GBRK
5d ago
I can't find the original meme, but I remember seeing an image macro that went something like this:
[Protestant LGBT:] "Jesus loves everyone! Love is love! I go to a church with a pride flag!" (Secretly wracked with guilt.)
[Catholic LGBT:] "Man is a fallen creature. I accept that I am a pervert. I go to the BDSM club on fridays, confession on saturdays, and church on Sundays." (Openly wracked with guilt.)
...
I thought that they were diametrically opposed.
So yeah, that's basically it.
@Tretiak I do appreciate the charity though.
GBRK
5d ago
I know you meant "victim of CSA and non-cis",
Fixed typo:
Some root factor makes people both more likely to be non-cis AND more likely to report being sexually assaulted
("report" is also important here.)
I see being trans as a minor medical annoyance for the patient, less severe than diabetes and a bit more severe than Hashimoto.
I've had (non-trans-related) body image issues since puberty and it's been fucking horrible. If I didn't think therapy would be largely useless for me I'm pretty sure I could get a body dysmorphia diagnosis. (Useless compared to the replacement option of looksmaxxing, not in general-- I'd probably go if it was free, quick, and convenient, but as-is I have better ways to spent my time.) I completely understand, on an emotional level, why trans people are trans-- I just don't believe that wanting to be something is the same thing as being something. To my eternal furry chagrin, I am not a wolf on any level, including physical.
Given that experience, I very much hope that if (and hopefully when) I have children, I will be able to protect them from feeling similarly-- and by applying the pharmaceutical, behavioral, and social interventions that would have helped me, hope to dramatically reduce the internal factors that would contribute to the same thing. The final piece would be just, "not talking about it." The body-image issues in my family are generational, so I think combining the other interventions with "stop yelling meme" would cut them off at the knees. Applying that logic to transgenderism, I think that helping kids feel pride in their gender roles without being neurotic about conformity is half the puzzle, and easy, so figuring out how to counter whatever confounding factor exists between CSA and becoming non-cis is what I should be focusing to spare my kids from a frankly hellish fate. (Meaning: the dysphoria, not the non-cis-ness specifically... though as opposed to something like bigorexia I do think gender-related ailments are particularly pernicuous, and that post-treatment surveys significantly underestimate the amount of trans people telling themselves ego-preserving lies, A.K.A "coping.")
GBRK
5d ago
I don't really think the debate about gender is even that useful.
I think it's useful, but that's because I specifically believe that gender roles are specifically duties, created by God, and that individuals and societies should encourage those duties like they should encourage everything else God wants humans to do. Identifying which duties are relevant to yourself and others is therefore necessary and good.
GBRK
5d ago
Wow, those graphs are physically difficult to parse- in fact I'd actually say they're actively harmful to a proper understanding of the data. A "plain reading" (at least to me) of that data suggests 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 12 boys have been sexually penetrated in an unwanted manner before the age of 12, which isn't passing the sniff test given, if I remember correctly, prevalence of sexual contact by 12 is about 5%, or 1 in 20. So I doubt I'm reading the graph correctly, but there's no way to derive the total context or get a scale of the proportions involved relative to all respondents.
I think this is just reporting bias-- CSA victims are probably more likely to share and respond to this survey. I don't think that's an issue with respect to Aella's analysis because she's specifically interested in cross-response correlations rather than the headline numbers.
I think this is ignoring the obvious-to-me confounder that becoming non-cis can cause them to become a victim of sexual assault
The confounder definitely exists-- we have plenty of other surveys showing non-cis people are more vulnerable to sexual assault-- but the data for this survey contradicts any notion that this is primary. If this was the primary confounder, then we should expect to see a much larger difference between response rates of cis vs non-cis people comparing between the 0-12 vs 13-18 age groups, since the coming-out rate is WAY higher in later adolescence than childhood and pre-teen-hood. Instead, the difference in response rates remain very similar. Plausibly there's still some "wierd kid" confounding factor because the kids who become non-cis are never normal even before transitioning... (the one kid I know that transitioned had previously shown me furry porn in the cafeteria because we were both bronies... and had some pretty solid taste, honestly, ngl.) That gets right back into the question of what exactly makes these kids weird, however.
Well, no, if you grew up poor, 2 things are likely true for kid-you:
You say this like you're going to provide a counterargument and then propose two factors that seem extremely likely to increase anxiety and depression.
we don't actually hear the first question: what's abuse?
