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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   38048 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Until I started working with geniuses, I never really understood the laments you sometimes hear that go, what a pity it is that our brightest minds have all gone off to Wall Street. I thought, that can't really be the case right? But then I joined a quant trading firm, in a sort of supporting role, and suddenly I also find myself wondering, as I interact with certain people at the office: shouldn't you be uncovering the secrets of the universe or something?

It took a while to hit me. I think I spent my first few months constantly debating people on this or that, convinced I had something to teach them, at least in my little domain. After all, it isn't always immediately apparent when someone is far more intelligent than you. But time and again I would have these epiphanies: oh, he is right, he was right two weeks ago, and I should've just listened then, as it would have saved me two weeks of trouble, and now I have to rewrite this code, and he had foreseen all this, and all this time he's been gently, politely nudging me to understand, as with a child, never brashly asserting his superiority, which must have been obvious to him. And I would feel ashamed remembering all my impassioned but mistaken arguments. After a while I picked up a sort of epistemic helplessness: even if my intuitions disagreed completely with one of these people I knew to be brilliant, I would go along with them. Eventually I would understand.

I'll call one of these brilliant and competent people Mark. I hesitate to say "genius" but I wouldn't object if you used the word. If I had to guess, I'd say he's 4 standard deviations above the mean, but really it's kind of impossible to judge people much smarter than you I think. Anyway, at some point I noticed Mark never came in anymore; he always worked remotely. That isn't normal at my company, but I assumed he must have negotiated an arrangement with the director. Perks of being a star. Was he on some beach? I don't know. He was still on Slack, ready to explain some point about statistics whenever I messaged him occasionally.

One day the midwits of HR took it upon themselves to organize mandatory in-person harassment training for everyone. Up till now, the annual training had been online and easy enough to click through without too much thought. But now we were forced to sit and discuss various hypothetical scenarios aloud, under the guidance of a training facilitator. In one scenario, a black employee is offended when someone describes her as "articulate". I wanted to pull my hair out, listening to the facilitator explain to my genuinely confused Indian coworker why this description was problematic. It struck me that our baroque American woke social norms perhaps do more to exclude minorities than to include them, on net. In another scenario, an intern with they/them pronouns is misgendered by those around them. Our guided discussion of this scenario was absolutely farcical. No one managed to utter two sentences about this hypothetical scenario without also accidentally using the wrong pronouns (and amusingly it was always "she", never "he", that people accidentally said), prompting stifled giggles all around. Even the training facilitator slipped up and had to conclude by mumbling something about how “intent matters”. It was as if we all knew subconsciously that individuals such as the hypothetical intern had on some level deluded themselves. Overall, I was (and am) annoyed that HR had been permitted to waste the valuable time of these smart people in this silly way, since the company had otherwise been very no-nonsense. I supposed Mark was somehow exempt from this training.

Weeks later, Mark returns to the office, ending his long absence. Only now he's a she, and goes by Mary.

And now maybe some of you are rolling your eyes at this post: you’ve been duped into reading propaganda. But no, I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here. I’m just trying to reflect on my own perspective on trans people suddenly shifting based on this one person. It’s not that I’d never encountered trans people before, but in the past they were always of the annoying sort, the sort that you could dismiss as a self-deluded victim of a weird sort of social contagion. But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded. Self-delusion is the one thing those of her profession are good at avoiding. Can you tell she’s trans? I dunno, kind of? Is it autogynephilia? No clue. It feels a little impertinent to ponder, though that’s the sort of question that I might have said mattered a lot before. Somehow just witnessing one extremely competent and effective person I respect turn out to be trans made it “real” for me, especially after all the other times I deferred to her judgment.

(I recognize that not everyone worships mathematical talent like I do, and you may find my automatic deferral of judgment weird or even disqualifying of my opinion. I know there are brilliant mathematicians with stupid and wacky beliefs in other domains. I do think, though, that the intelligence of Mary and some of the other quants goes beyond the academic; trading real money tethers your beliefs to the real world. She is not some aloof ideas person. She was and is reasonable levels of well-adjusted, funny, and courteous, and unreasonable levels of good at cranking out code that makes millions of dollars. Make of this story what you will.)

Has my opinion changed on any concrete trans issue? I don’t know. If a random person insists on referring to Mary as a man, and I’m required to say that between the two of them one is a fool, I’d have to say that Mary is not the fool. I don’t know if she’d be very angry about it anyway; she’s a level-headed person. What about sex change therapy for children? Still seems bad. Maybe the main change is just that I feel like I should be less quick to judge people in general.

