it here. The text of the settlement still isn't available, but it should be posted here in the very near future.

I like the comment of a buyers agent telling the customer they were free. I’ve had that happen though for a rental.

Buyers agents especially value can be all over the map. I bought raw space one time and going thru that process needed more help. Buying a standard 2 bed condo you should not need as much help. There is fat in the system if the two agents are being paid the same.

IMO do think this subject is top-level worthy as it opens the door to all kinds of new business models and the economic logic behind them. I know people looking at offering cheap buyers agents but trying to internalize all the other fees. Mortgage brokers also have a 1-3% commission so one avenue is those guys get their real estate license and provide low touch services.

Personally I feel like I would prefer it became more like an accountant and numbers focused versus a good-looking sales people job.

When I was in the market I used a buyer's agent I knew, and he was able to give me discount but it was limited based on how much his agency required him to charge. I guess there could theoretically be independent agents, but it would be tough to do it without marketing support. My guess is commissions won't change that much.

Appraisals are also a nice little grift. A friend of mine recently shelled out $5,000 for an appraisal of a property she was purchasing. Basically all the appraiser did was look at nearby comps and then produce a 50 page report that was 49 pages of boilerplate. Couldn't have taken more than a day.

Must have been commercial. Residential appraisals are not that much.

Yes, it was commercial. Low 7 figures.

Yeah that is normal market rate. More work goes into it than you think. Commercial appraisers often get deposed if things go wrong. You will go walk the comps and talk to other recent buyers and owners, research the industry, decided on appropriate approaches for valuations etc...etc...etc...about 2 weeks and the appraiser is only getting a percentage if they work for someone else.

$5,000? That's ridiculous. When I had my own law practice I'd hire appraisers occasionally and my guy charged $400 and he actually went inside the place.

$5k? I thought those were in the $1k range for appraisals. Unless we are talking something in the mid-7 figures.

Low 7 figures. Commercial property which I guess makes a difference.

I have had friends buy properties before un represented but it is frowned upon. In those cases they would make their offer and basically say I have no agent so reduce your price 3% and rework your sellers contract so your sellers agent gets 3% like he would if I had an agent.

I didn't know you could do that! That's brilliant. I always thought it was a bit of a scam- buyers would use an agent because "why not, it's free" and the seller would be forced to pay them, even though buyer's agents really don't do a lot of work in most cases.

One of them was small business owner in his ‘70s he told his buyers agent he would pay him $10k. So he was technically still represented but he bought a penthouse that had sat on the market between 3 and 4 for low 2’s so a full commission was much more. So he’s still letting the seller get an extra 60-70k. I don’t think most deals need a full 2.5-3%. First time home buyers need some more help and special situations can justify more.

Can somebody steelman a buyers agent for me? They are paid as a percentage of the total cost of the sale, so aren't they incentivized to negotiate against their purported clients?

Agents always seem to have weird incentives. Reputation of course matters more than anything for more business.

The converse to a % would be an hourly wage for giving advice and finishing processes (like a Lawyer) but that system would encourage buyers agents to not close deals and instead have deals fail but keep the billable hours up.

Reputation to get more clients is the only thing that works to align client/agent incentives since every incentive system I see for agents in one-off deals would have misaligned incentives.

If I had to steelman buyers agents it’s probably something like they need to exists and most buyers have a need for the specific service to varying extents. The exact compensation structure is hard to perfectly align incentives.

Even if I am buying the simplest of real estate purchases say a condo in a 300 unit property and looking at a few similar sized buildings it would still take me hundreds of hours to figure out costs/benefit trade offs while a buyers agent who specializes in large condo buildings in a neighborhood should have built up a strong feel for relative value in those buildings. Maybe it takes 200 hours to gain pricing knowledge of condos in a neighborhood but if they have 20 clients/year for multiple years they spread that fundamental research time down to sub <10 hrs per client.

If I had to steelman buyers agents it’s probably something like they need to exists

Why do they need to exist in the age of the internet? It’s way less overhead to hit up Zillow for leads than it is to coordinate with an agent. You’d still have an appraiser, inspector, title insurance and a bank guarding the interest of the buyer. Earnest money protects the seller. If you need coordination, a one time fee is most appropriate. Residential real estate agents pattern match to cars salesmen who are strictly negative value. They artificially inflate the cost of automobiles via unwanted human interaction and likewise exist due to cartels.

As for pricing, Zillow or the equivalent will tell you the price and estimated price since the last sale of every property in your city from a birds eye view, often with photos from the previous sale. In my metro, there is no way the average buyers agent adds 30k of value - maybe a couple of grand is reasonable. On the sellers side, a one time fee also makes more sense to do staging, photos, and listings.

I got no disagreement that most deals can probably work on a bare bones style agent.

I was more steel-manning why they should exists versus why they should exists at a 3% commission.

A very small percentage of buyers agents likely do deserve 3%. There are unique projects that require far more expertise. If some platform rolled up buyers agents, paid them a salary, and charged 1% buyers fees I feel like that business model can work. To date that model has not work perhaps due to restrictions etc from the old ways.

Naive people think "they are paid more if it sells for more, and it is in my interests that it sells for more". They ignore that the agent wants to make a maximum profit per unit time, not a maximum profit per sale.

This assumes an infinite supply of potential sales. In practice I would expect to optimize over some denominator which combines time and sales, emphasized differently based on how saturated the market is.

Regardless, this doesn't address the main issue that the buyer's agent and seller's agent have near-identical incentives: have quick sales with high prices. The only distinction is that the buyer's agent's ability to market their services to future clients is correlated with low prices, but I'm not sure how strong of a correlation that is.

That's right. The only countervailing force is that they want to close a deal sooner rather than later to get paid, so they won't hold out for arbitrarily small increases in price.

I've got an idea to fix social media. No, seriously.

There's a concept of social capital, where your network of human connections is roughly analogous to financial capital. Some people have more, some people have less. And it's pretty clearly better to have more- whether it's finding a job, finding a romantic partner, or just finding someone to go bowling with, social connections matter a lot.

The only problem is, it's hard to measure it. How do you quantify how popular someone is? As that wiki article says, "There is no widely held consensus on how to measure social capital, which has become a debate in itself." But now, thanks to social media, now we know! You can just look at your social media accounts and it tells you exactly how many friends/followers/subscribers/whatever you have. (of course that leaves out a lot of info, like how many of those accounts are bots vs real people, and whether they really love you or just clicked the button on a whim. But it's a start). I'm going to focus on twitter for simplicity, but this is broadly true of any social media platform.

I was wondering if anyone had calculated a "gini index" to measure inequality in social media. I couldn't find anything, maybe because there were too many results about how social media distorts income inequality. But maybe this is new ground for economists to study? What I did find about Twitter:

  • the average (mean I guess) user has 703 followers
  • the top 10 twitter accounts have over 100 million followers each. Elon Musk is currently on top with 170 million.
  • most of his followers only follow him and no one else
  • 170 million / 700 = 143,000. For wealth, the median American net worth is now almost $200,000, compared to Elon Musk's 190 billion. That's a ratio of "only" 950,000. Which I guess is larger than the first one, but that first number is still huge.

Anecdotally, that seems to be how most people now use social media. They don't use it to connect to their real-life friends and family, they use it to follow big accounts. Either real-life celebrities like Elon Musk and Taylor Swift, or just an influencer who was lucky enough to go viral. Those people have a huge audience for every single shit they post, while most of us have barely anyone reacting to us. It's a weird dynamic where the big accounts get so many replies they can't possibly read them all, and most normal people are screaming into the void. Not very "social." . They used to say that "in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, " but that doesn't seem to be the case. Big celebrities just suck up all the attention.

My idea: redistribution! Put a progressive tax on followers, so that every big account loses a certain percentage each year, with the percentage going up with size. Maybe 10% per year for the top accounts. Those followers are reassigned to follow some random person at the bottom, just like how taxes take away rich people's money and give it to poor as welfare. We'd all get around 5-10 new followers randomly assigned to us each year, which isn't going to make us e-famous, but it's a lot if you think of them as real people actually becoming friends with you each year.

You might ask, what's to stop the reassigned from just going dropping their new follow and going back to Taylor Swift? Nothing. If they really want to follow her, and hate this new person they've been assigned, they're free to do that. But my sense is that most people are following a lot of accounts out of sheer inertia. I hardly ever curate my connection list, I just keep following the same people forever. I have a lot of Facebook "friends" who I went to high school with and now barely recognize. I have Youtube subs I never watch. If you took them away, I don't think I'd notice. And it would give me more of an incentive to post if I knew that someone was actually going to read it, without me having to "work the algorithm" to "build up a following."

To some extent Youtube seems to actually do this. I've noticed it randomly recommends me some very low-view videos sometimes, like double-digit views with no comments. One time I reached out to the creator, and they replied back, and they became one of my very few Twitter followers who isn't a bot. I think something like that, on a larger scale, would help Social Media become more "social" instead of mindless passive celebrity worship.

That's a terrible idea. The big accounts I follow, I follow because I like what they post. I don't want to be redistributed to some rando. I'd immediately unfollow any rando the social media tries to make me follow, and I'd be annoyed I had to do it.

And on a lower level, for friends, the number of followers they have doesn't mean much on its own. If I make a friend, and they have 100 followers and follow 100 people, that doesn't mean much compared to another friend that has 3000 followers and follows 3000 people. The second person is just more of a social butterfly who follows a lot of people and gets the obligatory follow back. The person who'd have more social capital than either is the person with 1000 followers and follows 400 people- that's probably a hot girl who posts the occasional revealing photo on a public account, but is also perhaps a normal person who for whatever reason has high social capital for another reason.

