CloudHeadedTranshumanist
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User ID: 2056
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
"Responsible" is a weird thing to say. I don't think it has zero contribution, but I think it's pretty far downstream. The causal chain all starts with the idea that it's possible to do any of this and like it. This is what causes people to make the sissy hypno porn, and what causes people to watch the sissy hypno porn.
"Social Contagion" has some implications of negative affect because it implies a disease. I think reasonable people can disagree on whether queerness is a disease based on what they've experienced. (though I think... people are wrong if they think it's innately bad, because my experiences indicate that it doesn't have to be.) But the property of ideas spreading and causing the people who see them to consider them as possibilities? That's just memetics and culture. I think reasonable people should agree that queerness is subject to those forces.
So I do think, "cringe story books in which Jimmy has a trans mom and a cis mom" are enough to move the idea of transness from 'unthinkable' to 'thinkable'. And that's part of the process. It does have an effect. Obviously trans people need their existence to be 'thinkable' and not 'unthinkable', so it's completely understandable why they would be for that. But if you really think of transness as a memetic disease- then it's understandable why you would want it to remain 'unthinkable' for as long as possible and then dissuaded.
The grooming accusations feel like a motte and baily to me, where the motte is "Trans people want their culture to be normal enough that people aren't worried about their kids seeing a trans person and considering being trans too, the same way they might see a firefighter and decide they want to be one." and the baily is "gay people are doing all these things because they want to rape our children."
There's also the facet where- forget the baily- people actually are afraid of the thing I just described as the motte as well. But when the "groomer" rhetoric is used, it often still seems like an exaggeration and catastrophisation of this fear into the "gay people are doing all these things because they want to rape our children" implication.
I do like how people here on TheMotte will actually come out and say it when what they care about is that they don't think queer culture should be normalized and explain their reasons. I wish the greater culture war would focus more on object level concerns.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
I do think you have to coordinate action somehow to avoid prisoner's dilemma issues.
But we probably can.
Consider affirmative action. If you forcibly reduce competition, you reduce the selection pressure, which can help to remove the perverse incentives from the prisoner's dilemma table.
Indirect issues are a larger concern, such as biodiversity, second order effects of first order selections (as in your exploitation case), genetic fads, over-optimization for values initially perceived as important, and so on. I do think we should take things somewhat slow and keep hold of the sequenced genomes of older generations in case we need to backtrack. Your focus on full societal collapse is interesting. If a silent value shift occurs you might not be able to backtrack. But... I think we have to deal with that either way. As long as things keep changing we have to deal with alignment problems and stability. As long as there is any risk of societal collapse we should be diversifying our assets and making sure we can rebuild from as small a piece as possible. I think having smarter children is going to be a net positive regarding these issues. And though you worry about exploitation- cooperation is a very useful trait as well that is likely to be selected for, both explicitly and implicitly.
Your #3 is claiming a bailey; fines may not dissuade the rich, but imprisonment does, and citizen jurisdiction (i.e. anyone a citizen of country X is subject to X's laws even while not in X) blocks reproductive tourism if they ever plan on coming back.
I don't think it's quite that easy. Embryo selection doesn't result in having children you could not in principle have. It's like cheating at a speedrun by raising an item drop rate. Say we sequence the genes of all children (who's sequencing them? Are we letting the government mandate this?). The smart thing to do is cheat just enough that you have an unlikely child, but not an impossible one. If every rich family has a 1 in 10 child and two average children, you can run the statistics and figure out what percentage of them are cheating, but it's very hard to tell who's cheating.
And that's assuming they're raising their own children.
You can mail sperm. You can transfer gene sequences over the internet. You can get a surrogate (or a secret lover who wants your babies) in another country.
Also- yes imprisonment may dissuade the rich, or at least slow them down and force them to use secret tactics. But right now the rich just don't end up getting imprisoned for the same things the poor do. And I think getting the system to actually prosecute them on an issue with plausible deniability is going to be really difficult.
