Twin studies demolish the whole "born this way" thing, and show that it's only "born half way there". Even less for lesbians.
The "scientific consensus" is very against conversion therapy, but the science itself is a similarly mixed bag as that on therapy for something like alcoholism. Few people go from alcoholics to never touching a drink again, and a lot of people end up "relatively unrecovered", but nonetheless therapy is considered "effective" for alcoholism because a good portion of people end up drinking less. The science on conversion therapy also shows some people showing complete success, and a lot showing meaningful-but-incomplete success, and also a lot of failure -- and a lot of the failure is in the over the top terrible attempts at therapy which would fail at any therapeutic target. Yet conversion therapy gets touted as not only "difficult and likely to fail" but blanket "ineffective" because "you can't change what you're born with" as if it's an immutable fact, even though the science flat out contradicts this.
The science also says that homosexual men are higher in narcissism, which isn't very flattering and people probably won't like to admit. And in diseases, which is sometimes admitted but often gets shoved away too.
There might be more, this is just what comes to mind off the top of my head. The point is that as a topic, this is not one where truth is welcome so the science regularly gets avoided or branded "not REAL science". Imagine a study comes out tomorrow showing that 80% of gay people left in charge of children rape them, and it's bombproof. Do you see people saying "Oh, shit, I guess we need to stop letting gays watch kids", or do you see people screeching and revolting against the potential truth being suggested? That's the test for whether people are actually doing science or science denial. If a new paper came out in physics suggesting perpetual motion was possible, and actually demonstrated it, physicists wouldn't screech they'd update.
jimm
1yr ago
The importance of freedom of speech has to do with the fact that censorship is prone to abuse, and truth is not reliably obtained by censorship. The statement "But this time, the thing being censored is actually false" comes with a "according to me and my allies" qualifier, and even if I agree with you that in this case you're correct that doesn't mean that censorship isn't a political maneuver. It is still a use of force by the strong to silence the weak (or else it wouldn't work) and being strong is not sufficient proof that the use of force is just (or else there would have been no holocaust to deny).
The whole point of the freedom of speech is that the free market place of ideas is a more reliable path to good outcomes than is oppressing the weak when you feel really convinced that they're in the wrong. That's exactly what the Nazis did, and no amount of "But that's different because they were wrong [according to us]!" will change the fact that it's the same reasoning and the same justification.
In other words, if holocaust denial is clearly false and evil, then it won't need to be censored because anyone denying the holocaust will come off as clearly delusional and evil. If it's not so clear, then it actually needs to be hashed out, or else there will be unintegrated resentment and distrust building and the regime would have actually earned this distrust by choosing to close the path to feedback.
Abiding by the principle of free speech means voluntarily refusing to censor what you can censor, because you place more faith in the free expression of ideas to reach good conclusions than you do in your own ideology if it cannot sustain free expression of ideas. It's saying "Hey, maybe my head is up my own ass, and so to be appropriately humble I will refrain from oppressing the weak just because I think they're wrong and evil, and make sure that they stay uninfluential on their own merits".
And it works. While I'm sure they exist, I have never actually heard anyone deny the holocaust and I'm not even sure I've even met someone who wouldn't judge a person negatively for daring to suggest it didn't happen. This is an easy case, and if we can't even refrain from thumbing the scale when our ideological enemies are so easily defeated by pointing to the truth, we have no chance on anything remotely hard.
jimm
1yr ago
Definitely not impossible.
It helps to have more science cred then they do, and just generally not fitting the low-IQ backwater hick stereotype. It also helps if you reject science for scientific reasons, by doing things like citing science on the failures of science, or making specific critiques about how they used the wrong statistical test or whatever.
It's also useful to note that there are many aspects of science that these people reject themselves. Off the top of my head, there's the science relating to IQ, homosexuality, most of the COVID stuff if you pick the right point in time. Plenty more if you're willing to pick and choose bits that they will disagree with. "Science quickly becomes unscientific pseudoscience when touching on political hot topics, for example ".
jimm
1yr ago
To what extent does this analysis apply to homosexuality?
Building off of my other comment here, homosexuality could be viewed through the same lens.
The question is whether "X is good" leads to "I want to be X" or "I want to be sexually/romantically involved with X".
Only in this case X represents masculine virtue, and the "mistake" is in the other direction.
When a young boy observes his dad do something requiring great strength and is in awe (say, efficiently chopping down a tree with an axe), the result is that he wants to become strong like that when he grows up. He's likely to start imitating his dad, swinging axes or whatever his dad did to build/use his strength. Eventually, he becomes strong himself and chops down trees simply when they need to be chopped down, taking his physical strength for granted because it has just become part of who he is. Or he doesn't become strong, and is simply aware of what he's missing out by not being stronger.