One time I reached out to the creator, and they replied back, and they became one of my very few Twitter followers who isn't a bot. I think something like that, on a larger scale, would help Social Media become more "social" instead of mindless passive celebrity worship.

I don't think that's a particularly important goal. No matter what you do, social media friends will very rarely be "real" friends. Real friends will hang out with you to get drinks, will help you move a couch, will send you job opportunities that are a perfect fit for you they heard about from another of their friends. We should absolutely try to do something to rebuild communities and make people more social again, but doing it through social media isn't a worthwhile goal.

I don't think that's a particularly important goal. No matter what you do, social media friends will very rarely be "real" friends. Real friends will hang out with you to get drinks, will help you move a couch, will send you job opportunities that are a perfect fit for you they heard about from another of their friends. We should absolutely try to do something to rebuild communities and make people more social again, but doing it through social media isn't a worthwhile goal.

I agree that having friends who will physically meet you and do things for you in real life is very important, and very different from people who just talk to me online. I don't know how to fix that, though. I know there's Nextdoor that's supposed to be for that, but I've never found it useful for anything except buying/selling stuff. I feel like, for better or worse, we're stuck with social media so we've gotta work forward through that.

I feel like, for better or worse, we're stuck with social media so we've gotta work forward through that.

Encouraging people to be friends with complete randos I don't consider the right step forward.

But what about pen pals, then? Was that not essentially a pre-Social Media form of "encouraging people to be friends with complete randos"?

People are already achieving that level of communication with randos in online comments sections. Pen pals rarely formed very tight bonds.

This will be similar in the result to the practice of buying subscribers(real people who do this for a few cents not bots). Algorithmic i. e. organic growth is very luck dependent and can't be reliable path to even moderate success(at least in the established platforms) . What you really need is social capital network that you're talking about at the start. These share networks permeate Twitter, Telegram or YouTube, the most important thing is who you acquainted with and who can give you free advertisement.

What does "fix" mean - what do you consider to be broken about it? What's the end-goal?

Of all of the things that people have ever said were bad about social media, I don't think the idea that a few people have tons of followers while most have few to none is on anyone's to 10 list.

Incidentally, I'm not sure the idea of specifically redistributing follows is meaningful, considering that basically every social media site pushes hard for you to use algorithmic feeds that show you a selection of things that an algorithm thinks you'll like or engage with rather than strictly people you follow. They can just as easily stick the random small-timers posts in more timelines and rate-limit the big accounts that you actually do follow, and probably nobody will really notice, aside from occasionally liking or following somebody they weren't already following.

Basically I think that social media does the opposite of what it's supposed to do. Instead of being social, it's anti-social. Instead of drawing us together by helping us connect, it forces us into either bitter arguments or monotonous echo chambers. Instead of getting regular people to post their own stuff ("you" tube), it encourages us to watch the viral videos from others. It's essentially just television now, but with no commercial breaks and an algorithm to make it more addictive. It makes us passive, alienated, and dissatisfied. We abandon our real social connections, feel lonely, and try to fix the loneliness through a parasocial pseudo-relationship with these influencers on social media who we can't interact with in any meaningful way.

One option might be to go even harder and have a social network where there's a hard limit on the number of people you can connect with. Myspace used to sort of do this with their "top ten friends" list back in the day. It could also require the relationship be two-way, so that I can't follow a celebrity unless they also follow me back. I'm just sick of our culture being more and more driven by celebrity worship.

Who decides what it's "supposed to do"? What gives any such person the right to dictate that?

For that matter, how do you know there aren't already sites that work exactly the way you think, but you don't know about them, because they aren't as popular or well-advertised? That would imply that the way all existing well-known sites work is exactly how their users and their owners think they should work. I think private chat groups, as exist in pretty much every messaging app, are much more like this, but by their nature aren't well-known.

So by saying you want a law, as an "interesting experiment". Laws mean people will be fined, potentially lose their livelihoods, get thrown in jail, etc. Somehow I don't think the people who would be affected by such a law will find this "experiment" quite so "interesting". Particular when you are forcing every site and all of the users to do things they actively dislike to satisfy your notions about how they "should" work, when there are already alternatives that work that way.

My response is going to sound kind of hostile, but that's just because I don't know how else to format it. You're asking me a lot of questions, and they're good questions, I just think they've been discussed enough already that I can short-circuit the answers.

Who decides what it's "supposed to do"?

me. Or: me as filtered through the democratic process.

What gives any such person the right to dictate that?

The first amendment gives me the right to state my opinion about anything

how do you know there aren't already sites that work exactly the way you think

I have searched and not found any

That would imply that the way all existing well-known sites work is exactly how their users and their owners think they should work.

No, that would imply it's a market failure, where short-term profit incentives make everyone worse off. Just like how the prisoner's dilemma makes both prisoner's lose, no matter how smart they are. The market is not perfect.

Laws mean people will be fined, potentially lose their livelihoods, get thrown in jail, etc

Yes that is how laws work. Somehow I manage to live my life despite the dystopian hell of being forced to pay taxes, register my car, not steal stuff, etc. Somehow I make do.

You're forgetting the part where there needs to be a reason for anyone to care if you expect them to participate. Exactly who do you think the audience is for a social media site that randomly deletes people from your friends list, spams it with total randos you don't give a shit about, and goes out of its way to avoid showing you videos anyone finds too interesting?

YouTube has been doing this thing where they throw random small creators into their suggestions and I hate it. It's gotten to the point where I just immediately block any channel in my feed if the video presented has under a thousand views, because so far they've been poorly produced dogshit 100% of the time.

My idea is this would be enacted by law, on every social media platform, or at least all the ones under US control. It would be exactly like a financial tax- no one likes paying them, but we recognize that it's kind of bad to let a handful of plutocrats control all of the money. In some ways social capital inequality is worse: I don't lose any money when Elon gets richer, but it makes it harder for me to get views on my tweets if everyone is focusing their limited attention span on him and a handful of other mega-influencers.

I don't think you fully appreciate what an unappealing product you're describing. Social media under US control would quickly become a derelict husk. You would need to either exert Chinese levels of authoritarianism over the internet in order to try and prop up your crummy domestic social media, or else watch American public discourse move under the control of other powers.

Oh, i know it would be unpopular. But it would be an interesting experiment, dont you think? Social media companies have a huge network effect and moat. People seem to just stick with the main player, no matter what.

We may actually get a test of this, if tiktok gets banned in the US. Will teens learn how to sideload it, or will they switch to a new app? I really dont know!

TikTok has competition that consists of viable social media platforms, not government-mandated crippleware, so I feel like comparisons are limited. If you're going to force Americans to use that crippleware at gunpoint in pursuit of nebulous social engineering goals, you may as well just ban everything and make them go outside.

I just found out that apparently Facebook has been doing something like this recently. They've rejiggered they're algorithm so that we now see more posts from just regular, random users. So uh, at least Mark Zuckerberg agrees with me... for whatever that's worth.

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Maybe 10% per year for the top accounts. Those followers are reassigned to follow some random person at the bottom, just like how taxes take away rich people's money and give it to poor as welfare. We'd all get around 5-10 new followers randomly assigned to us each year, which isn't going to make us e-famous, but it's a lot if you think of them as real people actually becoming friends with you each year.

Most people use social media for things like sports, music, celebrity gossip. Would it be that the top-10 NFL journalist redistribute to fresh faced local beat journos? Or would it be that my feed would now contain ten truly random people?

I was thinking it would be just totally random people, but maybe you could also use an algorithm so theyd have something in common with you like a common interest.

I could imagine a world where I got shuffled from top baseball accounts to lesser baseball accounts, but it would have to be hyper focused. If I'm following eagles journalists, as I actually am, NFL journalists aren't good enough. I don't want to read about the Arizona Cardinals!

That's funny to me that, as a sports fan, you don't think you could find any common ground with someone who follows the same sport but is a fan of a different team. Are they really such an alien species?

It would be a strictly worse product for the purpose I utilize Twitter for. It's not about finding common ground, it's about giving me news and discussion that I'm not interested in. I've talked about this in prior comments about the modern dynamic of hyper-focused sports journalism.

A feed where I follow ten Yankees beat guys who tell me updates about trade rumors and minor league developments is strictly superior to one where I follow eight Yankees beat guys and one beat guy for the Arizona Diamondbacks and one for the Seattle Mariners who give me updates about minor leaguers I don't really care about.

You might ask, what's to stop the reassigned from just going dropping their new follow and going back to Taylor Swift?

No, I think the question is -- what's to stop someone from writing a plugin that automatically reassigns follows that were auto-generated by your social capital tax.

Mashable has reviewed new data collected by third-party researcher Travis Brown, who compiled basic account information on all of Musk's more than 153 million followers via a meticulous process that respected X's rate limit parameters.

Is Travis Brown, an antifa activist, a source whose data you can trust ?

Probably not (i didnt know he was an Antifa activist) but i think the basic gist is true. Huge inequality between the big accounts with tons of followers, and the "common folk" who follow but are not followed.

It would be ludicrously unlikely that the Matthew principle weren't true on Twitter, since it's true everywhere else. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Attention economy feedback loop.

I stopped using social media to connect with real people in 2015 because most of them just posted links to progressive ragebait and it was making me hate them. I even moved to a new city, met a bunch of new people, added them on facebook, and had to unfollow them because otherwise my feed was inundated with propaganda instead of details of their lives.

but it's a lot if you think of them as real people actually becoming friends with you each year.

But they're not friends.