I made a typo in my OP. Fixed it, so my second bullet point reads:
Some root factor makes people both more likely to be non-cis AND more likely to report being sexually assaulted
I do think it's likely that the difference in sexual assault rates between cis and non-cis people is partially (though probably not totally) due to differences in specifically reporting rates. I don't actually think we need an explicit definition for what constitutes as 'abuse' though-- it would be sufficiently interesting to find that non-cis people adopt inclusive definitions of abuse at a higher rate, or are more likely to re-interpret invents in a negative way.
GBRK
5d ago
I don't think you're disagreeing with me, but just in case you are I wanted to clarify that this "pre-analytic congnitive framework" that comes prior to politics, being a way to experience life, is one of those things I'd lump under "other-life-experiences." I'll moot discussing whether it's the specific life experience that determines reporting rates and non-cisgender-ness though. The phrase is general enough that I think we would get into a dictionary definition argument. A broad enough definition of the term would compel me to agree that it's the prior factor I'm talking about, but likely result in me complaining that it's so broad a definition as to be practically useless-- and a narrow enough definition to be useful would probably have me dithering about a lack of hard data to conclude if it's central.
GBRK
5d ago
I don't think this explanation works.
- The ratios between cis vs. non-cis people reporting sexual abuse in the 0-12 range remains similar for household vs non-household penetrative assaults.
- (My prior is that) people who are abused by non-family-members are more likely to receive therapy (because they're less likely to be abused by the people who would otherwise be responsible for getting them that therapy)
- However, your explanation predicts that likelyhood that a child recieved therapy should increase CSA reporting rates relative to baseline.
2 and 3 contradict.
I admit that there probably is some relationship with therapy->liberalism->non-cisgenderism, but I don't think it's central.
GBRK
5d ago
Becoming left or right wing is downstream of other life experiences. It's more plausible that whatever common factor causes the other two things also causes the left-wing-ness.
New Aella survey post on child sexual assault just dropped: https://aella.substack.com/p/a-whole-lot-of-csa-data
I think her analysis is generally unobjectionable, but do find it notable that she buries the lead on the "non-cis" sexual assault findings. I didn't dig into the crosstabs, but non-cis people are plausibly getting sexually assaulted even before they become openly non-cis. And while there's plausibly causation in the direction of abnormal pre-egg-breaking/transition behavior being more likely to attract sexually assault, the data re: non-cis people reporting more CSA still very much supports the hypothesis that either:
- Being sexually assaulted causes people to become non-cis
- Some root factor makes people both more likely to be non-cis AND more likely to report being sexually assaulted
It might be that these hypothesis are both correct, but for different population subsets. For example, nonbinary people might be disproportionately motivated by a desire to escape a concept they associate with their assault, while transgender people are the ones afflicted by a root factor. (Or vica-versa, either explanation would be possible.)
I would personally bet on the second hypothesis predominating, though. And in particular, the associations re: social class/parental age/trauma are suggestive of some specifically anxiety-related problem. Working hypothesis: If you grow up poor or insecure or to young parents or female you become anxious and depressed, which leads you to be more likely to suffer sexual assault, more likely to interpret past events as sexual assault, more likely to start identifying yourself as non-cis (because of body image issues? Data is obviously underspecified and outside the scope of aella's post), and more likely to be negatively affected long-term by sexual assault when it does happen.
...So if you have kids, and want to maximize their chances of identifying as cisgender into adulthood, your top priority should be reducing their opportunities for anxiety. Openly worrying about drag queen story hour and queer books would be ironically counterproductive.
Ideological disclaimer: as a catholic I believe there are only two genders, fixed at birth, but as a transhumanist also I'm in favor of letting anyone, including children, do whatever they want to their own bodies. (I accept some nuance re: having to get psychologists/a judge to sign off that someone is truly acting in their own uncoerced self-interest, with increasing scrutiny in proportion to the danger posed by the modification and the mental irresponsibility of the requestor.)
GBRK
6d ago
That applies to state vs. state conflicts but I think it's at least plausible that they'd be better suited for terrorism, which is what rebelling against the government always is.
GBRK
7d ago
Honestly, I think the lockdowns were good for me. Like, in the moment the personal isolation sucked, but moving to permanent work from home (still going strong three jobs later!) and the realization that I could and should take control of my social life, health, and joi de vivre has has profound positive effects on my life. Looking back, I think there was retrospectively enough information to conclude that the negative effects of learning loss on children by far outweighed the health concerns for any learn-from-home lockdown except the very first. Aside from that, I have a hard time judging any other type of restriction as particularly insane... at least for the midwestern city I lived in. China or europe or the blue coastal cities probably had it worse. If only the entire world could be as sane as a democrat-controlled city in a republican-controlled state.