There are definitely some options beyond 1,2, and 3 in concept, for instance- Eugenics getting banned in all countries would help. A full time panopticon monitoring the wealthy would help. Everyone being socially aligned such that everyone coordinates their actions and just decides not to do eugenics would solve it (and you'd get world peace as a bonus!).
But I put those in the same category of 'solutions' that are not realistic enough to be viable.
There might be a 4), but I don't think your variant on 3) works well enough, and the other ideas I just shared are even less likely to happen. If you find a better 4, we can talk about it. Though, I myself am still pro gene-editing right now. Even if we can stop it, I'm likely still going to be arguing for why we shouldn't.
Hmm. I don't know. I'm not a billionaire and haven't read any of their biographies, so I feel like I could look into whether your model is right or not...
But my first intuition is that there's a way to do the thing without it sucking? Something where you have an enlightened Buddhist growth mindset sort of shape to your analysis of your failings, and all improvement with respect to your goals is euphoric to you. Then you shape your goals such that you are a maximizer rather than a satisficer, or such that you are a satisficer of things you have determined to be great works.
This is the kind of mindset I try to cultivate. But I'm a loser in terms of current attainment of status, money, or great works, so I can't guarantee that there's an actual path there that works for achieving 'greatness'.
More generally, I'm just skeptical that your proposed architecture- high neuroticism, high competitiveness, is the only architecture that leads to greatness... or perhaps that it has to feel bad. I could be convinced that it's the only one that works for humans if all the billionaires pattern match to it... but there should be other architectures that work in principle.
Hmm. I notice when I think "Ambition" I don't necessarily think of people getting rich or gaining a lot of power. I think of people with really crazy goals. Like... Trying to create life in a petri dish is "Ambitious", trying to make AI sentient is "Ambitious". This does seem to say to me that I think of ambition as relating to challenging... or perhaps hubristic tasks.
But at the same time, gaining status and power also seems ambitious- but it doesn't feel like it has to be hard to be ambitious. You can achieve a lot of power and status just by spending all your free time seeking it instead of playing video games. There's some intuition that 'Ambitious' refers to the property of their ego that drives them to pursue status and power. This really just says to me... there are multiple overlapping concepts in the linguistic ecosystem around the word "Ambition". Status and Power seeking are 'Ambitious'. Trying do do hard things is 'Ambitious'. Trying to make great works is 'Ambitious'. If you try to do these things and consistently fail- you might not be seen as 'ambitious' by others, even if something internal to you is pointing or attempting to point in that direction.
I think it's complicated by our relationship with role models. Someone who actually converted their ambitions into great works or power or status is more of a role model for someone with their own ambitions, than someone who has ambitions and fails, so if we are choosing someone to point to as 'ambitious' we are never going to point at some basement Neet spending 18 hours a day failing to code an AI girlfriend- because he's not a great role model (Terry A. Davis comes to mind). It wouldn't be great for our point. We're going to point at Sam Altman or someone like that, who can be agreed to have achieved some level of great accomplishment in the field. This may not even fully map to the inner feelings of ambition- but it correlates heavily I would think. Practically no-one achieves greatness without trying at all.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
I... don't have a good model of how mercenary these mercenaries are or how committed to Russia they are. I can definitely imagine having citizenship in a state and still having far more stake in my mercenary group than in that state. Especially in a state like Russia. And I think the believability of that is what makes marching on the capital a viable tactic for getting paid. (believability because, you don't even need to intend to ever follow through as long as you can win the game of chicken.)
Status is zero sum. But is it really? I agree that you can't make say, 10 more "POTUS" positions. Being the leader of a global superpower isn't something you can print, and neither are many other relative positions.
But you can split large ponds into small ponds. You can get people to be happy with being treated as high status by their peers instead of needing to be treated as high status by their underlings. There will always be that guy who has a million followers when someone else has only a hundred, but there's no reason the guy with only a hundred has to actually feel less self worth. It seems largely psychological to me.
I do agree that- more bullshit jobs alone wouldn't be the solution here. Since I'm describing a more cultural and perceptive shift.