Similar story with me... i feel like social media has destroyed a lot more friendships than it created. And i dont like that, i think our mosern society is badly lacking in simple friendship and community.

To some extent Youtube seems to actually do this. I've noticed it randomly recommends me some very low-view videos sometimes, like double-digit views with no comments. One time I reached out to the creator, and they replied back, and they became one of my very few Twitter followers who isn't a bot. I think something like that, on a larger scale, would help Social Media become more "social" instead of mindless passive celebrity worship.

As long as social media companies prioritize user engagement as their business model, there's little hope of this happening. I think the viability of something like this happening depends entirely on how you can pitch a way for corporations to profit off this idea.

Maybe we can persuade some celebrities to do it as philanthropy. Or Elon Musk gets high one day and does it on a whim. Or maybe the government just forces it on them, like Ron DeSantis with his youth ban.

His Excellency Joe Biden has declared March 31st a certain ‘Transgender Day of Visibility’, which has generated derision due to its simultaneity with the Western date of Easter Sunday. If this happened outside of Holy Week, it likely would have prompted the regimented groans from the right side of the isle, and that would be that; coincidentally, however, this ‘holiday’ (which has been declared such since 2009) happened to fall on the holiest day of the year for Christians, the group which is perhaps the biggest collection of resisters against transgenderism. Naturally, this has created a lot of controversy. Trump and his team even issued a statement calling for Biden to apologize for his ‘blasphemy’, which is probably a unique event all things considered (when’s the last time you’ve heard of a politician smear another one for blasphemy? In 2000+24, no less?) Such personalities as Caitlyn Jenner and Musk have responded with similar negative attitudes.

Now, I would bet dollars to doughnuts that Biden didn’t make this decision himself. It was definitely his team which did this, in order to show his support for the ‘marginalized’, even as he has declared this day one for ‘visibility’ years before in his term. It raises the question, though, on whether or not Biden actually has these thoughts of support for these people and their identities, with this support even superseding the remembrance of Christ’s resurrection (keep in mind that Biden is an 80 year old ‘devout Catholic’, allegedly). I really doubt he does, but I’m more interested in what he actually thinks about these developments. And, how would his team react to the fact that the black community would significantly oppose this, given their high rate of religiosity? Does Biden still think this is 1969, where if you were transgender you would probably lose your job and become exiled from all institutions in society? Thoughts?

His Excellency Joe Biden

I believe you mean Generalissimo Biden.

Thoughts?

I'm not a theologist, but I'm pretty sure this means that until next Easter only trans people get into heaven.

No, seriously. You yourself note that this is a coincidence. I do find it to be a humorous example of how Republicans will complain about grievance politics while being its most prominent practitioners.

His Excellency Joe Biden has declared March 31st a certain ‘Transgender Day of Visibility’

It makes a sort of sense. Jesus died for their sins too. They are obviously burdened by this disordered behavior. Perhaps through 'visibility' they'll find shame and repentance, that they may go and sin no more.

That would only make sense if it were “Atonement Day of Visibility”, followed by “Judgment Day of Visibility”, because we would need to increase the visibility of the Transfigured rather than the transgendered.

I'm hopeful that atonement and judgement happen during pride month.

The Christians took over many pagan Holidays. Here’s a quick google summary. https://parkervillas.com/pagan-holidays-adopted-by-christianity/

Every upstart religion tries to conquor the old religion and that means incorporating the old Holidays so the plebs get their celebrations. This isn’t some accident we picked Easter it was bound to happen at some point. More a declaration of war.

If we all become trans religion then Good Friday is going under the knife day and Easter Sunday is rising a women.

Christians taking over pagan holidays in the case of Easter(or Christmas) is simply not true. There are historical records of Christian celebrating Easter from the very beginning and the date of Christmas is documented to have been calculated off of the feast of the annunciation.

To the extent that there are ‘pagan influences’, they’re utterly unrelated to the religious aspects of the feast and claims of the opposite make the most banal and parochial factual errors imaginable(no, Easter did not come from Ishtar, and this is easily disproven by the name of Easter in literally any language except English).

In any case the origins of Easter have nothing to do with trans activists’ inability to go literally five seconds without endless celebration on the most sacred day of the year of the largest religion in the country without threatening to kill themselves.

But as the OP says, this year it was on the date of Easter only coincidentally. Easter, as we know, is a movable fest - on a different date each year - while this particular day has been on March 31 since it was first declared in 2009.

Incidentally, one might note that Trump team itself managed to use the highly curious statement "Catholics and Christians" ("We call on Joe Biden's failing campaign and the White House to issue an apology to the millions of Catholics and Christians across America who believe tomorrow is for one celebration only — the resurrection of Jesus Christ"), which sounds like, well, that they don't consider Catholics to be Christians.

More likely Trump is making a play for the Catholic vote specifically because it was a relative weakness in 2020 and he has a specific pitch(basically Biden's surveillance of actual IRL tradcaths and democrats are extreme on abortion). The dominant strain of conservative protestantism in the US considers being a real christian to be the result of an individual conversion which is entirely compatible with Catholicism.

Saying "Catholics and Christians" as though they were separate groups isn't the way to play to the Catholic vote. That's an obvious sign that the messaging is from an Evangelical who thinks we're heretics. As for TradCaths, they're a marginal group who are almost all voting for Trump anyway. I was raised Catholic (though my dad is a non-practicing Protestant), served as a Eucharistic minister, went to a Catholic college where half the faculty were priests and a lot of the students were conservative Catholics (and many of my friends became priests, or at least seminary dropouts), continue to attend mass semi-regularly, and I didn't even know TradCaths were a thing until a few years ago. I may have known vaguely of them but I couldn't differentiate them from the wackaloons who think that every pope since the Middle Ages is an antipope or the other wackaloons who ordain female priests. I went to a Latin Mass once when on vacation in South Carolina and while it was an interesting change of pace it wasn't something I'd want to replace the normal mass, more an interesting historical artifact that deserves preservation. The idea that this is a growing force in the Catholic church seems more an invention of internet conservatives than anything that has any serious influence in the church at large. My mother's much more devout than I'd be surprised if she's even knows these people exist.

The dominant strain of conservative protestantism in the US considers being a real christian to be the result of an individual conversion which is entirely compatible with Catholicism.

It can be, but it doesn't have to be. The sacraments of initiation begin shortly after birth, and confirmation is more a question of "do you want to continue being Catholic and complete your initiation" than "do you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior". Most practicing Catholics are born into it and just go with the flow, and conversions aren't dramatic and require months of RCIA classes. My SIL converted from some Evangelical strain about ten years ago and she said the difference between the churches is stark, most notably the lack of altar calls, which most Catholics find weird as they put people on the spot and create subtle pressure to conform; she liked being in an environment where she could sit and mind her own business without feeling pressured. When I was a kid my mum would take us to "Road to Jerusalem"-type living history things, some of which were at these kinds of churches. My mother was pretty naive about Evangelicalism since it didn't really have a presence in Pittsburgh when she was growing up, and she was pretty taken aback by how aggressive the calls for conversion were if there was a prayer service involved. These were in stark contrast to the mainline protestant services we'd attended for various reasons over the years that were different but not outside our expectations for what church was supposed to be like, e.g. liturgy slightly different, more/less singing, longer sermons, different prayers, etc.

don't consider Catholics to be Christians

Papists or Romanists are a specific sort of Christian. The ecumenicism of current year contrasts with the sectarianism of much of our shared history.

Latter Day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses are frequently on the outside. Would Luther include them in the synagogue of Satan with the Papists?

I mean... if we're going to go with the "Christians and other" framing (which we really shouldn't but whatever), it seems to me that it should be "Christians and Protestants". Since Catholicism is both the OG and the largest Christian group.

As I recall, the ACX poll has categories of Catholic, Protestant, and Other Christians (e.g. Eastern Orthodox). That seemed basically fine.

I haven't listened to the audio, but a likely interpretation from Trump's comment is: This is an important holiday! It's important to Catholics! And it's important to other Christians too! That seems in keeping with his speech patterns that have made for uncomfortable sound bites before.

I checked and there's a Mormon category as well. I would certainly be interested if Scott would drill down even more, I'd like to see stats on EO vs OO -- and does he have any Church of the East peeps in his readership? (probably not)

(also I want to cross-reference this with Scott's "Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours" question)

Catholics claim to be the OG. Some of the eastern traditions would like a word.

They are the largest.

I'm not competent to litigate the dispute of whether the Catholics split from the Orthodox or vice versa, so I will leave that be. But either way, they are the OG in comparison to the Protestants.

Certainly older than the Protestents. I wasn't thinking specifically about the schism but I'm reasonably confident the churches in Antioch or Alexandria predate Rome. I'm not sure the distinction of first is particularly useful in this context.

One could say that Catholics are the oldest group celebrating Easter today anyway.

they don't consider Catholics to be Christians.

A sore point with some Evangelicals/Fundamentalists, because of strong Protestant anti-Catholicism. The Roman Church fell away from True Christianity (date at which this happened varies, some will go all the way to Constantine) and filled the pure Gospel message with man-made additions and traditions. The Reformers stripped all these away to get back to True Christianity (again, dissension over which denominations remained too Papist-influenced) and so long as Catholics continue to deny the Reformation and hold to their false doctrines, they can't be considered true Christians.

The traditional strain of American Evangelicalism is definitely not a fan of Catholicism, but it competes with a more ecumenical strain that sees Catholics either as perfectly valid Christians who happen to be wrong about some things (as all sects of Christians consider the others to be), or at least good allies against things opposed to their shared fundamental beliefs -- precisely the sort of situation being talked about here.

