aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
11mo ago
If I reduced transness to desire to undertake hormone therapy with no justification needed or given with no further implications what percentage of the trans activist community(or trans community writ large) do you think would sign onto it? What percent do you think would call me a transphobe?
aqouta
11mo ago
I'm not convinced the repeated requests for the bare link repo aren't just the same three or so people repeatedly bringing up the same request. I'm indifferent to it's return.
aqouta
11mo ago
Trans people make an impossible empirical claim as well. The claim that undergirds their requests are that they are actually able to tell that they are the opposite sex. That is to say they are claiming to be able to distinguish between the experience of "being a male who correctly thinks they have the internal experience of a female" and "being a male who mistakenly thinks they have the internal experience of being female". This is epistemically impossible as we each only have one experience and cannot triangulate reality.
aqouta
11mo ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology. Believing that a certain man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as believing that a man can become a woman by calling himself a woman and doing surgeries. But many people here on The Motte give Christianity a pass because it's really old and really popular and so it seems "normal", because they like its cultural/political connotations, and probably in some cases because they were raised Christian.
I'm always baffled when this accusation comes up. We understand that there are Christians among us and we don't poke that sore spot unprovoked. But it's absolutely not the case that we let reasoning from religious conviction go without critique. There are trans people here, when they argue topics that aren't about transness I don't, or at least attempt not to, let the fact that I have some disagreements on one topic come up in the other unless it's invoked.
Can you actually point to instances where someone used their belief that Jesus was the literal son of god when arguing for some policy without brooking opposition?
aqouta
11mo ago
Apparently the mods don't believe that low effort, low quality posts can prompt high effort, high quality responses despite ample evidence to the contrary.
I think it's a reasonable case of being concerned about moral hazard. If you let low quality posts because they can lead to high quality posts then you may find yourself with a flood of low quality posts so unworthy wading through that you scare away the high quality posts. There is an experiment on this, CWR.
aqouta
1yr ago
Right, it's a contest between rights and one can reasonably decide either one comes out supreme from the he context. It's an argument about trade offs. But most people aren't engaging in arguments acknowledging trade offs, they pick whichever response looks most flattering to the ingroup without any regard to reason. If the kid being made to change his appearance is a minority they will decry the act, if it's some visibly Maga kid they will support the school. This is what approximates moral reasoning for most people. It's a kind of consequentialism where the only consequences considered are PR.
aqouta
1yr ago
That very aspect is an inescapable part of being a functional agent that doesn't halt and catch fire when it encounters two mutually exclusive or conflicting Kantian imperatives, such as not lying versus letting people come to harm when an axe-murderer knocks on your door and asks where their target is hiding.
Honestly. I don't know if I agree with this. They don't catch fire but they certainly seem to get quite mad if you don't side with whichever imperative they've decided takes precedence. I got into a spat today on twitter in response to a post about a boy who reportedly had to have his ponytail cut off because of some school policy. I said if it was a public school this was definitely wrong but if it was a private school then they have the right to make whatever arbitrary dress code rules they want. A classic freedom of association vs freedom of expression problem. People didn't, an I propose in most cases like this don't, consider the trade off and say that they disagree with placing freedom of association over freedom of expression, they accused me of hating minorities and any number of other moral deficiencies. This is how normal people respond to values conflicts, pure black and white thinking.
aqouta
1yr ago
I guess it’s another victim of the toxoplasma of rage? Important issues that no one disagrees with are largely ignored, whereas less important ones will get talked about if you can create a debate over them.
Sure, but especially on a debate forum this doesn't even seem like a failure mode. If you want to say the republicans focusing on it as a point in the last mid terms lead to bad outcomes for them then I'd agree with you.
Put another way, if you come in here and claim to be able to see out of the back of your head and also think that we should focus on increasing fiber rather than decreasing sugar in American school lunches the claim that objectively impacts more people is absolutely not the claim I'm more likely to want to discuss. To many of us that claim that there is an internal feeling of gender is more like the former than the latter.
aqouta
1yr ago
Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?
I tire of this style of dismissal. It's posted continuously because intelligent people disagree and the most uncomfortable feeling in the world is knowing that people you otherwise respect disagree on something that seems so obvious with no explanation you can imagine an intelligent person believing readily available. No intelligent people really disagree about the problem of obesity, there are some disagreements on what should be done about it and those are talked about consistently but they often terminate in an agreement that more information is needed or a few reasonable theories to be investigated.
aqouta
1yr ago
The point of bank/state holidays isn't that bankers get them off, it's because banks/state offices are required to be open all the other days and it's to be avoided to have 4 days in a row of banks being closed.
I found that graph very funny. "Sensuality" listed as a fetish stunned me for a second.