When a woman is similarly awed by a man's strength, she's less likely to imitate his strength building behaviors and her fantasies are of a different kind. When you take the same expression of awe and way of relating and put it on a normal straight woman, it's no longer "I want to become more like him" -- it's a crush. She's attracted to him, as a way to have some of his strength as her own.
This seems to make some predictions too. If homosexuality is about noticing masculine virtue and fetishizing it rather then working to integrate, embody, and get bored with masculine virtue, then one might predict that it would lead to overemphasis of the appearance of the traits themselves rather than the end use. It would predict that working construction jobs and watching football "aren't very gay", and that bodybuilding -- even in nominally straight bodybuilders -- is "kinda gay". And that seems to fit, as shown by the bodybuilding communities frequent need to say "no homo".
It would also predict that homosexuality is correlated with narcissism, which appears to bear out (p<.001). The implication that "I can't embody masculine virtue and move on with my life" seems to predict lower self esteem too, which also appears to be true (p<.001), but I have to admit that I didn't think of that connection until seeing the result.
jimm
1yr ago
These are good observations. "Am I prone to pretend I am what I want to be" is kinda a given -- like any self described "Alpha male", for example. Or the people who inspired the phrase "the tolerant left". People do that a lot.
The other question is much more interesting, and Zach's "Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems" is insightful here.
The fascinating thing to me, is that despite being a quite gender conforming (and non-AGP) straight guy, when I read his description of his underlying desires it resonated. I could have written the exact same thing with one minor and meaning preserving word swap.
Consider this (word swapped) quote from Zach's post:
I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) as from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but somehow wanting the soul behind those eyes to be mine. Wanting my body to be shaped like that, to be in control of that avatar of beauty—not even necessarily to do anything overtly "sexy" in particular, but just to exist like that.
The relevant difference between Zach and me isn't that we feel "X is good" for different X. It's the same X.
Here's another quote, this one direct:
"Oh my God, I have breasts and a vagina that I can look at and touch without needing anyone's permission; this is the scintillating apotheosis of sexual desire and the most important thing in the world."
The most obvious way to fulfil this desire isn't "become a woman", but to own a woman -- but that doesn't fit with being (in his words) a sensitive boy who was ideologically committed to "antisexism" as defined by the religion of feminism. And if "owning" a woman is too unthinkable, you might come up with creative solutions.
When phrased that way it does sound sexist, and words do kinda fail here, but there's a nonsexist way of achieving this too, which Zach touches on slightly here:
It's because I was straight. Because I loved women, and wanted to do right by them. It's an identificatory kind of love—loving women as extension of the self, rather than a mysterious, unfathomable Other. But that's not unusual, is it?—or it shouldn't be. I would have assumed that guys who can't relate to this are probably just sexist.
If you can imagine a woman saying to you "I don't want to be 'your girlfriend'. I want to be yours" -- and meaning it, and being right to mean it, then you can love her "as an extension of yourself". There's no more "needing permission" because the mutual love breaks down the boundaries and the idea your lover "needs your permission" to touch you just becomes absurd and nonsensical. "Wanting my body to be shaped like that"/"wanting the soul behind those eyes to be mine" takes on a different literal meaning, but the desire being fulfilled is the same.
The question is whether "X is good" leads to "I want to be X" or "I want to be sexually/romantically involved with X".
jimm
1yr ago
"Controlling your appetite" seems harder than "controlling what you eats" in the same way that "controlling what you are afraid of" seems harder than "controlling whether you into the fear", but fears are "controllable" too. Pairing a shock with a stimulus is a good way to condition a fear of said stimulus, and exposing yourself to the stimulus while paying attention to the lack of any bad consequences is the way that therapy can reduce fear.
The same thing works for appetite. Pay attention to what you're eating, how your body feels in response, and what the outcomes are. People are often very mindless about this, craving foods which make them feel bad and lead to undesirable outcomes while flinching away from making the connections. Make the connections, and all of a sudden those foods/quantities of foods no longer seem so appealing -- in the same way that a restaurant no longer seems so appealing after you get food poisoning there, only more subtle because the effects are not so immediate and dramatic. When someone says something horribly fat shaming like "You eat too much", for example, instead of pushing it away with "I know I know don't rub it in I can't help it!", sit with it. Face it. "I do eat too much. I am fat, and look disgusting. My stomach feels disgustingly over full, once I pay attention to it". How hungry are you after sitting through that? How compelling is that same hunger?