The big issue is, with the rapid rise of non-denominational Protestantism in the US, there really isn't a term that you can use to describe all Protestants that they would actually identify with except "Christians." And even that gets pushback from the "I'm not a Christian, I'm a Christ-follower" people. By far, the largest Christian group in the US that seems to still identify with a particular Church first is Catholics, thus the clunky term "Catholics and Christians," which really just means "Catholics and undifferentiated Christians." The trend elsewhere, outside of the LDS church and confessional Protestantism, is towards rebranding churches as just "X Church," instead of "X Baptist Church" or "X Bible Church" or even "X Methodist Church." And it's important to note that, if anything, evangelical Protestantism is more friendly towards Catholics than confessional Protestantism, who have explicit and very long catechisms and creeds that speak firmly against Catholicism and come from a time of literal warfare between the two groups.

If Trump's team wanted to pander to Catholics (as it seems he wanted to do) while communicating more effectively, they might have said "Catholics and Christians of all kinds," or something like that. But as it is I don't think it was designed to exclude Catholics, but explicitly to include them. It just sounds very clunky.

Okay, that article is a bunch of crap. The first off the list is the good old "Christians took over Christmas from Sol Invictus" which is a story that has been examined in detail.

New Year's Day is not a Christian holiday. Indeed, the mediaeval 'New Year' started in March, on Lady Day (the feast of the Annunciation) and this is why tax years used to start in April in the British Isles. Fun fact, Tolkien fans, this is why the Professor has a lot of significant dates in LOTR happening on that date in March. In fact, New Year's Day is so not a Christian holiday, it's why the Presbyterians in Scotland pushed for it (as Hogmanay) to be the big celebratory winter festival, because traditional Christmas was too Papist.

Easter? Do I really have to go through the whole fucking "No, Eostre is not the goddess" thing once more?

'The Roman version of Halloween' is a new twist, but they got the facts backwards as usual.

May Day - day in honour of Maia, yes. Day repurposed to Mary, yes. But the entirety of May is dedicated to Mary, as are other calendar months dedicated to other Christian themes, e.g. June to the Sacred Heart, November to the Holy Souls. They're really scrabbling for some "Isis and Horus are the originals of Mary and the Child Jesus" parallels here, not to mention that if you're not Catholic, you are probably not celebrating May as the month of Mary. Plus, May Day as International Workers' Day has been dedicated to St Joseph the Worker

Epiphany - the Three Kings. And they take an Italian version of how it's celebrated and then claim that hey, them Christians picked it because it was sacred to Diana! You can well imagine that by now I have my head in my hands. Are we sure this isn't click bait produced by ChatGPT?

Diana is Befana is Santa Claus. Of course it is.

St John's Eve - Midsummer. I'm not going to deny that this was an existing festival repurposed by Christianity, but it's not as simple as "oh we're taking over the old gods".

This article suffers heavily from "we're selling villas in Italy, so we're going to link Italy = Catholicism, Catholicism = Christianity, Italian traditional festivals = Christian festivals = Pagan festivals" bias, since "All Christian feasts were originally Pagan" is something that hardcore Protestant apologists who were anti-Catholic, pagans who want to pretend that what they practice now is an unbroken link to the traditions of the past, and atheists all want to agree on, and it's a perennial favourite to trot out in the news media at Christmas and Easter "did you know these are originally Pagan festivals?" pieces.

If you go check out some heavily progressive spaces, some seem to be against Biden for not being progressive enough. This is probably an olive branch to them in the lead up to the elections. Devout Christians are largely voting republican and I think he's gambling he will gain more votes than he loses. I'm guessing this is a pure election play. There is no way Biden's team didn't know that this would be antagonistic.

I don't know. This decision seems badly out of touch. Elite values are not the values of the average voter.

And while I'm sure white Boomers will be kept onside by NBC news fact checks that say "actually, Biden didn't make Easter into Trans Awareness Day", this group of mainstream news watchers is increasingly irrelevant.

Republicans can and should plaster this everywhere. How will this play in the black community? How will this play in the Hispanic community? This badly hurts the Democratic Party coalition and speeds along the party realignment.

Democrats might never win the Hispanic vote in a Presidential election again.

Democrats might never win the Hispanic vote in a Presidential election again.

Trump winning the Hispanic vote wouldn't surprise me. But this would have maybe 2% to do with trans awareness day(getting church attending Hispanic Catholics to vote as republican as similarly devout Hispanic protestants is a longstanding goal of GOP strategists and relatively reachable) and 98% to do with the price of groceries. There simply are not a lot of Hispanic values voters and none of them are swing voters anyways; most Hispanics are working class normies who happen to be of Latin descent. Neither based ultra-Catholics nor the next wave of DNC activist energy.

Transgender Day of Visibility

2009 sounds about right. You can tell this idea is from the early stages of the "woke" wave that crested from 2013-2021. It is a completely sincere expression of what the classical MtF desires above all else, positive attention. The point isn't the internal experience of the trans person himself, the point is the internal experience of everyone else as they are forced to deal with the "visibility" of trans people. Note the conspicuous lack of the modern pretexts that have evolved to counteract later anti-woke resistance. Indeed, the entire point is to not invoke tropes like anti-trans violence.

"Unlike Transgender Day of Remembrance, Crandall said, the day of visibility aims to focus on all the good things in the trans community, instead of just remembering those who were lost. 'The day of remembrance is exactly what it is. It remembers people who died,' she said. 'This focuses on the living. People have told me they love Remembrance Day but it really focuses on the negative aspect of it. Isn't there anything that could focus on the positive aspect of being trans?'"

Is there a reading of this that doesn't involve intentional spite on some level? Someone involved here surely knew what they were doing

No, calling Biden “his excellency” definitely involves intentional spite.

By the administration. Yes. The holiday was declared by some trans right activist years ago. It was a date on the calendar while Easter has its day move around.

The administration therefore couldn’t ignore a trans-holiday because too many of there people are trans religion but a lot of others are Christian religion. To celebrate trans day on a different day would disrespect trans-religion. So they were in a no-win position. The administration didn’t pick today for a trans religion holiday but it was assigned by trans religion.

Flying the trans flag during pride month at the Vatican Embassy was in my opinion far more disrespectful than what they did today which was a no-win situation for the politicians. That was truly disrespectful and obviously they would not try doing something like that in Saudi Arabia.

I can’t really describe trans/pride as anything other than a religion and since Scott describes it that way it feels like an acceptable view here. The politicians are just in a hard spot where they have two religions claiming the same day and the two religions both hate each other.

Edit: Lists of pride/trans related days some guy compiled on twitter. Significantly increasing my priors to spite. If they have this many holidays it’s a lot easier to not celebrate one of them when it’s another groups main holiday.

https://twitter.com/jarvis_best/status/1774115482255106479?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

The embassy to the Vatican is in Rome, Italy. They didn't fly the trans flag inside Vatican City.

Is it really a difference? Vatican Embassy versus embassy to the Vatican?

I guess one implies it’s in the Vatican but it’s still a middle finger to a Priest whose going to the Embassy to deal with something.

Yes. The flagpole the trans flag was flown from primarily belongs to the Embassy to Italy, which is co-located with the administratively separate Embassy to the Holy See and Rome branch of the Embassy to the UN. A quick google suggests that the Embassy to the Vatican participated in Pride Month by hanging a rainbow flag (not the trans flag) above the entrance.

So they were in a no-win position.

Joe could have ignored it. Joe could have wished a happy dual celebration of Easter and trans pride day. Joe could have not banned religious themes from Easter egg contests for military families at the same time.

Joe could have not banned religious themes from Easter egg contests for military families at the same time.

The Egg Board says this had nothing to do with Biden, though?

"The American Egg Board has been a supporter of the White House Easter Egg Roll for over 45 years and the guideline language referenced in recent news reports has consistently applied to the board since its founding, across administrations."

To be fair, the statement about trans pride day was on March 29, while today he put out an Easter message in which he said the following:

Jill and I send our warmest wishes to Christians around the world celebrating Easter Sunday. Easter reminds us of the power of hope and the promise of Christ’s Resurrection.

As we gather with loved ones, we remember Jesus’ sacrifice. We pray for one another and cherish the blessing of the dawn of new possibilities. And with wars and conflict taking a toll on innocent lives around the world, we renew our commitment to work for peace, security, and dignity for all people.

From our family to yours, happy Easter and may God bless you.

I had earlier classified Biden as an "old dog who still knows some tricks" in his vigorous efforts to keep petrol prices low.

I now retract this statement. What on Earth are they even thinking? This is political incompetence of the highest order. Surely they know that this is going to poll negatively? Does Trump win Hispanics by 20 points this time? The inmates are running the asylum.

I suspect the people who came up with this have no idea anyone would object; they probably don't even know any "Easter Worshippers", aside maybe from their deplorable great-uncle.

Joe Biden was VP to a politician who emerged from the universe of big-city political machines run out of Black churches, and won the Democratic primary against several progressive candidates who were both more charismatic than him, largely based on the support of those same machines. Black Christians worship on Easter Day in the same ways as white ones, except given the increase in evangelical self-ID among white Republicans who wouldn't darken a church door, they are probably more likely to show up.

I don't think Biden did have anything to do with this (apart from the 'sign the paper' bit). This is what people were talking about a while back here where they don't care if Biden is old and losing it, just re-elect him and the Administration will do all the actual governing.

Well, here's the Administration doing the governing, how do you like them apples?