I wasn’t there when Mary walked into the office for the first time as a woman. I don’t think anyone made a fuss over it or anything, and now everyone respects her new name and pronouns, but it still makes me anxious just imagining what it must have been like. Surely a measure of bravery was required, probably more than I’ve ever mustered on any occasion. What compelled her to do this? On a visceral level, it still doesn’t make sense to me, and I can still make it gross if I want to, just by thinking about it. But why do that? I’m inclined to defer to her, whether or not I understand.

I do wish she'd go and pursue science though.

Maybe I'm going on a tangent to your interesting culture war anecdote, but since you touched on it, there is a problem that has been bugging me lately: is there any way we as a society can discourage our best and brightest from going into rent-seeking professions?

I used to be a quant trader. I left because I was bothered by the pervading sense that what we were doing created nothing of value for society or the world, and by the moral decay it seemed to create in the environments I was working in.

Almost by definition, quant trading will never generate any significant positive externalities for anyone, since most of what you are doing is seeking to exploit temporary inefficiencies. And it generates a significant negative externality by draining talent and capital that could otherwise be employed productively.

So why don't we ban quant/algorithmic trading? Or regulate and tax it heavily? This is what governments usually try to do when an industry is generating negative externalities.

I can make a few good arguments not to ban it outright:

  • There are well-known benefits to having stable, liquid capital markets in terms of attracting investment to an economy.
  • The markets for capital and labour should be efficient, as long as we ensure competition in the industry. Sooner or later, these salaries should come down to Earth and the talent will go someone it's needed more.
  • All of the negative consequences of quant trading seem to be higher-order impacts. There's no immediate, visible negative consequences produced from this activity, like say, tailing ponds or child amputations.
  • It's difficult to even define what it is exactly. When is it "quantitative" or "algorithmic" vs. "fundamental" or "gut-based" (and are the right-hand terms even more virtuous somehow?)? Maybe you just want to ban noise trading or scalping, but even those could be difficult to differentiate those from other activities such as market-making or longer-term investing.

A lot of the same considerations apply to other lucrative bullshit industries that are currently sucking up talent such as cryptocurrencies, internet advertising, social media, or video games. I think these are all terrible things and if it were between having them or not, the world would be better off without them, unquestionably. But I don't think it's a good idea to ban them, and politically, this is never going to happen.

Taxing these industries could be more practical. A well-considered tax could offset some of the negative externalities and shrink the number of seats available, forcing many would-be quant traders or social media engineers to venture out into the productive part of the economy instead. But there are still practical and political considerations that will prevent this from happening in our world.

So what else can be done? Since the government isn't going to do much to fix things, maybe the solution lies with individuals instead. As in, what would make me our best and brightest go against financial incentives and actively choose not to be quant traders?

To imagine what this solution might be, we can look at the petroleum industry. Years ago, many of our best and brightest engineers used to flock to oil & gas. Dating myself a bit, but when I went to school, chemical engineering was known to be a lucrative option. But then in the last decade or so, besides a correction to the price of oil, working in oil & gas became possibly literally the least cool thing you could do. The younger generations have experienced a major moral awakening, and decided that they wanted to be on the right side of history when it comes to the climate crisis.

Could finance have its moment like this as well? Certainly, back in 2010/2011 it looked possible with the Occupy movement. And of course, anti-capitalist sentiment amongst youth has been rising lately, especially ever since they got their hands on TikTok (what a strange coincidence). I would never rule out change due to negative backlash from an economically alienated, ill-informed mob.

But what I would really like to see is a positive change in the mindset of the elite itself. As someone who is arguably part of this elite, I would put forth the following ethical argument:

  1. The world has very pressing issues that we need social, cultural, political, and technological solutions for.
  2. These issues require members of the elite to devote themselves to solving them. Most non-members of the elite will not be able to do so, since they are just scraping out an economic existence as it is.
  3. Therefore, as the intellectual elite, we have a moral responsibility to solve these issues for the benefit of all (elite and non-elite).

To me, this is the core of a belief system, or possibly even a religion. Speaking as an atheist, I think maybe at least part of the reason that these industries exist in their current form and the world is so screwed up today in our post-modern areligious world is that we've lost a bit of the moral anchor that religion used to provide us. So maybe what it takes to save us is actually a new kind of religion.

I just wanted to say thanks for these interesting thoughts - I'd hoped to see more discussion about the misallocation of talent especially since I don't know what to think myself. It seems unlikely people are going to engage on this topic anymore - too bad about the timing.

Of course it is almost certainly autogynephilia. Too high profile and too functional to be some sort of dysfunctional autistic or impressionable personality disordered type.

Plausible transsexuals, the very feminine male-attracted types have feminine interests. They're not into software engineering or mathematics, not moreso than ordinary women who avoid these mind-numbingly boring if lucrative occupations if it's at all possible.. That's why you find more Turkish or Iranian female software devs than Norwegian. They want to not be poor.