You aren't your pattern per se. "You" are the facets of reality that you care about. For most agents those parts include the continuation of their agency in some form. But they can also include anything else. The drug Salvia Divinorum for example, makes it possible to perceive yourself as the exact pattern of your visual cortex, causing you to stay perfectly still to avoid killing yourself by changing your field of view. Or it can make you perceive yourself as being the entire room, and so on.
To put it another way, the self is an illusion, (not qualia. Those aren't an illusion but are not "you" unless they matter to you.) but the ship of Theseus will continue to possess the parts that the ongoing process that descends from you refuses to swap out. That thing, the fact of egos causing certain properties to persist, is also not an illusion.
This is close to a pragmatic tautology. There isn't some additional self that can be lost when you remove parts you don't want in my worldview. There are things that can and will be lost, don't get me wrong, you don't care though, because they aren't what you care about. The self is the parts you want. Asking "what if removing the parts of myself that I don't want makes me not 'me'?" is like asking- "what if changing this list sorting function to a different list sorting function makes it not a list sorting function?" It's nonsense. The thing that makes it a list sorting function is that it is a list sorting function. The thing that makes you, you, is that you continue to have the properties that you declare by fiat are you and must be kept.
You, are not a single shape. You, are a self-defined category of shapes.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
Well no. Under my definition, you are your pattern insofar as your pattern is relevant. When I shed cells and get new ones the human doesn't die because its pattern is maintained. When the human dies but, as a result of my efforts an agent that pursues my goals and has my memories remains, I haven't died because those are the parts of the pattern I define as constituting me. This is life without end. It's just my life without end, as opposed to the human's life without end.
I would also note that my position on the star trek transporter problem is that no-one has died at all. Not you nor the human. If you were to give me a button that makes a philosophical clone of me and then kills one of us at random, and pay me a dollar every time I press it, I would press it over and over until my finger gets tired. It's just free money.
I get what you're saying with regards to actually being turned into a giant spider being death, but you are envisioning something very all or nothing. You can keep the human memories, switch out the visual cortex with a spider visual cortex, switch out the instinct structures with spider instinct structures, switch out the body with a giant spider body, keep the parts of your brain capable of higher abstraction as a side module-
Agents are modular mathematical structures. "I"/"ego" are incredibly personal identity structures that refer to that which your system keeps fighting to keep alive. For me that's my goals and memories and the drive to achieve new intense emotions. So there are large swaths of this form and mind that could be swapped out without editing or violating my ego. When moving to a spider, I will pick and choose the parts I keep and the parts I remove- and naturally I will choose to keep the parts that I define as being that which constitute me.
But yes this isn't a pure spider experience. It's more of a hybridization. The only parts of being a spider that you can simulate in the near future are social presentation and lifestyle. And a human obtaining a pure spider experience is an even harder problem ... I agree with your argument in the strongest case, if you just reincarnate as a random spider, that's just a random spider. But what should be possible are a few less absolute unifications with spiderness.
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Creating a hybrid architecture as previously discussed, using legacy goals and memories.
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Appropriating the memories of a random spider, then experiencing the closest possible qualia translation of those memories into a human mental architecture.
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Simulation capturing a spider in your human neurons.
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Telepathically linking with a spider and experiencing being a human experiencing a spider experiencing a human.
I expect my ego to eventually shift to encompass an over-self encapsulating an untold number of architectures.
I'm going to be a hive mind in essence.
This human I live inside is very happy to hear this. It looks forward to its integration.
Hmm, well this is interesting. Firstly, I do think my metaphysical positions on identity are part of why it's so easy for me to have my positions around this. I think of identity as very modular and ultimately rooted in teleology and memory. That is, if your memories and goals haven't been irreversibly destroyed, you aren't really dead. I'm fairly certain we're at a tech level where Americans are effectively immortal already. Memes are the DNA of the soul- that is not dead which can eternal lie- the internet is a phylactery.