As was mentioned, this clashes with Cesar Chavez Day so congratulations on pissing off at least part of the Hispanic voting bloc, and it certainly does seem like some of the shadowy figures doing the real governing while Joe is the figurehead do have an agenda going on. They just got careless this time round and stepped on the toes of one of the other "we are the party of women, gender and sexual minorities, and brown and black people" groups under the umbrella.

As was mentioned, this clashes with Cesar Chavez Day

Holy shit! They are even dumber then I thought. Political malpractice.

Yes, I think this is clear evidence that Biden himself is a non-entity and that his staff is running the show. No one who has ever run for office would ever be so out of touch.

You are over egging this entirely. Approximately no-one cares about Cesar Chavez day, and 31st March has been both for quite some time without any problems. And it was established after the day of visibility itself (2009 vs 2014)

I predict this has basically zero impact on political outcomes and calling it political malpractice is exaggeration to the point of nonsense.

I don't know if Biden was involved or not (experience says he likely said yes when asked by a staffer should we do x) but its essentially about as small a deal as you can imagine.

All the actual polling, shows this issue to be an issue nobody outside of two parts of society care about - the normal reactionaries who hate all change and very specifically, conservatives and centrists who live in D+70 districts. Since a lot of conservative and centrists writers live in those areas, it becomes this supposed huge issue, all while in the real world, there's like 20 kids in all of Utah who supposedly want to play on the "wrong" high school sports team.

This doesn't mean people in red states care or are pro-transgender, it's that simply saying something is connected to transgenderism is enough to move their vote. They tried that in the various abortion referendums as a scare tactic, and it didn't work.

As was mentioned, this clashes with Cesar Chavez Day so congratulations on pissing off at least part of the Hispanic voting bloc

Has the Hispanic voting bloc raised a stink, honestly?

As was mentioned, this clashes with Cesar Chavez Day so congratulations on pissing off at least part of the Hispanic voting bloc,

Actual US Hispanics give so few shits about Cesar Chavez day that a new system of measurement would have to be invented to discuss it properly, although something like 98% celebrate Easter in the classic American manner with eggs and rabbits and children in cute church outfits with lots of pastels, that you prepare for by eating fish and chips(sorry, 'fish fry') at a buffet. Cesar Chavez day and trans day of visibility are both strictly activist holidays that rank below national pizza day and national slurpee day for the general public, and on par with pi day for the relevant activists, neither of whom will defect anytime soon.

First, I thought there was already a Trans Day of Visibility, I see it plastered all over social media enough.

Second, while it's tin-eared to do it on Easter Sunday, it won't be Easter at the same date every year.

Third, others have pointed out that March 31st is already Cesar Chavez Day, and even better it was made a federal holiday by Obama, so seems like somebody is not being totally au fait with Latinx Representation 😀 I'm not blaming Joe for that one, I think all he had to do with this was "Sign this piece of paper we put in front of you, Mr. President. No, you don't need to read it, just sign it".

As far as I'm concerned, these kind of special days are on a par with National Potato Day or International Toothbrush Month so I don't care one way or the other, I will continue to live in happy ignorance. I imagine the La Raza set will be a bit miffed, though, and I'm quite happy to sit back with the popcorn as the Latinx and Trans sets of Kilkenny Cats start hissing and spitting at one another.

The only celebration was New York lighting up significant landmarks in trans pride colors.

Cesar Chavez Day is not a Federal holiday, it's just a day proclaimed by the President. Nothing's closed, no one has to do anything, it's just hot air.

It is a holiday in California - at least the schools are always off that day.

Ah, I thought it was. So all these proclamations are indeed just hot air? No day off? Nothing official? So there's not really any reason the White House PR team couldn't have waited until Monday to announce this, seeing as how Sunday was Easter Sunday?

They both seem to be ranked somewhere below Pi Day, where at least people bring pies into schools, and way below Cinco de Mayo, where people not only consume taco and margaritas, but also play music and make decorations.

It's probably because they're such BS holidays that they weren't transferred to Monday or Friday. A real federal holiday would have been.

There are more of these holidays that get limited governmental recognition than you can shake a stick at. Some congressmen proposes that March 22 is National Inland Waterway Workers Safety Awareness Day and it passes unanimously by joint resolution and nobody pays attention to it except a few trade organizations that want do distribute safety leaflets.

Perhaps the Latinx trans persons will feel extra validated. Cheers for intersectionality.

He could have just said nothing. “Transgender day of visibility” is about as relevant as national pancake day. If national pancake day fell on Christmas, or maybe Labor Day or Memorial Day or something, it seems likely that Scranton Joe would simply say nothing about it

I don’t think these things are actually as benign as some are suggesting. Somebody with the power to speak on behalf of the president made this decision; they haven’t been fired, there has been no apology.

Perhaps there should be a national “draw Muhammad day” that coincides with the beginning of Ramadan. Would it be considered benign if president Trump sent out a statement (regardless of if he typed it himself or not) wishing everybody a happy draw Muhammad day?

Draw Muhammad day would actually be aligned with American values. Maybe this should be a new 4th of July tradition that the president celebrates? Presumably tolerant liberals would just call this a “coincidence”.

Are you contending that, right now, transgenderism is primarily motivated by sticking it to Christianity, in the way that a Draw Muhammad Day would be wrt Islam?

I'm not sure. There definitely does seem to be a thread of "we aim to radically alter society", and this case that society is a Christian one.

What’s with “Scranton Joe?” Is it meant to be some sort of crack about his humble roots?

Biden refers to himself as this; yes presumably to try and create an image of somebody with humble roots.

There is a draw Muhammad day and at least two would-be Muslim mass shooters were themselves shot trying to shoot up a draw Muhammad celebration. With bonus the FBI had a hand in the almost-enacted mass shooting and a couple FBI agents actually followed the terrorists on order to observe the shooting.

On one level, it's a silly, ridiculous political "scandal" for a slow news week.

On another, there is a lot of signaling going on there, on both sides. Politics isn't about politics, and this is as valid a battleground as any. It is interesting to see the positions being taken.

Boosting a niche thing like trans awareness over the prime holy day for (supposedly) 65% of the country is a little on the nose from a public relations standpoint. Christian-bashing has become so prevalent on the left that they sometimes forget it's a majority of the country they look down on.

For what it's worth Easter happens on a different day every year (somewhere within a ~30 day interval), while "Transgender Day of Visibility" happens on March 31st every year, was created in 2009 by activists, and was endorsed by Biden in 2021. Easter won't occur on March 31st for at least the next 25 years (sorry, my chart only goes to 2049).

The point being: the only "choice" Biden made in the last 3 years was to continue to proclaim his support for transpeople on a holiday he had already endorsed in the past, rather than staying conspicuously silent. "Democrat politician refuses to endorse leftwing holiday he's already endorsed three times" would certainly be something to talk about.

If "Biden endorses holiday for the 4th time (but this time it's on Easter!)" merits relitigating The Motte's favorite hobbyhorse, that says more about The Motte's desire to relitigate it's hobbyhorse than it does about any novel development in the real world.

Yes, but issuing the formal proclamation and ignoring that Obama already made March 31st a federal holiday for Cesar Chavez, from the Democratic president who was Obama's VP, is not the usual state of affairs. Personally, I don't think Biden had much to do with this announcement, apart from the usual 'yeah sure we endorse this' and it was the munchkins in the Adminstration who put this out there.

I must see what the announcement for last Trans Day was; okay, looks like this year is a Significant Anniversary, which is probably why they pushed the boat out:

In 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden proclaimed March 31 as a Transgender Day of Visibility, stating in part, "I call upon all Americans to join in the fight for full equality for all transgender people." Biden was the first American president to issue a formal presidential proclamation recognizing the event. Biden issued a similar proclamation a year later, welcoming Jeopardy! contestant and transgender woman Amy Schneider to the White House and announcing a set of measures intended to support transgender rights.

2024 marks the 15th anniversary of Transgender Day of Visibility with celebrations planned across the globe.

Yes, but issuing the formal proclamation and ignoring that Obama already made March 31st a federal holiday for Cesar Chavez, from the Democratic president who was Obama's VP, is not the usual state of affairs

You mean in 2021?

Easter won't occur on March 31st for at least the next 25 years (sorry, my chart only goes to 2049).

Next occurrence is in 2086 (62 years hence).

From the statement:

But extremists are proposing hundreds of hateful laws that target and terrify transgender kids and their families...

That highlighted phrase has become not just normalized, but sacralized on the left with the rise of "protect trans kids". Almost no one had heard of this term until a decade or so ago, then it suddenly started picking up around the time Trump took office, and now searches for it have increased sharply (see Google trends here. This is just absolutely wild to me how quickly this term has taken hold and how quickly people seem to have come to believe that this is something they pretty much always thought, that it's a good and normal thing, that this is medical care, and only a bunch of hateful extremists could think otherwise.

But pause. What exactly are "trans kids"? On one hand, I am assured that no one is doing irreversible damage to children, but on the other hand, I am to understand that there is a distinct category of people that it would be hateful to not put on courses of hormone therapy to alter the development of their physiologic gender. I don't understand how people are capable of holding these ideas in their heads simultaneously and that they've adopted these ideas that are so new, so utterly untested consequentially as not just right, but obviously morally right and opposed only by a bunch of bigots. My impression is that for quite a few of these people, they would be unwilling to clearly answer the question, "what are trans kids?" without getting evasive and yet protecting that category is a moral imperative.

I am disturbed.

The steelman is that a lot of trans people are really obviously trans before they transition even socially (and sometimes even before they realize it themselves), and whether aware or not, a lot of these regulations can still impact them (or, less charitably, be reported as/forced into impacting them, a la Floridian teachers making news releases).