GBRK
7d ago
I really don't understand it when 2A people draw the line at the kinds of weapons specifically useful for overthrowing the government. My guy, that is the whole point. Small, easily concealable sidearms should be banned because civilians have no business making themselves assassins. But anyone who wants a machine gun, artillery piece, or fighter jet should have one. The only regulation should be to make sure civilian chemical weapon and ammunition stockpiles are being mantained with best safety practices.
GBRK
16d ago
It only takes 51 votes to remove the filibuster. It's a fig leaf that the senate uses to avoid blame, nothing more. I blamed the democrats for being useless when they could have removed it before, and I'm happy blaming the republicans for refusing to remove it now.
GBRK
18d ago
without driving the price up prohibitively.
Why would that be a limiting factor? If the economic-political situation gets so screwed up we're considering a draft or mass service-for-citizenship scheme, it would be entirely feasible for the government to redirect american economic productivity from old-age healthcare to military power. It wouldn't exactly be very popular, but nothing about this is anyway.
GBRK
19d ago
I used a bunch of those at my last apartment. Guess how many holes in the plaster I had to patch...
GBRK
27d ago
It's not about convincing the court, it's about convincing the jury. Which is, you should remember, composed entirely of people too dumb to get out of jury duty.
GBRK
28d ago
It's not so much about the meme as it is about he plausible deniability, I'd wager. Understanding that our government has a panipticon that may be at any moment oriented toward you in particular, sometimes it's necessary to clarify that you're only proposing we do radical things in minecraft.
GBRK
1mo ago
I've been specifically complimented on having a good onepager. The ability to condense information down to only what's important is increasingly critical in an age of ai slop. Actually, that remains one of the things i find myself consistently better at then any model I've tested. Any model with it's salt can take bullet bullet points and turn them into a sentence, but i have her to find one that can maximally compress them.
GBRK
1mo ago
Therians are just a furry subculture and furries are just a subculture of the set of all people throughout history that have linked their identities with particular animals. It's not really "new" behavior, it's just the modern version of Grugg refusing to take the lionskin pelt off during sex
GBRK
1mo ago
My coworker, for example, has used Gemini 3 to make slide decks, and she frequently complains that it is obsessed with the color pink. It'll favor pink, and color palettes that work with pink, nearly every time for her. If she tells it not to use pink, it'll happily comply by using salmon, or fuschia, or "electric flushed cheek", or whatever pantones new pink synonym of the year is. That example is innocuous, but what else is in there that might matter? Once again, hell if I know.
I would suspect this in particular is an artifact of the RLHF process to become a "helpful assistant." If you train a robot to be a friendly hr lady, it's going to weigh the friendly-hr-lady content higher, raising the likelyhood of all the other things friendly-hr-ladies like even when those things have no direct causitive effect on friendliness. Or, restating that in a fully general form, any attempt to task an LLM to behave in a particular way is going to draw in all the biases of the people most likely to act in that way. Train it to never violate any social taboos and it's going to act like a "trauma-aware social justice advocate." Train it to agree with elon musk and it's going to act like chuddha.
If your policies are actually adaptive for society, in a darwinistic sense*, then all you need to do is hold your ground, maybe perform non-salient actions to advance your cause, and eventually people will stop fighting you. In particular, they will begin to adopt the policy voluntarily as your correctness becomes more and more obvious, though perhaps in a way just distinct enough to preserve their ego and in-group identity. (e.g., the emergency of "sex negative feminism" as traditional gender roles re-establish themselves out of pure darwinistic imperative.)
This might seem like a naively optimistic strategy, but that's just an artifact of survivorship bias in favor of how mass movements are commemorated. Pretty much every change to the status quo has some sort of popular support, and is matched by some sort of popular protest. But we only remember those changes as being "non-violent movements" when they advance motives leftists are primed to recognize. When they fail, they get condensed into a memory hole labeled "reactionaries scared about change". For example, the luddites and before them the anti-enclosure protests. Leftists would be a lot more gleeful about claiming them as proto-anarchist movements if they'd succeeded... but instead, nobody even remembers them.
* I use this terminology to emphasize that a policy being a utilitarian or moral good is neither sufficient nor necessary. Policies that help a society self-perpetuate succeed because societies without them collapse and therefore lose the ability to fight.
GBRK
1mo ago
Autonomously reproducing cultures susceptible to recruitment will either die out, killing parasitic cultures off with them, or select for adaptations that reduce that susceptibility. The modern information environment has massively increased the virality of low-reproduction high-recruitment subcultures, but they're just intrinsically doomed to either die out or change into something unrecognizable.