Perhaps the easiest way to get a gut level feel for how much your relationship to food can change is to just not eat for a few days. Eventually you get over the neediness and experience the desire for food completely differently, in a way that leaves a lot more perceived freedom to do what you want to do.
jimm
1yr ago
So trans women can assault women in the bathroom, away from the protection of men, but that's okay and totally not an issue unless
- the assault is sexual
- the assailant doesn't precede their assault with words
- they're assaulting someone they don't know
- they choose to assault women one at a time
- they couldn't possibly have found another venue at which to assault people
That sounds like an odd place to move the goalpost to, and I think there may have been a reason you didn't list all these criteria up front when saying I "I've never seen an example which meets all these criteria"
Regardless, it's not like I keep a file tracking these things, or even follow it intentionally at all; this is just the first example that met your criteria. If you can't think of any examples of things that most people would see as "the kind of thing anti-trans activists warn about", then it seems like you're not looking, and not noticing when it happens..
jimm
1yr ago
I am not aware of a single case of a trans woman assaulting a woman in a women's bathroom. This is purely hypothetical as far as I know. If it happened, I expect the anti-trans side would publicize it heavily.
jimm
1yr ago
You’ve got a limited amount of time on this earth, and aren’t obligated to spend it debating people you think are trolls or at least cranks. [...] There is some level of belief where it becomes rational to write off the rest as a rounding error, rather than spend time on it.
This is justification for not having any motivation to talk to them. It is not motivation to avoid looking more closely at your beliefs.
I believe the earth is round. I could be wrong, but I find it sufficiently unlikely that I'm going to learn anything worthwhile from the average flat earther that I'm not really interested in debating them. However, if I ever find myself wanting to debate them, and also feeling like I need to avoid doing that, then that's a sign that something about what I claim to believe is wrong.
Having watched a couple actual debates on this topic, it's often that the "round earther" has no idea how to justify their (correct, IMO) beliefs, and instead of honestly admitting that they are essentially taking people's words for it, are trying to pretend that they actually understand things more than they do. That cognitive dissonance doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong on the object of contention, but it's a pretty good bet that you're wrong somewhere (perhaps in how confident and justified you actually are), and this sign marks the trailhead.
feel stupider for having engaged, or encourage your opponents.
These are both signs that your story isn't adding up. Why did you feel tempted to do something stupid? What roped you in?
Why would your opponent leave feeling "encouraged" rather than humiliated? If you actually know the topic so well, and their beliefs so dumb, shouldn't you be able to address their points so well that they are the ones that leave feeling dumb?
If I think something is 99% likely to be true, and I don’t want to spend time debating heretics, it’s still fair to say that I believe that thing.
That's 99% fair. And that 1% lie can be an acceptable rounding error.
But that 1% lie can also be a part of a much bigger lie to avoid having to deal with the fact that it's a hell of a lot more than 1% motivated and likely to be false.
Any time you find yourself actively wanting to avoid engagement (and not simply lacking motivation to engage), you're actively up against the part of your belief which isn't genuine. Even if it's only 1%, it's proven that it's not small enough to be irrelevant. And if it's making itself relevant, that's good evidence that it isn't really as small as you might like to believe.
jimm
1yr ago
I don't think it's ironic at all. It's just what's obviously going to happen if 1) it needs to be said in the first place and 2) you can't think of a more persuasive thing to say.
"Don't ask us to support our reasoning" is not trust building discourse.
jimm
1yr ago
If you genuinely believe X -- as in, all the evidence you've seen points towards X, you have no inkling that X might be false, you would be willing to bet at strong odds that X is true -- then there may not be any motivation to look any more closely but there certainly isn't any motivation to avoid looking closely -- because what's the worst that can happen? You find more evidence that you're right?
In order to know that you need to be motivated to not look to closely, you need to know that there's at least a significant chance of learning that a thing you want to be true is not true. And that means you know that you already know there's at least a significant chance of this thing not being true. At this point, if you act as if you "believe" X with any confidence then you are merely acting.
Genuine (dis)belief and motivated reasoning do not fit together.
jimm
1yr ago
The theme running through my whole series of posts is "just because they don't act right doesn't mean you get to act v badly too". Why would that change when it's the government not acting right?