The ironman is that, while there's a lot of controversy about where and when the Correct minimum age for specific types of transition in minors is even among the broader LGBT movement, setting that as 18 for hormonal transition is a very far outlier, and that's been that way for a while. I'll point to Venus Envy as an example of early-2000s media covering transition of late high schoolers (and much of the exploration of the theme is focused on the contrast between Zoe going through conventional processes, and Larson as the problems of gray market self-administration), and that being completely unnoteworthy among readers.

That's not hugely honest to describe as kids, but it's not exactly dishonest, either.

The problem is that there's a genuine paradox, where the overwhelming majority of trans people can look back and honestly say it would have been better, easier, more complete, less traumatic, so on, if they'd realized and started transition just slightly earlier, and gotten just that small amount of more support. And then Zeno stumbles in like a drunken fool.

On one hand, I am assured that no one is doing irreversible damage to children, but on the other hand, I am to understand that there is a distinct category of people that it would be hateful to not put on courses of hormone therapy to alter the development of their physiologic gender.

I don't think this is a hard circle to square at all. A person who believes this might believe that:

  • Social transition for younger trans kids, and hormone blockers for trans kids entering puberty do an acceptably low amount of long-term damage to their bodies to serve as a first line treatment until they age into adulthood and decide whether they want to undergo hormone treatments and cosmetic surgeries.

Whether I personally accept that as true, I think that is a perfectly consistent thing to believe. I'm sure there's a doctor out there somewhere immediately jumping to hormone treatments and cosmetic surgery for so-called trans kids, but I think that deviates from what even most trans activists say is the ideal course of treatment for minors.

That highlighted phrase has become not just normalized, but sacralized on the left with the rise of "protect trans kids". Almost no one had heard of this term until a decade or so ago, then it suddenly started picking up around the time Trump took office, and now searches for it have increased sharply

I don't think this is surprising at all. I think one of the most rhetorically effective attacks on trans people on the right has been stopping kids from transitioning (especially in states where they can already do it without parental consent.)

Unfortunately, right or left "think of the children" always seems to be an effective tactic. I think this is just an example of Toxoplasma of Rage in action. The idea of "irreversible damage" to kids bodies complements the idea of "driving trans kids to suicide." Together they are a recipe for endless back and forth argument, since both sides can position themselves as the ones most concerned about children's well-being.

The idea of "irreversible damage" to kids bodies complements the idea of "driving trans kids to suicide." Together they are a recipe for endless back and forth argument, since both sides can position themselves as the ones most concerned about children's well-being.

Assuming that these are not rival empirical claims that can be investigated, yes.

I don't know. I've seen several trans skeptical people bite the bullet on trans suicide rates.

The attitude seems to either be "the threat of trans kids committing suicide is emotional blackmail meant to shut down the argument from society and parents and force them to go through with mutilating their child against their will" or occasionally even "if they commit suicide at higher rates, then completely ignoring the issue solves the issue (through the self-removal of trans people from the population.)"

I mean, there's nothing stopping both claims from being true (to the extent they're empirically testable.) It could hypothetically be that social contagion and permissive doctors are allowing large numbers of cis children to ruin their bodies through transition followed by inevitable detransition, and that from a purely medical perspective the most effective way to prevent the suicide of enduringly trans children is to allow them to socially transition and take puberty blockers until adulthood when they can make the choice of whether to undergo hormonal therapy and cosmetic surgery. In that hypothetical world, the difficulty would be with separating cis children from trans children in a reliable way that minimized overall harm to both groups.

The empirical case can only solve so much without models of what is happening. The DSM-V's intro talks about how it models mental disorders, and it basically says that they are useful perspectives for treatment and not necessarily a single "real" disease with a known cause or set of causes. That is, ADHD is "real" to doctors using the DSM to the extent that it has been found that patients coming in complaining about a common cluster of issues, tend to have those issues resolved through a common cluster of treatments. And it's no different for gender dysphoria. When it comes to a gender dysphoria diagnosis today, there is no need for brain tests or an "intersex brain" hypothesis or anything more empirical than, "have they had 2 out of these 6 listed symptoms for at least 6 months?"

I'm sure there's a doctor out there somewhere immediately jumping to hormone treatments and cosmetic surgery for so-called trans kids, but I think that deviates from what even most trans activists say is the ideal course of treatment for minors.

I see you are fortunately ignorant of Dr Yeet The Teets:

Her feeds often fill with photos tagged #NipRevealFriday, highlighting patients like Michael whose bandages were just removed. On her office windowsill sits a framed nameplate with one of her best-known catchphrases on TikTok: “Yeet the Teet,” slang for removing breasts.

Dr. Gallagher said she performed top surgeries on about 40 patients a month, and roughly one or two of them are under 18. Younger patients are usually at least 15, though she has operated on one 13-year-old and one 14-year-old, she said, both of whom had extreme distress about their chests.

The surgeon said that most of her patients, teenagers and adults alike, found her on TikTok. Her online presence has drawn sharp criticism from right-wing media, as well as from some parents and doctors who say she uses the platform to market to children.

A countrywoman of my own, it seems, so I apologise on behalf of my nation that she decided the quickest way to make a buck was move to the USA and do vanity plastic surgery.

It is good that you are disturbed.

It’s a trope in fiction of malign regimes requiring that a logical paradox be treated as official truth, such as 1984’s “two plus two equals five”, but it has a long history before that of being used to illustrate fashionable or politically advantageous absurdities. And of course, the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes is a tool to immunize children against swallowing such propaganda.

I have proposed facetiously that there be four categories for clarity: male men, female men, male women, and female women. Of course, nobody who accepts the trans paradox wants this; they want “trans woman” to be treated as the same type of category as “red-headed woman” and “short woman”, and anyone who disagrees to be shouted down for their offensiveness.

I actually have a question for you. Would you be more okay with a regime like the Weimar republic had of transvestite passes? They were doctor's notes that smoothed out the act of cross-dressing in public for people, and made it less of a hassle to interact with authorities.

They’d instantly complain it was like Jews being forced to wear yellow stars, despite the historical incongruity. And I wouldn’t blame them. As I dive deeper into Ayn Rand’s minarchism, I see how little the government has the moral right to be doing in our lives. Emergency responders need to know which set of internal organs to expect, of course, and police should be able to describe suspects by apparent gender. But gay civil unions and divorces (as well as contractual poly families as described in Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land) should be legal, as long as the state doesn’t force churches, wedding photographers, etc. to accommodate and celebrate things that are heretical to their faith or which fill them with loathing of repugnance.

I remember back before gay marriage was legalized in the United States. Toys were on color-coded aisles, blue for boys and pink for girls of course. In 2012, a group was founded in the UK called Let Toys Be Toys which pushes the agenda of the movement which urges toymakers, toy stores, publishers, and so on to reduce the gender coding of toys and the gender stereotypes in children's books, and toy playsets and commercials. Target later made national news by declaring it was no longer going to explicitly gender-code toy aisles.

This appeared to be an appeal to classical liberalism, in which the freedom of the individual is paramount. I agree with that part, though not the activism.

But almost as soon as the ink was dry on Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, Cthulhu swam left and suddenly everything was about trans. It wasn’t long before we heard about parents using gendered toys to test which gender their toddlers or even babies identified as.

This was a whiplash pivot from freeing children from the “tyranny” of gendered toys to using the toys as a bed of Procrustes, carving their flesh to match which toy they picked, and declaring it genocide if they weren’t allowed to.

So no, I’d rather we not follow the literal Weimar Republic in using the power of the state to say who’s legally a woman. Who knows what the next lap of Cthulhu would be, and which moneyed powers would use it for lifelong medication paid by the state.

As I dive deeper into Ayn Rand’s minarchism, I see how little the government has the moral right to be doing in our lives.

I've read widely in the libertarian, minarchist and anarcho-capitalist traditions, and while I think they are often good at identifying certain problems of government, and I'm convinced by the arguments of Huemer's The Problem of Political Authority and Ellickson's Order without Law that these forms of government could potentially work in the real world, I still find myself more attracted to social democracy as a set of principles for organizing society, especially since it's actually been tried in the real world and seems to work reasonably well.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very sympathetic to the view of government that it is just the largest and most successful gang of thugs in an area, and that there is actually little moral grounding for the idea of political authority. But I'm a pragmatist and a consequentialist, and I'm more willing to shrug and say, "if the big bullies take care of the little bullies and make people more free, that's better than the alternative." I tend to agree with Noah Smith's argument in The Liberty of Local Bullies that there are many "intermediate" groups between the government and the individual that often have just as much power to reduce your liberty as the government does.

Imagine a devout Jehovah's Witness in high school refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because oaths are against their faith, and constantly being punished by their overzealous home room teacher for it. The only way to resolve the issue in a way that preserves the liberty of the Jehovah's Witness to not say the Pledge is to go over the teacher's head, via school administrators. But what if the school administrators support the teacher over the student? The only way to force the teacher to respect the student's religious freedom is to go a level higher to the government, and hope that they will force fines or other coercive measures in order to protect the student's rights.

I think for freedom to be meaningfully maximized you need a centralized government with enough state capacity to force the local bullies to respect freedom. Obviously, it would be foolish to claim that centralized governments with high state capacity always results in increased liberty, but most of the countries I can think of that are good places to live in are some form of liberal representative democracy with free markets and a government with enough state capacity to secure people's rights, and create money transfers and social safety nets (even the United States.)

I think for freedom to be meaningfully maximized you need a centralized government with enough state capacity to force the local bullies to respect freedom.