There is apparently a continuum of tabooness from white to Asian to black...
aqouta
1yr ago
I don't mean to claim that Musk has done literally nothing, but I remember distinctly at the time people here and in my social circles were making wild claims about how Twitter had weeks to live and I was pretty sure end users would see minimal changes.
aqouta
1yr ago
Not much has changed. I don't think I participated in that particular thread but I am quite sure my opinion would be that nothing much would change.
aqouta
1yr ago
What the fuck do we do about the fact that owning shit and renting shit is just flat out better in every way than doing shit or making shit?
Having things is inherently and unchangeably better than not having things. This isn't a problem and there is no solution to it.
That said you seem to be heavily discounting the risk built into real estate. Everyone is a genius investor in a real estate bull market/bubble. If this was all as easy as you say then the market would correct for it.
aqouta
1yr ago
aqouta
1yr ago
If steel manning I think the motivation is something like that there is some value in young disenfranchised black kids seeing that their skin color is not alone an impenetrable barrier. Are their voices actually being heard because a rich lady who happens to be black gets a position? Maybe not. But it's not nothing to know that if they escape poverty they too can aspire to any position.
aqouta
1yr ago
I agree with this point. If the goal of appointing these people is to enfranchise Black people whose opinions are marginalized in society then I don't see how putting someone who does not at all have the experience of those groups into power accomplishes this. It's like the recent immigrants taking the affirmative action spots in ivy leagues. The disconnect between the purported motivation and the outcome achieved along with the total lack of interest in aligning these things betrays that the motivation is not sincere.
aqouta
1yr ago
Even in this scenario given a three minute chat and just observing behavior I think you could swamp race with other observations. But yes, if you're going to construct a scenario that amounts to "You need to select people knowing only the average stats of their group" (racial or otherwise - this same analysis applies to things like hair color of any other arbitrary grouping) then it would just follow that you should select the group with the highest expected competence.
I agree with the following implications and further think this implies some obligation of those who are more capable to help those who are less. Not on a group based level but just the mesh of all humanity.
I've probably commented on HBD threads on the motte several dozen times over the years and remember replying directly to you more than a couple times.
Edit: here I am about a month ago pushing back in the same topic.
Here I am clarifying that HBD need not be able racial supremacy
As far as no enemies on the left goes, I work at a mega bank and some groups of leftists have expressed to me a desire to have me take a place in front of a wall. I know you have a kind fo esoteric understanding of left VS right but I assure you that I recognize enemies to my left.
aqouta
1yr ago
I've never had any trouble with it myself. For the most part people you're interacting with have been sorted such that I think assumptions wouldn't be interpersonally useful. I work with excellent black engineers. It's a lot like how I can recognize for various reason women tend not to enter engineering fields and yet I easily recognize one of the most talented engineers on my team is a woman.
aqouta
1yr ago
HBDers like to claim individual and environmental factors largely don't matter and that everything can be boiled down to genetics. When I observe the world around me, I find that exceedingly hard to believe. My go-to example is that someone can have all the genetic potential in the world and still end up a flabby bastard if they don't eat well or work-out. Or in the case of the linked thread, all the genetic potential in the world isn't going to make a kid read well if nobody teaches them to read. From these simple observations I have arrived at the conclusion that the effect sizes of individual/environmental factors like having an engaged adult who teaches the kid to read, or getting off one's ass and going to the gym are far more predictive of outcome, and thus must have a greater effect size than genetics assuming such effects are measurable at all.
You do seem to just ignore those of us who are proponents of HBD and don't fall into this obvious trap. Yes, the environment also matters, no this does not actually disprove HBD and it is ridiculous to assume it does for the same reason a dump trunk being able to plow through a barricade does not prove barricades to have no efficacy. The world is more complicated than only one thing being able to contribute to an outcome. The HBD position is not that HBD has a greater effect size than environment, this is trivially proved by the ability to deprive babies of oxygen enough to leave them mentally handicapped. The HBD position is that genetics matter at all and vary between groups.
aqouta
1yr ago
I just want to chime in as I do that as someone who believes HBD is very likely true that I have no real interest in the use of it in this way. The use of these characteristics to pre judge people is reprehensible. I am only interested in HBD as an alternative explanation for disparate outcomes.
One can attempt use of both the left and right hand. One has other limbs to compare the feeling of missing a limb to, or if a quadraplegic at least a plausible biological explanation for the sensation. The Reimer story you reference is packed with alternative explanations besides internally felt 'gender' being real.
I was trying to avoid getting bogged down in the weeds of examples because I think your understanding of this, while I also think is wrong, is not representative of the trans movement at all. It's the rickety motte inhabited by you and two other people surrounded by a kerosene soaked Bailey filled with people who make claims like "we can tell a 2 year old is trans if they don't like wearing a certain type of dress."
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