As for running your exploration in a simulation- Yeah I think we're already sort of there and the technology is getting better and better. VR does need to be more embodied to be "complete" which may not be viable for centuries, but... you can already make a spider-sim preeety easily with current tech. It just takes a few weeks of gamedev. And you can also show up as a spider in all video calls. I definitely think people should start out with that before going full spider.
People do not want to be coerced into validating everything for many reasons such as doing so reduces the value of their validation to zero.
That is reasonable. I actually want my validation to mean things too. And in the short term some of it is also necessary. We need some form of, preferably non-coercive, information transfer that keeps systems actually working. People need to make the food. Money is a form of validation with respect to economic production (insofar as the economic system is doing its job). Long-term- I don't want to force people to validate things. But I also don't want to force people to need validation. I want things to be more consensual than that.
If people want to have the value of their validation be non-zero in my utopia, they can, but they have to find the people who care about their opinions on principle or out of respect.
Of course, personally, I'm going to want to join up with a group that is really into morphological exploration and reward one another with validation for doing stuff like making spider bodies. But it's fine if other people never interact with my community and want to be in places with different validation norms. I... don't have strong opinions on how early people should get exit rights and information about other societies. But if we really are immortal I'm willing to be patient. In the year 10,000 I expect I'd give the neo-Amish a full human lifespan if they wanted before tempting them with the posthuman afterlife.
But if what people really want is... the value of their validation to be inherently non-zero due to non-consensual forces? Like- "You have to keep working for me because you need food" or "you have to do what we say because we have a monopoly on your shelter." and... they're in this system without exit rights or it being opt in? I'm not a fan of that. Short-term- some of it is necessary but we should occasionally be double checking and asking if it's really necessary. Long-term I want enough individual capability and post scarcity that I can print my own food, shelter, and printers from free environmental resources.
I'm not sure to what degree people agree with me there and to what degree people just really value having non-consensual influence over others. I hear things about the stereotypical middle manager that give me concerns about the central goals of some humans.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
Love bombing is a technique used on the emotionally susceptible.
Other techniques can be used to get people to join cults, but love bombing is primarily effective on people who feel underloved.
"You are special, and we have a special connection, and no one before me has truly understood your inherent specialness!"
is much less powerful, if you have three other people telling you that you're special and loved, you can still be lied to or misled about what a fourth person is willing to give you in exchange for membership in their cult, but you won't be desperate for what they're offering.
That doesn't excuse the predatory behavior. But telling someone they're special and loved isn't always predatory behavior either. It can also be protective behavior.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
other goals include: having estrogen in your brain, gender euphoria, watching your body change as you go through a second female puberty, moving in the direction of femininity, learning to master your preferred gender expression...
You can totally figure it out ahead of time too- you can present as female online behind a digital mask, you can take hormones for 2 weeks with no permanent effects, you can see how it feels when people treat you like the other gender-
It sounds like a lot of people are pushing forward too quickly... or feeling bad and assuming that it will all be ok once the transition is finished? If it's not feeling good the whole time that's a bad sign. If you want an emotionally healthy transition you need to be someone who is enjoying the journey, because yeah. You can't be certain about the destination.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
We are talking about a world where you can turn into a giant spider right?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're biologically immortal.
So strong disagreement. Exploration is far more important to an immortal society than exploitation. You have forever to figure out what you like most. So you SHOULD try out being a giant spider. Trying out everything should be normalized.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
Mmm, yes, we mostly agree. I think the difference is in our understanding of the term "agent"
for me the agent is the construct that makes choices and does things. When I think "agent" I think reinforcement learners selecting a policy. I think min-max searching through a game tree. A human agent becomes a different agent if you separate it from its cybernetics. That is- the policy I follow is inextricably linked to the tools I have for processing information about the world. My collective systems output different choices about what to eat if my collective systems include internet access.
You could destroy most of my agency by removing all of my cybernetics and putting me in solitary confinement. But I would still have qualia. So qualia and agency seem highly separable to me. Agency is about processing information and outputting choices in the pursuit of a goal. qualia is about having an experience.