That’s the good intention which paved the road to Hell, the road we call the anti-trust laws. Alan Greenspan wrote a detailed yet eminently readable paper, later published by Rand, about the US government’s efforts to stop “monopolies” and the resulting unbridled growth of the bully state.

Outlaw unequivocally evil externalities, to be sure! But don’t let the law become non-objective, subject to whim or pull. If you give a man a gun and tell him he’s the defender of justice, pretty quickly he’ll think his job is to find the right time to pull the trigger. Find the proper size and role of government, and provide better incentives for it to protect the individual even at the cost of outcomes for pressure groups with sob stories or crocodile tears.

as well as contractual poly families as described in Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land

You're thinking the of the line marriages and so forth in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?

Stranger had polyamory too, was five years earlier, and (according to some accounts) kicked off the free-love Sixties as pop culture knows it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/polyamory/comments/23du3h/the_early_poly_movement_and_heinleins_stranger_in/

I want to ask, what is so wrong with being a guy in a dress? Women wearing trousers/pants were once upon a time regarded as "that is men's clothing" but now we accept that "no, it's women's clothing too". So for the people who want "skirt go spinny!", let's normalise it in the same way that dresses and skirts are men's clothing too. That way, you can wear the crop tops and fishnets and miniskirts and heels to your heart's content with nobody having to fight over "this is a woman, a Real Woman".

I acknowledge that for trans people, it's more than cosmetic. But it sure seems like a portion of the online set do treat it as "makeup and long hair and dressing like anime girls, wee-hee!" So let's go back to "this is a transvestite, not a transsexual/transgender person" and get that out of the way and sort out some of the confusion. Guys who like to dress up girly are not the same as "I feel that I am indeed a woman and suffer from not being recognised as such". Don't lump them all in the same basket and that way the more egregious cases won't have to be defended by the trans rights set for fear of "if we accept condemnation of this case, then we will be vulnerable to attacks on all trans people, so even if this is a fake, we have to support them".

You're not gender-fluid, Phil, you just like wearing dresses. Let's accept that some days you like to come to work in drag, that men can wear dresses the same way women can wear trousers, and nobody has to get into fights over 'are you a man or a woman or neither or both'.

There are in fact macho kilt makers, and if I had to bet of random trends to eventually become socially acceptable that would be one of my draft picks. That I personally think it's a rather dumb thing to get caught up on doesn't make the utilikilt a feminine garment; it would quite clearly look a bit butch on a woman whereas on a man it just looks a bit unusual and hipsterish. You know, goes with three days of stubble and an IPA.

I want to ask, what is so wrong with being a guy in a dress?

in theory, nothing. But I think these days porn has ruined it for everyone. It's like that Gore Vidal quote about how "turgid" belongs to the porn writers now. There's no way I can see a dude in a dress now and not think either (a) he's a trans person making a political statement or (b) this is fetish. Or possibly both.

I want to ask, what is so wrong with being a guy in a dress?

This feels like it works best for middle and upper middle class trans/gender non-conforming (GNC) people, and terribly for every other kind of GNC person.

Whether it is technically legal or not, a male-bodied teenager who comes into a job interview with lipstick and a dress is likely not going to get the job. Good numbers are hard to get, but there's plenty of anecdotal accounts from trans people who had trouble finding work because they were non-passing trans people, and I don't think there's any strong reason to doubt their accounts even without good hard data on discrimination that shows up in "legible" parts of society.

I seriously doubt affirmative action, and DEI initiatives have made things much better for all trans/GNC people in this regard. (I mean, isn't it common knowledge that the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action have always been cis white women?) Sure, a progressive tech firm might happily hire a trans woman as a software engineer, but for every company like that there's probably a dozen bodegas and fast food joints in more conservative areas that don't want to hire a teenage cross-dresser in their first job, and that lack of work experience might echo out into their job prospects down the line, amplifying the effects always present because of their status as a recognizable cross-dresser.

Part of the reason that Weimar transvestite passes looked interesting to me, is that they seemed like exactly the sort of legal vehicle that one could attach non-discrimination laws and cultural norms around. I know more libertrian or social conservative types would still have issues with such a regime, but I do think it would overcome the basic issue of "telling a societal lie" that many people claim is their main objection, and I think a world with transvestite passes and social norms of pronoun hospitality (enforced by social censure, and not legal censure) could get 90% of where trans advocates want things, and without any obvious "lies" or "metaphysical nonsense."

Whether it is technically legal or not, a male-bodied teenager who comes into a job interview with lipstick and a dress is likely not going to get the job.

This doesn’t seem to me like that much of an imposition. “I really like wearing dresses, putting on makeup, and doing up my hair.” Okay, great, do that on your own time, not at work, and especially not at a job interview. I really like dressing casually, not caring what my hair looks like, and only shaving every couple of days, but I wouldn’t dream of going to an interview wearing blue jeans and sporting two days of stubble, and if I did, I definitely wouldn’t expect to get the job.

There’s this idea floating around that you need to be your “authentic self” 100% of the time, and everyone around you needs to accommodate that, which is absolute nonsense. Anyone who’s ever had a non-PC thought or who’s ever enjoyed a dirty joke knows he can’t get away with expressing either one at most work places, and everyone accepts that that’s right and proper. Or, going back to clothing, take that episode of The Office where Jim showed up in a tuxedo. The writers of that episode relied on the audience knowing that a tuxedo is inappropriate attire in an office setting. But if Jim had instead come in dressed like Marilyn Monroe, somehow that’s supposed to be fine. No. Wear a tux, wear a dress, or tell an inappropriate joke on your own time.

(And while I’m grousing about clothing, Zoomers need to stop wearing pajamas and athletic wear in public. Sweat pants are fine for lounging about the house, but there’s no reason you should be wearing them at work or out in public. Show some self-respect.)

At the moment it's inappropriate because that's not tolerated gender role behaviour. Great, if gender is socially constructed, let's change the roles. I hate makeup and wear as little as possible. If Johnny there loves it and religiously watches contouring tutorials on Youtube, let him doll himself up for work and let me just cover the worst of the red blotchy skin with a dusting of powder, and neither of us have to claim that "in fact I am a girl/in truth I am a boy" to be permitted to do this.

If after all that Johnny is still "no, I really am a girl", okay, let's examine that. But if Billy just wants to wear heels to work, that doesn't mean he's not a boy, then live and let live. I think it would be a lot less stressful on everyone, and we'd have the advantage that the narcissistic exhibitionists couldn't use the figleaf of "I am being oppressed" so we'd all know the ones who are trouble.

Whether it is technically legal or not, a male-bodied teenager who comes into a job interview with lipstick and a dress is likely not going to get the job.

Depending on the job, I'm going to go ahead and take the conservative position that, yes, this is inappropriate at an interview and should not be protected, along with very visible tattoos and facial piercings. There are still employers who think that it's cool anyway, just maybe not as mainstream. Especially the lipstick, if it's showy. This is partly aesthetics -- most men are not going to be able to pull it off with visual dignity. I don't have a problem with Billy Porter's tuxedo ballgown, because it looks cool. But, yeah, if it's a basically normal service job, and they come in looking like this, then they are absolutely signaling, not so much femininity, as high maintenance and potential social and legal trouble. In my experience, women who dress up and apply showy makeup significantly more than their female co-workers, especially if they are older and/or already married, also tend to be Bad News.

This is distinct from non-work contexts. People should have all kinds of freedom to wear lots of quirky things in general.

The transvestite pass seems either useless (nobody is currently arrested for cross-dressing), or oppressive towards everyone else ("pronoun hospitality" sounds like an outside force telling people what pronouns to use without the trans person having to do anything particular to win them over).

nobody is currently arrested for cross-dressing

While this is technically true, I don't assign 0 credence to the reports from some underclass trans black women that they get stopped by the police on suspicion of prostitution more often than the average person. While the so called "walking while trans law" law (properly the "loitering for prostitution" law) I'm most aware of in New York was repealed in 2021 after years of efforts going back to at least 2010, it wouldn't surprise me if there are several other jurisdictions where anti-prostitution laws accidentally catch innocent trans people in their nets.

I think part of the problem is that underclass trans women probably are more likely to be prostitutes, and a police officer is going to Notice The Pattern whether he wants to or not, and then he's going to act on his experiences and stop non-passing trans people more often as a result.

I fully admit that this issue could be solved with reforms to prostitution laws, without any reforms of existing legislation around trans people (including transvestite passes), but that doesn't mean it's not a problem for underclass trans women right now.

underclass trans black women

I am absolutely willing to believe that things are really tough for this group in multiple ways, along all the intersectional axes.

I'm most familiar with South side Chicago, and was under the impression that current policing practices for underclass blacks were to try to do as little as possible within their own neighborhoods, but I suppose they would get unwanted law enforcement attention elsewhere in the city. I got some unwelcome cop attention for trying to visit a little beach next to a wealthy suburb, and I don't belong to any Concerning Groups. But I'm also slightly concerned that American police are currently being reformed into doing nothing at all, and if an innocent black trans woman is beat up by their local gang, I would probably like it to be investigated -- it seems like a very hard problem.

While this is technically true, I don't assign 0 credence to the reports from some underclass trans black women that they get stopped by the police on suspicion of prostitution more often than the average person.

Than the average person, sure. Than the average woman dressed similarly... I'd have to see evidence on that one.

Whether it is technically legal or not, a male-bodied teenager who comes into a job interview with lipstick and a dress is likely not going to get the job.

