InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Whatever (huge) disagreements I have with Yud, it's not that he's chained down to conventional opinions about political correctness!
I would only share this view if I believed that Yudkowsky would face serious consequences for dissenting from the mainstream narrative about transgenderism. Which I seriously doubt. (Serious as in losing his job and/or some of his close family; losing clout on Twitter (or I guess X now) doesn't count.)
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Sure. Obviously, a lot of the externalities with transgenderism go away if you have a social norm to actually be nice, including not using transgenderism for bad results.
But I understood Scott (and others) to be talking about trans people in wider society. I would have less of an issue with them if they clarified that they were only talking about trans people in the context of the rationalist community.
Or if they drew a line in the sand and said, no, actually, it's not acceptable to give Norton the head of Rutherford B. Hayes, and we need policies on emperor-identified people to ensure that doesn't happen.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Exactly. By this same standard, we might as well replace a power substation with a playground because the power substation is ugly.
Being beautiful is not (usually) one of the main aims of infrastructure projects.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
It really does strike me that Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Aella et al are putting on the kid gloves tight when it comes to the proposals of transgenderism.
Take Scott, for example, responding to the 4chan post about trans-Napoleonism. He basically says "just let him wear the silly bicorne hat" and points to "Emperor" Norton of San Francisco as a happy-go-lucky story of just going along with what a trans-emperor says because it's easier. But he doesn't ever adequately address the hardball arguments - a Napoleon-gender that demands absolute power over the French Empire and its satellites in Europe (as the 4chan post said), and a Norton that demands the head of President Rutherford B. Hayes (as you, Zack M. Davis, point out). As far as I can tell, Scott's response to people pointing out the demands for a French Empire and Hayes's head - although he doesn't explicitly state this - is "lol, that just doesn't happen".
This is a very troubling dismissal, because there are a lot of Rutherfords in transgenderism. The reason why people point out President Rutherford Hayes and demands for a French Empire is because transgenderism affects others - it has externalities - and attempting to cure someone's distress by agreeing to their false map of reality is not a cost-free action and is not something with no meaningful consequences to other people (hence, the story about putting the hair dryer in the passenger seat is simply irrelevant). In other words, "just be nice" is a really bad argument.
For example, the inclusion of trans athletes in women's sports, or the inclusion of trans people in women's bathrooms, or the inclusion of trans people in women's prisons. Everyone seems to agree that it would be a very bad thing if a trans-Napoleon today gained control over the countries that used to make up the former French Empire, or if Norton was given the head of Rutherford B. Hayes, so they just... dismiss those and say it could never happen. They say they would never demand Rutherford's head and that it's absurd to even consider the possibility that Rutherford might be decapitated to fulfill the desires of an Emperor Norton.
And then when those externalities do happen, and a male-born trans person wins against a female athlete (inherently, unfairly), or a trans person assaults a woman in the bathroom, or a trans prisoner impregnates a woman, those objections are at best handwaved away and dismissed as outliers or discredited, or at worst labeled "transphobic" and censored.
In my opinion, the refusal to honestly engage with these arguments reflects poorly on the leaders - or otherwise influential figures - of the rationalist community. To put it lightly, it's unbelievable how they make a simple mistake - that their own foundational writings (the Sequences) warned about - and how they have failed to correct their own mistake (at least, they haven't corrected it yet, although I'm not optimistic about their chances of doing so).
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
It got a ton of engagement at first, but that fell off a cliff extremely quickly. Many speculate that this was due to its stricter content moderation compared to Twitter.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
(reposting because new thread)
Is Twitter finally dead yet?
Usually, I'd be the last person to ask such a provocative question. I used to be one of the people who rolled their eyes or otherwise ignored sensationalized media stories surrounding Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, stories which have plagued the news cycle for the better part of almost a year now. It felt like you couldn't go a day or two without an article on the most mundane of things that were only remarkable because of Musk, like him going to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
But I have to - reluctantly - admit, maybe all the media's negative hype had a point.