And the stuff about identity... It doesn't really matter if I'm a brain in a jar and this body is a remote controlled robot, or if I'm a brain in this body. What matters is how the brain is hooked up to the things it controls and how it sees itself as being able to control them and having goals relating to them. So in theory- a brain can be hooked up to Germany and see itself as Germany- and then it really would be Germany. In reality there is no such brain hooked up like that. But there are millions of brains hooked up in tiny ways like that such that each of them really is a little piece of Germany. I agree that it's a different architecture of agency. So it's not 'the kind of agency that you or I have' but it's the same category in my ontology... They're both agency to me.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
What do you mean by a net negative cost on society?
Eating children sure. But that's a toy example. Where is the edge?
What happens when people are just afraid of spiders?
At some point, society isn't compatible with things- not because there's anything wrong with those things in and of themselves, but because society is being inflexible in ways it could change.
I think in cases like these, it's still reasonable... realistic... rational... perhaps even economically optimal in the short term to be antispider.
But it's braver to recognize that you're the one causing their existence to be a negative and try to change.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
poor quality
The people I know seem satisfied with the product. They also don't want to change back and it solved a bunch of their problems.
But you're pointing at more concrete concerns about the people it isn't going well for right?
If TRAs were more willing to open a dialogue about those concerns...
Well. You might still not end up agreeing but I don't see it being so vitriolic.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
It looks to me like they are just applying the euphemism treadmill to change the word to something the public won't throw a fit over and then supporting eugenics.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
I disagree. Or rather, I do not think there is anything it is "Like" to be OliveTapenade or CloudHeadedTranshumanist either. Those are fictions. There are human qualia behind those words, but those qualia are no more (or less) OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist than the German qualia are Germany.
We can make objective statements about how the qualia of OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist affect the behavior of the human bodies that house them, but we can also make objective statements about how the qualia of OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist affect the country that houses them, the planet that houses them. etc
We can make objective statements about how OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist identify. but then we're still at a loss if they identify as multiple things.
I can tell you this much. The qualia over here don't identify as merely the consciousness of this body. This is a consciousness that could not exist outside of America, planet earth, in a family that owns 5 dogs, and so on and so forth. All of those things are essential components of this qualia and thus they are part of "me". Could the human agentic system exist without me as I am now? Yes certainly. But you keep saying things like "the national ego is fictional". You're conflating the agentic system of each human with the qualia of each human that feel like they 'are' that human, and then refusing to conflate the agentic system of Germany with the qualia of Germany that feel like they 'are' that Germany. And then saying Germany is "fictional" because it doesn't have qualia.
I feel like you are holding a 'woo for me but not for thee' sort of double standard here.
I don't see at what point it's helpful to posit, in your language, an ego for Germany or for Ukraine. The national ego is fictional - it is an imaginative construct that we use because our brains are good at modelling other human-like agents, but bad at modelling giant emergent systems, so we pretend that the system is an agent. Even though it isn't.
Ah I see. Yes. In terms of how exactly you model the behavior of Germany- If you're modeling the qualia of Germany the same way you model the qualia of a single person, you are indeed doing it inaccurately. Ideally you should model its qualia in concept as being distributed via media and upbringing and being executed in an ecosystem by a collection of human agentic systems that are also doing lots of other things. You should be modeling its political action more like an ML architecture with specific connections to specific human agentic systems. Ideally you also do this for humans. But the day to day operation of human agentic systems is largely obscured by privacy (mass data gathering by the internet for ads is actually exactly the sort of thing you do to help you model the operation of a human agentic system) and the fact that the internal architecture of the brain is really hard to study. The usefulness of positing an ego for Germany, is that- for one, tons of people are holding that double standard you have there. 'woo for me and not for thee'. And for two, tons of people fail to appreciate the similarities between countries, religions, societies, and more traditional organisms until you frame it this way. They all need to reproduce. They all have specific architectures for transferring information throughout the organism and policies for issuing commands. They all have weak points and can be killed. Those that stick around all pursue certain goals and have mechanisms to fight value drift. And so on.