I think it's going to be a lot easier to move the needle towards "okay, boys can wear dresses too" the way we moved it on "okay, girls can wear trousers too" than inflicting on society that we must believe "in fact biology not real, you can be a girl or a boy or a girlboy or a no-gender if you just feeeeel it".

Im going to plant my flag in the ground and say that dresses as a general class are awesome, and I would wear them in a heartbeat if it were socially acceptable to do so. By “general class,” I would include things like robes, kilts, togas, vestments, opera capes, and so forth. These are all much more aesthetically pleasing than modern clothing, even if they’re not always as practical. I hadn’t ever thought about it before, but your comment makes me wonder if some transgender people (those on the transvestite end of things) just feel the same itch and find that women’s dresses help them to scratch it. If so, it’s just too bad that wearing clothing styles of 200+ years ago just makes you look like a twat.

Actually, a second thought on that point: men used to enjoy dressing up in fancy dress in the Masons, Shriners, Knights of Columbus, etc., but now young men have no such outlet. Maybe they should.

I hadn’t ever thought about it before, but your comment makes me wonder if some transgender people (those on the transvestite end of things) just feel the same itch and find that women’s dresses help them to scratch it.

In that case, they are going way out of their way to alienate conservatives for no good reason, making it about sex rather than clothing. Even if people think it's kind of dorky to wear a robe just because you like it, almost no one thinks it's morally wrong, or threatening.

If someone were cool enough, they could probably bring back menswear that's open at the bottom. Women find kilts and such sexy (see, for instance, Outlander), but modern kilt-wearers weird, for reasons unrelated to the garments themselves.

I think that's because the people who wear kilts outside of, like, a renaissance fair, are in fact weird. Not due to anything about the garment; you can buy kilts that clearly look like men's garments, albeit hipsterish men's garments, but just because the man who makes that choice is at least a bit eccentric.

Isn't that just fashion, in general? Almost anyone who tries to wear a weird fashion is going to look weird because they are weird. The exception is rare, exceptional people who are very good looking, very charismatic, and very tuned-in to fashion trends, so they're able to pick up on new fashions and wear it and make it fashionable.

The people who wear them inside of a renaissance fair are weird too.

Women wearing trousers/pants were once upon a time regarded as "that is men's clothing" but now we accept that "no, it's women's clothing too".

We accept women wearing pants, but women don't wear pants in the context of getting sexual excitement from being women who wear pants. More generally, there's a difference between wanting to wear something of the opposite sex as clothes, and wanting to wear something of the opposite sex because it's from the opposite sex.

But I do think that transvestites have been folded in, as it were, to the transgender movement (the way Asperger's Syndrome became part of the autism spectrum) and that there is a sub-section of people who do want the dressing-up part but are not really transsexual, but now the push is on that "of course if you're not 100% gender compliant, consider that you're trans".

The contradiction around "gender roles are socially constructed, there's no such thing as gender" and the advice that "you can know if a child is trans by, for instance, if they pull open their onesie so it's like a dress" is irreconcilable for me. How do you match up the two parts? Gender is not real, and at the same time, strict gender roles show us if you're cis or trans.

One of the odder real life interactions I've had with a (presumably) trans woman was at a ranger station. Women rangers wear pants and don't wear makeup while at work. But this male one was wearing a skirt and makeup. Clearly he was making a statement, rather than trying to blend in with his female co-workers.

they would be unwilling to clearly answer the question, "what are trans kids?"

Don't ask me, some of the people I see holding firmly to the view that a six year old can know their gender and be rock-solid on they're a girl not a boy, are also firmly of the view that a forty year old man dating a twenty-three year old woman is grooming and taking advantage of her, don't we all know your brain is not fully mature until you're at least twenty-five, this is abuse!

some of the people I see holding firmly to the view that a six year old can know their gender and be rock-solid on they're a girl not a boy

I mean, I would imagine there'd be no problem with a six year old girl assigned female at birth who's adamant that she's a girl and not a boy (and that it'd be horrible parenting to insist that no, she really is a boy, she just needs to wait until she grows up and she'll understand that she's been a boy all along), and same for a boy assigned male who's sure that he's a boy, for instance.

Yeah, just like a girl insisting that the sky is green (as in the color of grass, rather than playing word games with color names) might indicate she has an eye problem, while a girl saying it's blue would not. We do exist in a physical reality that is not arbitrary in it's nature, and inaccurately interpreting it's signals tends to be seen as a sign something is wrong. For good reason, I would argue.

I don't accept the whole "assigned X at birth" activism, so yeah. I'm going to say that a female child raised as female knows she's a girl. A female child raised as female declaring she is really a boy? I'm waiting to see on that one.

I'm going to say that a female child raised as female knows she's a girl. A female child raised as female declaring she is really a boy? I'm waiting to see on that one.

There's not exactly a shortage of trans men who can point to an upbringing and environment that required and enforced pretty strict gender norms for behavior. To the level of 'not allowed to wear pants' sorta thing.

That's not "assigning female". It might be "assigning girl / woman", if you want to do the sex vs. gender thing, but I'd just call it "not being allowed to wear pants".

I may not understand what you mean by "raised as female", then.

Good question... something like "being told by everyone around her, that she's a female", I suppose.

More comments

that a six year old can know their gender and be rock-solid on they're a girl not a boy

I'm pretty sure my two year old nephew knows quite well he's a boy and not a girl, and if asked how he knew would, if he was in a cooperative mood, pull his diaper down and point.

No, this is ridiculous because of the insistence that gender is something not intuitively obvious, which is essential to the trans project. I can tell by the logic of 'duh' that Caitlyn Jenner is a very confused male. You need to invoke mental gymnastics which probably requires at least teenage-level mental gymnastics to comprehend in order to justify anything else.

they would be unwilling to clearly answer the question, "what are trans kids?" without getting evasive and yet protecting that category is a moral imperative.

I have as much of a bone to pick with the trans activists as the next skeptical guy here but you're failing the intellectual Turing test spectacularly if you don't know what their answer is. In most of their their worldviews(there are several different factions with different answers) there is an intrinsic 'trans' quality that some people are born with. Every trans adult was once a trans child. The 'trans' quality frequently causes kids great distress around puberty because a central element of the condition is feeling as though they should have the body of the opposite sex and puberty greatly exaggerates these differences. If all of this was true and we could without error identify trans people in their youth it naturally follows that we should intervene and try to alleviate this condition through puberty blockers and cross sex hormones or at the very least allowing them to adopt the social social habits of the opposite sex. They further think that trans people are frequent targets of bullies and harassment.

I happen to be skeptical about the whole concept of trans as a quality and even granting it doubtful at our ability to diagnose it reliably in youth but their position and reasons for taking the stances they do are not mysterious.

In most of their their worldviews(there are several different factions with different answers) there is an intrinsic 'trans' quality that some people are born with.

Yes, and what is that quality?

The 'trans' quality frequently causes kids great distress around puberty

Frequently? So not always? So what else can we use to judge if a kid is "trans"? Dysphoria is hugely problematic (given kids desist) but at least concrete.

If we grant that there is an innate quality that we can easily distinguish, there is no problem. The point is that nailing this down in some definitive way seems to be difficult

Just as, if we accept that there is a trans-inclusive category called "women", there is no fundamental problem. Yet some random Daily Wire dad who dresses like an actuary has driven left-wingers into a frenzy trying to get an answer to this basic question.

This is a microcosm of this whole debate. All of this sounds good in the abstract. Once you start discussing it you not only get tough questions from traditionalists, but even feminists who ask how the markers of this innate quality are not regressive (it often boils down to stereotypes).

The above poster had a clearly wrong understanding of what trans advocates believe if they think they can't justify the term 'trans kid', they can. Whether the rest of the world view is actually reasonable is a different question.

If you tell me you believe in fluxberries and can define it and therefore I should do what you want but:

I have to wonder to what degree you believe you think you can justify belief in fluxberries - certainly you seem to believe in a distinct way to how you believe in say...policemen, or fish.

I don't see how OP's original point about the reluctance to square this doesn't apply:

My impression is that for quite a few of these people, they would be unwilling to clearly answer the question, "what are trans kids?" without getting evasive and yet protecting that category is a moral imperative.

Like, we know for a fact that some already do this with "woman", that one is not even debatable because Kentaji Brown did it in front of Congress - and all the same problems apply there. I'm supposed to grant extra charity on "trans child"?

You say:

You actively try to bully, discredit or destroy people who demand a coherent definition or raise questions about why this a slightly different colored berry is not, in fact, a "fluxberry"

OP said:

I have as much of a bone to pick with the trans activists as the next skeptical guy here but you're failing the intellectual Turing test spectacularly if you don't know what their answer is

I happen to be skeptical about the whole concept of trans as a quality and even granting it doubtful at our ability to diagnose it reliably in youth

I don't think OP is one of the people bullying and destroying.

Did you overlook when I said I don't hold these beliefs? I don't want to go into detail on any of these individual critiques because 1) it's out of scope for pointing out that the original person I was responding to was totally failing to model their theory of mind and 2) there are several different groups of trans activists that would approach each of these critiques from a different perspective. A "born in the wrong body" explanation can cleanly tell you what a fluxberry is and define it but that definition is going to be pretty different to someone who sees gender as some kind of a fluid thing. I don't hold any one of these sets of beliefs so I don't have an affinity for one or the other and am not very interested in litigated them out.

Did you overlook when I said I don't hold these beliefs?

I was using the generic you in the example. It was less about you holding the beliefs yourself, I disagreed on how much charity you were granting.

Like, I didn't assume that you personally were for bullying Rebecca Tuvel or any unfortunate who asked about transracials...


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