The latest decision Musk has made is to rebrand Twitter to "X". The URL X.com will automatically redirect Twitter. Twitter is changing its logo from the iconic blue bird into a white "X". Apparently a tweet should now just be called an "X".
The obvious question is: Why? Musk's answer seems to be that he wants to change Twitter into some sort of "super-app" where one can do everything on it, similar to the WeChat app in China. This only raises further questions, like why people couldn't just use other apps, or why it had to be done in this why, or why they couldn't even just go the Meta approach where the company is renamed X (in fact, it's already been "X Corp." for a while) but Twitter gets to still be named Twitter and keep the blue bird logo.
The one thing that everyone in the Musk-Twitter discourse seems to agree on is that Twitter has significant value in its brand. Now, it might not even have that. Who really wants to talk about "'X'-ing on X" when it's far more idiosyncratic to say "tweeting on Twitter", which people have done for the better part of the decade?
But to answer my own question: No, I think it's the wrong approach to look at each change as potentially an outright Twitter-killer. I think the bigger picture should be looked at, and that in the long run, the demise of Twitter will be a death by a thousand paper cuts, where each change isn't quite so negative to kill it entirely, but it keeps Twitter on a downwards and downwards trend. And there's already been several paper cuts - fleeing advertisers, ratelimits, restricted guest browsing, etc.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Is Twitter finally dead yet?
Usually, I'd be the last person to ask such a provocative question. I used to be one of the people who rolled their eyes or otherwise ignored sensationalized media stories surrounding Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, stories which have plagued the news cycle for the better part of almost a year now. It felt like you couldn't go a day or two without an article on the most mundane of things that were only remarkable because of Musk, like him going to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
But I have to - reluctantly - admit, maybe all the media's negative hype had a point.
The latest decision Musk has made is to rebrand Twitter to "X". The URL X.com will automatically redirect Twitter. Twitter is changing its logo from the iconic blue bird into a white "X". Apparently a tweet should now just be called an "X".
The obvious question is: Why? Musk's answer seems to be that he wants to change Twitter into some sort of "super-app" where one can do everything on it, similar to the WeChat app in China. This only raises further questions, like why people couldn't just use other apps, or why it had to be done in this why, or why they couldn't even just go the Meta approach where the company is renamed X (in fact, it's already been "X Corp." for a while) but Twitter gets to still be named Twitter and keep the blue bird logo.
The one thing that everyone in the Musk-Twitter discourse seems to agree on is that Twitter has significant value in its brand. Now, it might not even have that. Who really wants to talk about "'X'-ing on X" when it's far more idiosyncratic to say "tweeting on Twitter", which people have done for the better part of the decade?
But to answer my own question: No, I think it's the wrong approach to look at each change as potentially an outright Twitter-killer. I think the bigger picture should be looked at, and that in the long run, the demise of Twitter will be a death by a thousand paper cuts, where each change isn't quite so negative to kill it entirely, but it keeps Twitter on a downwards and downwards trend. And there's already been several paper cuts - fleeing advertisers, ratelimits, restricted guest browsing, etc.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
"Selection bias doesn't make Aella's surveys worse than average" should not mean Aella's surveys are useful; it should mean on average surveys are about as useful as astrology.
Definitely. Scott's article is arguing against some hypothetical person that disbelieves Aella's surveys but for some reason believes the average sociological survey, when as far as I'm aware, people who criticize Aella don't also believe in the average survey.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Agreed. I'm always skeptical of people, like Aella, who focus endlessly on what the data is and trying to interpret grand conclusions from statistics, bigger conclusions than one should. There's a reason "lies, damned lies, and statistics" is a saying.
For example, police statistically pull over and ticket more black people. Does this mean that police are racist? No, it just means that black people commit more traffic offenses. Indeed, black people statistically commit more crime in general. (Noticing this is only racist if you come up with racist explanations for this. There's perfectly innocuous explanations you could argue like black people being historically disadvantaged, being in poverty, etc.) People will argue that speed cameras are better because they can't be biased, and then once speed cameras are implemented, will allege that cameras are racist somehow just because they, statistically, ticket more black people.