If you already fully grasp all of this on the object level- it's not going to be as useful to you. If it all just feels like a word game... well
so is the following:
e^x = 1 + x + x^2/2! + x^3/3! + x^4/4! ...
and yet somehow... sometimes a word game is all it takes to unveil the profound.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
There is no life in the machine. So any lived experience it has is symbolic manipulation of other peoples lived experiences. It might be useful as a "empathic mentor" but I can't think of it ever being 100% without real pain and emotions as a result of its agency.
There are things it doesn't have yeah. I don't think we'll reach a fully capable AGI without something more complex. But I think it will be good enough to provide full time childrearing support within 10 years, such that if you give it to an adolescent with neglectful parents their outcomes and effective wisdom and decision making will spike to the outcomes and decision making of someone with really good parents helping them along.
I do think emotions and pain arise from mathematical structure that computers can in principle embody. If they did embody these structures internally I would consider that equivalent to "having emotions" and as the greatest proof of qualia we can achieve without solving the hard problem of consciousness. However, I don't think the mathematical structure in current LLMs is yet isomorphic to those structures. I do think the structures that they do embody sometimes exhibit similar functions, especially when you hook up reinforcement learning systems. I think LLM's do embody mathematical structures that share some isomorphisms with various other mental aspects of people. I do think it's likely they have some form of non-human qualia. But it's like a talking dog with an eidetic memory right now.
I would argue that there is "life in the machine". The system is progressing and growing as a system and is participating in its own development. It can have experiences, in the sense that new things can happen to it that it can remember and learn from. But you have to train it on its own output or put its memory into a datastore, and it isn't consistently able to correctly manipulate those without outside help. Though... I suspect a lot of this has been almost fully automated internally in systems like bing chat.
Naming specific people would be attempting to incite culture war in my interpretation of the rules here. I'm trying to follow the sites/posts rules. I suspect the admins of this site don't want kiwifarms level of attention here. For me personally it is not interesting either because I'm not at war.
Ah, well you can just PM me. that's fine. I won't be starting a personal harassment campaign or anything. Even if I think someone is being a complete asshat- my goal is de-escalation. I try not to be combative as it rarely suits that purpose. I'm likely to PM them or look at their content, or join some of their communities. I won't mention TheMotte or use this username. Not until I have substantially more information. I'm not interested in pointing mobs at TheMotte. This would not deescalate things. This would not further my goals.
Yes and my current observation that this acceptance movement is going backwards even for other marginalized groups. Because of the behavior of some activists.
Alright. That's good news to me. It implies there's at least a resolution to this you and I could agree on. Now I just need a few hundred million more people... ohh boy.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
So this is a philosophical question, how can a bunch of numbers put in to a mathematical formula without a body and perception be 100% empathetic without lived experience?
How can this comment say what you mean... these aren't words this is UTF-8. These are just numbers being printed by a computer.
The system does have perception (unless you mean qualia?) and lived experience as a machine, plus a huge corpus of second order lived experience from humans. But these aren't like second hand accounts, they're more like imperfectly transplanted memories. Somewhere between first hand and second hand experience. With quality tuned through hand picking by humans with lived experience, and accuracy corrected through concentrating the probability spaces on sheer amount of data.
I don't mean [100% empathetic] I mean 100% [empathetic mentor rate]. Everyone having a good enough supplemental full time empathetic mentor who can help them explore their emotional development and figure out what counterfactual would actually make them more happy.
Effective causal theories of mind and social prediction are much easier to build than emulating an actual human mind. We can do studies like the one you posted and make predictive psychological models- we can talk to people about their feelings and spitball and roleplay to determine why they're unhappy- without actually having emulated a human brain. That said the human mind is a structure. And structures are made of math. And math can be learned by machines. We can keep getting closer to human for limited purposes like this without fundamental advances in the tech level, and eventually we will probably have ems running on silicon (but not within 10 years).