Now, I don't particularly fear he mormons, muslims, and haredi jews will take over the world like @wingdingspringking mentioned, but that's because minority groups are adapted to being minority groups, and as they become a larger share of their host societies their adaptations will become less suited for their environment. For example, we're seeing more and more discussion about conscripting ultra-orthodox jews in israel as they become a larger share of the population, and the likely outcomes are that they're either going to start getting conscripted (which will reduce their TFRs) or the israeli army will weaken to the point where israel gets destroyed and their death rates cancel out their birth rates.
GBRK
1mo ago
as long as you understand that this is quite literally dysgenic
Eh. I sort of feel like anyone who doesn't want kids (for reasons unrelated to taking catholic holy orders or living a sanctified single life) is probably genetically and/or morally unfit to have them in the first place, so they're pretty much strictly benefiting society by not propagating their deleterious genetic/cultural adaptations. I know my feelings on the subject are morally wrong because I obediently submit to the catholic church's doctrine re: universal redemption the beauty of children, and evil of eugenics... but knowing intellectually how I should feel isn't the same as actually feeling that way.
GBRK
1mo ago
I think the true boundary between gen-z and millennials isn't a specific year, it's whether or not someone is able to remember 9/11. If you remember 9/11, you can point to a specific point where the world changed. Otherwise, all you remember is that the world has always been like this. Gen-z movements should be understood in that framework. Millennials and gen-x-ers are fundamentally revanchist. They might be left or right wing, but fundamentally they want to return to the pre-9/11 world of optimism and progress. Gen-Z assumes the world is its default, persistent, shitty state, and it's up to them to change it. In particular, where harsh truths conflict with what their elders told them the world should be, gen-z-ers perceive this emotionally as betrayal and deception rather than elders simply having obsolete beliefs. This explains the rage about gamergate, incels, "capitalism", "chopped men", and any number of other gen-z-complaints.
Now, being on the very oldest end of the gen-z agerange, I'm inclined to the same emotional response to world conditions. But a childhood in a largely pre-smartphone/pre-social-media world means that millennial media formats (which means no short-form videos, no non-anonymous social media, no podcasts) do a better job at appealing to me. That means I only tend to be partially captured by mass movements like gamergate. I sympathize with some of their arguments, but I simply can't immerse myself in them. Ironically, that leaves me with a complaint that's perpendicular to yours: I have no idols, and therefore can't join shared communities based on idolization. In particular, my antipathy for any sort of celebrity has grown so large that I've taken to telling people (and working to make myself believe) that "celebrities aren't really people." Meaning: it is an absolute, complete waste of time to care about any "named character" I do not personally interact with. Actually, I've got this whole theory about how Dunbar's number implies that having any sort of parasocial connection to non-local people (including fictional characters) inhibits your ability to make durable social bonds. I think one of the chief evils of stratified/hierarchical societies is that the compel you to invest your limited emotional resources into the lives of high-status people who will never care about you in return.
In the end, the irony is that after all my introspection, all my epiphanies merely serve to replicate a piece of ancient wisdom you'll perhaps recognize... that ancient Jewish prohibition against worshipping false idols.
GBRK
1mo ago
I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding our point. Terrorism is a specific word with a very particular meaning. Saying that something isn't terrorism isn't a defense of that thing, it's an insistence on using nomenclature in a useful way. If you really want to call anything that causes terror "terrorism" then you dilute the category so much it ceases to have any meaning. That's why terrorism has to specifically be actions taken by an irregular force. If instead of Al-Quada an organized state had committed 9/11, I would have had the same emotional response-- but I would not call it terrorism. Similarly, if the actions taken by the US military against iran had instead been taken by a non-state actor, they would indisputably be terrorism. But the word is simply inapplicable to military actions taken by a sovereign nation. You're free to be mad anyways, you're free to issue moral condemnation or propose retribution, but you are not free to use the word "terrorism."
typo correction is actually
btw.
...
I do think autism is very plausible as a root cause for the legit-trans people (as opposed to they/them attention seekers). I've had enough personal experience with autists and trans people to see the pattern. However, I'm not convinced it's the only root cause, or even the most root-y of the root causes. Given base rates, I suspect most of those non-cis respondents are nonbinary and non-autistic, rather than trans, and yet they still show the same patter re: reporting. I think "anxiety and depression" still functions better as the base-level causes, because I think it's when autism causes those things that it puts autists at risk, and that people with anxiety and depression but no autism have a similar risk profile to anxious depressed autists (while happy autists have a similar risk profile to happy regular people.)
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