Most people don't think in terms of data and statistics, and quite frankly, it's not really the best policy to implement something from "well this number is lower" or "this line is going up and to the right". So what if Meghan Murphy is wrong, and, for the sake of argument, a lot of people in the sex industry have a positive view of it (as proven by statistics)? It does not necessarily follow that the sex industry is ethical or positive for society as a whole.
(Silly Aella surveys are unhelpful and probably worse than nothing.)
Just so we're on the same page, there's already articles defending Aella's surveys as things you can draw big conclusions from, rather than things that only apply to Aella's audience.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
This is why I never posted much about the Rotherham scandal when it occurred, despite it being the city where I was born and grew-up before I left for uni in London as a 5’5” 120 lb woman.
Now I'm wondering if you actually were born in Rotherham and grew up there or if this is a lie to preserve opsec.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I wish many more parts of the internet had a norm of habitually archiving stuff. These days, anything posted is lucky to stay up for a day before getting taken down for one reason or another.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
That could explain other things too, like why the furry community has a significant number of people and why furries have so much disposable income. I've seen many jokes about how if there was a plane full of furries, and it crashed, killing everyone on board, the tech infrastructure in America would crumble soon afterward.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I've never understood how people who are, essentially, less than 0.01% of the population have gained a comparatively much higher proportion when it comes to their representation in the popular conscience. Trans rights activists don't like the 0.01% argument, which is fine - but then they turn around and use it themselves by saying that a people that is 0.01% of the population is harmless. Which, besides being not how things work in any capacity, is having it both ways.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
So how do you refer to someone who’s straight, but in a wheelchair? Or a cis autistic person? You can be “normal” in one axis but not another. Surely it’s handy to have a word that refers to the default attribute?
I don't see why the first can't be referred to as "wheelchair user" and the second as "autistic person". There is a convention in communication where if you leave out an attribute, it is assumed to be normal, or at the very least, not currently relevant to the conversation. Especially since "wheelchair user" does not necessarily mean that they are not straight and "autistic person" does not necessarily mean that they are trans.
If you feel denigrated being called straight, do you also feel denigrated being called right handed (assuming you are)? Or would you want to be called normal handed?
This is very different from "cis" for a few reasons.
-
Estimates of the proportion of right-handed people in the population varies widely from 70% to 90%, but whatever it is, the actual number is far from 99.99%, in contrast to the proportion of non-trans people. So it would be incorrect to say right-handed is "normal-handed" (unless one is joking, of course). It may be the majority, but not the norm.
-
The accommodations for people of a certain handedness are very understandable and very reasonable. E.g. talking about manufacturing left-handed or right-handed computer mice. So there's plenty of innocuous reasons to use the term.
-
Most of the time that "right-handed" or similar is used, it is used neutrally and without a negative connotation. E.g. this isn't about the actual hands of people, but talking about how to drive on the right-hand side of the road with a vehicle that has a steering wheel on the right-hand side of the car. (I say most of the time, though, because I just searched "right-handed" on Twitter to look at the usage of the term, and there are a few recent tweets mock-arguing that it is a slur in response to Elon Musk's tweet, which I can decidedly say means it is being used in a negative context.)
To me your argument just sounds like the same language policing that the left is oft guilty of, but with a right wing flavour.
If you mean language policing as in "don't say the n-word", then I guess so. But I agree with that policing insofar as I don't really think it's productive to let people say the n-word all the time, although at that point it's more about behavior, not language.
If you mean language policing as in "say 'people of color' instead of 'black people'", I don't think that's the same thing, because "black people" is definitely a neutral term (and as a minor point, "people of color" is just more awkward to say).
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Never. But I wanted to be a bit less anecdotal and a bit more charitable in my top-level comment.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I agree, contrary to the outrage of many on Twitter. With the context, he clearly says it in relation to targeted harassment. That's why he himself said "cis" without censoring it.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Someone can be a "racist" for having the wrong skin tone and singing along to the wrong song, or refusing to give up a rented CityBike.