The point is that enforcing order when no one else will is not "acting badly".
jimm
1yr ago
It can definitely happen quicker than 5 seconds or take longer than 15 seconds. The problem is that unconsciousness isn't always as obvious as you'd think, and so "choking someone until they stop resisting" can mean that the choke is being held long after unconsciousness and is only released upon death. That appears to be what happened here.
jimm
1yr ago
I've been training jiu jitsu for the better part of a decade now, and I disagree. The RNC and hooks combo is common enough that a lot of people who don't train have seen it on UFC, and his execution is sloppy enough in more than one way (against a basically non-resisting opponent, by that time) that I find it hard to believe that he had any significant amount of training.
Anyone that trains will know that you shouldn't be holding a legit RNC tight for minutes after the guy has gone unconscious. However, I find it to be very unlikely that they knew the homeless man was unconscious. The homeless man was still moving, and even professional MMA refs occasionally fail to recognize that the competitor being choked is only jerking around unconsciously. If you have little to no training, and a piss poor RNC (which probably didn't put him out quickly), and the guy you're trying to choke keeps flailing around.... and you don't have have enough years in jiu jitsu to have seen people keep fighting when unconscious, then it's pretty easy to conclude that you just aren't successfully strangling him.
jimm
1yr ago
He's struggling, but he's unconscious. It's not clear to an untrained eye, and from time to time even MMA/jiu jitsu refs will fail to recognize that the person struggling isn't conscious anymore, so it's understandable that these guys didn't realize that he was unconscious.
However, to someone who has experience with this stuff, it's very clear that the guy is unconscious for at least two minutes and twenty seconds of being choked.
jimm
1yr ago
No HylnaCG, I am not. It boggles my mind that you'd double down with such confident counter assertions without checking if you understand what is being said or whether you have your facts straight. Google "critical temperature" and "critical temperature methane", then reread my comment. Then maybe google "supercritical fluid compressibility".
jimm
1yr ago
Butane and propane liquify just fine at room temperature, but methane does not. Methane has to be below -80C in order to form a liquid, and therefore cannot be transported through a pipeline as a liquid. Liquids can end up in the pipelines anyway, but that is not the same thing and requires an additional detail to be specified -- something that cuts against your Occam's razor argument.
Whether you think it's a priory super unlikely that a military would ever attempt a clandestine operation and only kinda get caught is really beside my point.
Simply put, no it is not.
The "call to violence" exception isn't really an exception because you're not actually punishing speech.
If I kill Betty and bury her body under the old church, then if I'm ever caught saying the words "I killed Betty and buried her under the old church", I'm likely to go to jail because I said those words. But it's not "punishing speech", it's punishing violence -- murder, specifically. And in the same vein, if I say "Give me your money or I will kill you", it is not "speech", it's the counterfactual violence which I am using to extort you. Speech is needed to communicate the evidence of guilt, or convey the threats, but it's the violence itself that calls for punishment -- and that's why I can say the words "Give me your money or I will kill you" here, or "I killed betty and buried her under the old church" without getting or deserving punishment for it.
If you are actively attempting to coordinate unjust and illegal violence, then again, it's the violence that's a problem. But it has to be unjust and illegal violence. Making the case that parking tickets should be given in a certain case is not "advocating for violence" just because their policy, if accepted, would ultimately lead to violence against anyone refusing to pay the parking tickets. It's the illegal parker's "resisting arrest" that will be deemed violence. And that's fine and good, because if we as a society decide that it makes sense to enact new parking rules, we as a society agree that people parking there are defecting and doing the wrong thing -- even though this "bears an implicit threat" against people who like to park there.
Saying "The holocaust should happen" is vague as fuck. What's that even mean? "The jews are vermin, which we should exterminate"? That's absolutely a threat of 'unpopular truth' to the people who want to ban it, even though I don't feel particularly threatened myself because I'm solid in the fact that it's not true. But that also means I don't feel a need to censor in order to stop the ideas from spreading.
"Show up by the old church wearing swastikas, and round up any jew in sight" is a call to violence, and you should arrest those people for attempting violence -- if you have sufficient evidence that the violence is real, that is. If someone is merely arguing -- even incorrectly -- the factual case that we'd be better off if jews were genocided, then that is factual speech and absolutely 100% speech that needs to be protected.
The bottom line is this:
If it were true, would it be important to know?
If we'd really be better off exterminating jews, because jews really are so parasitic as to be more comparable to tapeworms than productive members of society (and therefore "the holocaust should happen"), then that would be very important to know.
If we just disagree that it's true, then we use our words like grown ups instead of having tantrums at ideas that upset us to think about.
Applying "If it were true, would it be important to know?" to "Show up and round up the jews", we immediately find that it is not applicable, because there is no truth value to be found. If the statement has no truth value because it isn't a proposition but an actual call to violence, then respond to the actual threat of violence accordingly.
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