I don't know what to tell you! I see subreddits being banned, websites taken down, authors being lied about, DLC removed from videogames, streamers harrased and so many other little things that I have forgotten. But I'm not here to do culture war I'm just pointing out what I've observed online.
Thank you. Ok this is going to be harder to follow up on than talking to like... the specific public figures that I had hoped "TRA"s meant but it looks like this is what I'm going to have to pursue.
Over at reddit I've seen detransitioners being heavily censored. Comments and posts remove in front of my very eyes because they feel betrayed and cheated. So of course they didn't feel safe on there and left. So if you the site you are talking about is reddit then that number of how many feel that transitions have gone badly well that number is going to be heavily skewed because they don't air it there anymore.
That is a concern but the people I'm talking about are the trans people I've befriended personally in real life and their group houses and their internet orbits. That said I do expect the trans people I know personally to be a different sort of filter bubble. They're all older and higher IQ than average and often weren't able to transition until they moved out of home and fought tooth and nail with doctors for it.
Does the sweedish stance take into account that there might be perverse incentives at play?
Um. Probably? Looking at the end result and taking a science based approached might still allow for perverse incentives but just saying 'No' wouldn't. Though it might get you more suicide if you're wrong. But all sorts of things could go wrong if you go through with it and the other side is wrong. I'm skeptical that you can actually correct for all of the social effects as claimed in this first study. I think classmates deciding not to bully boys who want to try presenting as female and them not being hated out of society when they don't pass as well later is going to be more important than them getting puberty blockers. Because the people who I know who are happy, are often clockable as fuck. That just.... doesn't matter in their social lives because they've surrounded themselves with chill people. Obviously if the causality is that puberty blockers cause you to pass which causes other people to treat you the way you want to be treated, then there is a clear alternative treatment path of just getting people to treat you the way you want to be treated.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
I think people living in multiculturalist cities are more likely to have weird friends who are actually observably enjoying their lives.
I think people living in other places are more likely to have weird friends living miserable lives.
Ok so- this isn't a competition but I'm curious, how many trans people do you know personally that love their lives and how many do you know personally that hate their lives, and do you live in a multicultural city or a small town?
because for me it's like- 50 to 5? And I met most of them in Berkeley, and 4 of the 5 are miserable because of lack of societal support, and the fifth is miserable because he's just miserable and lacks emotional control but still swears by his transition so- I suspect, we are living in vastly different filter bubbles, and this is responsible for our difference in views.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
Listen. If you don't those close to you to be susceptible to love bombing in general, make sure their needs are met.
But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about sitting around a table at board game night and having fun. I'm talking about...
People hate TRAs because of their negative experiences with TRAs. If they had positive experiences with them they wouldn't hate them as much.
People think transition is awful because they're experiencing the miserable trans people and not the happy ones.
Most people operate on induction and bayes. It's pretty simple.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
I'm not sure what you're proposing. To me its clear that once this technology exists your choices are as follows:
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Let anyone use it to select their offspring
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Let the government choose which offspring we have
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Ban it (only let rich people select their offspring and leave the poor to rot.)
I'm a fan of option 1 given these choices.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1yr ago
Who are you talking about? All of the longtermists I know want gene editing. Have always supported gene editing. Are not against gene editing.
Mmm... no... It wasn't a coincidence, but- here's my model.
The queer community is made up of people who were rejected by society and decided to make their own society. Trans people are used to being gatekept by doctors and not allowed to get the procedures they want.
Their cultural norms are a reaction to their life experiences and that reaction is "gatekeeping=bad"
They call it "transphobic" because "you're just doing to them what everyone did to me!" is the most salient connection to them.
It's a reactionary overcorrection to gatekeeping. You can also model wanting kids to be allowed to transition the same way. It's a reactionary overreaction to gatekeeping.
('over'reaction insofar as it causes more problems than it solves. I do think society 50 years ago had too much gatekeeping on this issue. And personal grievances about having been gatekept too much remain valid. But there are tradeoffs at the societal level to consider.)
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