Actually, the outrage was worse than this. The argument of Twitter activists wasn't that she was refusing to give up her CitiBike. It's that she was trying to somehow steal the bike that the other black men had rented and was using her status/privilege(?) as a white woman to cry crocodile tears, and thus trying to get someone to call the police, and therefore the police arriving would commit racist police brutality on them, and therefore her resisting in that manner means that she was committing literal violence on them, despite there being more black men than her who were all individually physically stronger than her. And of course, therefore, it's appropriate that she be canceled and fired from her job as a nurse.
At least, that was the argument as I understood it. It's all completely incorrect, of course, and I do not endorse it in the slightest.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Is "straight" a slur? "Able-bodied"? "Neurotypical"? Those, like "cis", are all neutral valance ways of describing a person as normal along some axis. I'm guessing you're disagreeing that "cis" is neutral valance?
If I kept going on about the straights, able-bodied, and neurotypicals who are doing things that I deem to be unpleasant, at some point I expect others to treat me like I'm using slurs. That's kind of how slurs evolved in the first place, otherwise they wouldn't be slurs. Most of the time, I don't have any reason to use those particular terms anyway, so if I want to talk about those kinds of people, I just don't use "straight", "able-bodied", or "neurotypical". I generalize this from the principle of talking about everyone like they want to be included in the conversation.
And, yes, "cis" doesn't sound neutral to me. Adding a qualifier in front of something inherently implies that it's different from the norm. If I kept talking about "blorg men" and "blorg women" and "blorg people", I sincerely doubt that any person would think that I'm talking about the vast majority of people. Rather, they would think that I would be talking about some minority of people with the "blorg" attribute, whatever "blorg" may mean. I would expect them to be confused if I told them I'm simply talking about people who, say, have five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot. Double their confusion if, preceding this, I was ranting about "blorg privilege" and how "blorg people have it easy" and similar statements.
(This isn't even getting into people accurately described as such not wanting to be called "criminal", "con man", etc., and us not calling those slurs.)
Well, for one, I don't really see criminals demand to not be called a "criminal" that often, if at all. For two, this would be kind of pointless, because the accusation of someone's criminality goes far beyond just surface-level labeling. Like, personally, you can tell me someone is a criminal, but I'd ask you for specifics. And then if you told me "well, he was convicted of the sexual assault of a woman", there's not really many language games one can do to weasel out of that accusation besides challenging the definition of "sexual assault" (and of course, "woman").
For three, I don't go on angry rants about people I describe as "criminal". Like, I can think of plenty of cases where "criminal" would be unacceptable, but those are when it's obvious the speaker is using it as a thinly-veiled replacement for "black" (e.g. "I hate people with criminal skin color"). The same cannot be said for "cis", and while anecdotal, at least one person (WhiningCoil) has replied to my comment corroborating this. I also don't treat all people described as "criminal" like they're a unified group who are all in coordination to achieve some common goal.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
The gender-critical would say that a trans woman is a trans-identified man, or TiM for short.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
An interesting tweet from Elon Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671370284102819841
Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.
The words “cis” or “cisgender” are considered slurs on this platform.
My initial reaction to this was that "well, aren't you already allowing slurs on Twitter, Elon?" But then I realized that there's a distinction here - slurs may be allowed, but harassment is not. After all, he used the words "cis" and "cisgender" without any censorship, much like many would censor a typical slur such as "nigger" as "n*gger" or "n-word". You may be allowed to use "cis", but you're not allowed to directly call someone "cis" on the platform.
More to the point, I think it's very valid to describe "cis" and "cisgender" as a slur, insofar as a slur is something you call a group of people who don't want to be called that (similar to the "'TERF' is a slur" debate). Certainly, "cissy" is definitely a slur (which the person Elon Musk was replying to was called). So why don't people want to be called "cis"?
I think it's because labeling the vast majority of the population (something like 99%) and making them have to use a qualifier to describe themselves is a systematic effort to make them seem more different from the norm than they really are. For the vast majority of human existence, a woman would be described as "a woman", until suddenly (around the late 2010s or so), she would now have to be described as "a cis woman", to distinguish her from "a trans woman". The implied argument seems to be that "a woman" is now suddenly ambiguous and one does not know whether one is referring to a woman in the classical sense, or a trans woman.
I would agree with this, except that I still see many instances of "women" being used when it's really being used to refer to trans women. If a qualifier is needed now, why not just keep saying "trans women" all the way through? So the "cis" terminology seems to just be a ploy to redefine "woman" to by default mean "trans woman", thus making the "cis" qualifier necessary to refer to a woman in the classical sense. But this would seem to contradict one of the supposed goals of the trans movement, that trans people should be treated the same as non-trans people. Why not refer to trans women and "cis" women equally, without the qualifier?
And it's not like it's impossible to refer to non-trans people either. I've seen many terminologies used that are much more acceptable, such as "biological women", or "non-trans" as I've been using. There's also "assigned female at birth", but I feel like that's much more of a misnomer, as it implies that gender/sex is something you're "assigned" rather than a fundamental property that is immutable (at least with today's primitive technology).
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
So, you're basically saying that these failed social policies were created by the insecurities of the middle class?
If so, that's not how I see it. I see it as the result of people in power who aren't in contact with the ground-level reality. For example, they will let violent criminals out on low bonds ($500-$1,000) and don't realize how much of a disservice it is to the community. Another example is the abolishment of mental institutions under the guise that they were horrific for patients, without the acknowledgement that the alternative of letting them out onto the street is much worse (not only for society, but for the former patients too).
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I don't buy this narrative of the "very successful destruction" of public transport by automobiles. For one, airplanes still exist and are very successful.
all as part of a concerted effort by relevant industries to lobby for these changes.
So are you ruling out that these changes happened because people wanted them?
The hysteria refers to white flight, which started on its own but was considerably aggravated by highly destructive bussing policies within urban areas.
Not sure what policies you're referring to, but from my understanding, it was crime, not the policies. Or maybe the crime caused the policies.
Source? I was under the impression that they're actually less likely to be the victims of any crime, although it is a pretty small sample size to draw any significant conclusions either way.
Okay. But they should at least edit in a little disclaimer that says their writings on trans people are meant to be read in the context of the rationalist community, right? (Actually, they should do that for basically everything, but that's a different story...)
Well, why do we have an age of consent? That could be considered a special policy for children, since violating someone's sexual consent is already against the law.
The reason is that there's enough gray area in the law that it's far more prudent to draw a line in the sand and add a special policy that forbids any sex with anyone below the age of 18. This way, we can cut the Gordian knot and end the otherwise interminable debates about whether a minor really consented to sex in this instance or not.
The meta-reason is that children are different enough than adults and thus need a special policy for them. So it goes for trans people too.
The trans person in the news story you linked to, Noah Ruiz, pleaded guilty to aggravated disorderly conduct. I'm guessing that this is referring to "defense mode":
So I doubt the story that Ruiz claims. The TikToks that Ruiz has posted don't really amount to anything significant, nor do they support the claims. It sounds like Ruiz started the altercation (and not for looking like a man in a woman's bathroom).
Again, I don't believe this narrative of trans people just being flat-out attacked if someone thinks they are doing the wrong thing.
Yes of course, that is already the policy. But my focus was on women being impregnated, because the easiest and simplest way to 100% prevent prison pregnancy is to separate by sex and disregard prisoners' trans identity.
It's a misconception that you can simply "stop" puberty. I mean, you can, but the rest of the body still develops. I would also object to this being possible in the first place because I don't believe taking puberty blockers is good for the physical health of any minor. They'll have many health problems for the rest of their life.
Here's a different idea - why not just let trans people compete with men, or create a separate sports category for trans people?
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