But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded. Self-delusion is the one thing those of her profession are good at avoiding. Can you tell she’s trans? I dunno, kind of? Is it autogynephilia? No clue.

Why?
If someone's entire sex fantasies are based around fantasies of being female, why couldn't a relatively sane person, in an environment designed to do so, manage to delude himself into thinking "I'm actually female?" Sex is the most powerful motivational drive there is. Lot of functional, socially adept people are deluded about something for one reason or another.

So, entirely plausible you're dealing with a mostly normal person who, due to the environment it is in, is behaving like this.

There are, at this point, at least 1813 erotic games based around the concept of sex change(page looks innocuous, deeply nsfw classification though).. Despite all the activist claims that autogynephilia is bunk, a whole lot of people seem to find the idea erotic to the point they spends a lot of time making computer games about it.

I mean, there's no reason to condemn the person, you don't choose your main sexual preferences. It is what it is though. Of course, a small part of these people are vocal advocates who believe it is their moral duty to try to convince others that they too, are transsexual..

In the end, it doesn't really matter one way or another, as the amount of these kinds of people and potential cases is way, way too low to matter in the great modernity die-off.

I think there's some element of that, but I don't think that's entirely it. There are definitely people who have sexual thoughts about turning into the opposite sex, but as progressives say, sex is not gender. Reality does not offer anything close to what that experience would be like if it could actually happen, and I think that's pretty obvious to even a casual observer.

I think there's some element of that, but I don't think that's entirely it.

I'm pretty certain that in cases of people into coding, wargaming and other almost exclusively male interests and the like, the 'entirety of it' grows on the scaffolding of 'sexual target identification error' which is thought to be behind autogynephilia. People 'fall in love' with the idea of themselves as women.

sex is not gender.

Yeah which is why ostensible 'women' with stereotypically male interests and male attitudes raise so much eyebrows.

Right, I get that, but that's not my point. I understand the fantasy. But trying to live the fantasy I don't think would bring them the things they want out of the fantasy. If it's something like "Women are hot and feminine. I want to be hot and feminine," well you're not going to be hot or feminine, you're going to be a dude in a dress. If you want to know what sex is like for a woman, surgery is not going to get you that.

I am saying that I would generally imagine that most with autogynephilia would desist with acting out their autogynephilia in public in disappointment. Not all, but a significant percentage.

I would generally imagine that most with autogynephilia would desist with acting out their autogynephilia in public in disappointment.

Yes, but there's a subset of them who aren't dissuaded by "it'd look terrible and it pisses people off when you aren't being subtle about it".

Which is probably why there's a missing middle of AGPs that want to do it but are more conscious of how they look while doing it (you know, like an actual woman would). But then again, if they were all wearing dress appropriate for the environment and not insisting on going into women's bathrooms while obviously male it would be a non-issue.

From an AGP standpoint, there's nothing qualitatively different between "just the underwear and one of those utility-type skirts that are basically just shorts without the pant legs" and "the showiest red dress you can find"- they're both female clothes, so they should both scratch that itch. It's the fact that they take it beyond parody/have terrible fashion sense/aren't satisfied with the clothes alone that's 99% of the issue.

If it's something like "Women are hot and feminine. I want to be hot and feminine," well you're not going to be hot or feminine, you're going to be a dude in a dress

Delusions are very powerful. I used to go to lunch with a psychologist, he said that every single trans person he knows is deluded about the outcome of these procedures.

I am saying that I would generally imagine that most with autogynephilia would desist with acting out their autogynephilia

It's unclear what % want to transition as long as it is what it is, but it's believed to be at least half. Hard to find out, but /u/tailcalled (on reddit) did some research thru surveys on it..

There's a lot of people who get off on that and are not really bothered by being guys.

Over thinking patterns without any actual way to determine truth is at the center of my trouble with the whole trans thing. I think it's well known that at least one strand of the trans person is stereotypically a very good programmer, perhaps you hadn't encountered that meme. But it's so well known that I pretty much guessed where this story was going at this point

Anyway, at some point I noticed Mark never came in anymore

It's precisely the keen analytical mind that notices they feel a disconnection(A better word eludes me) and searches for a reason. Maybe they find god, maybe they find community in some niche, maybe they discover the concept of gender identity and ascribe their not fitting in to being the wrong gender. All these answers have a kind of new equilibrium to them and I can't confidently say they're wrong. But I do know the appeal. Landing on belief in one's trans identity to explain your dislocation has this feature that even after transition you have any number of handy explanations for why you don't quite feel right. The important thing isn't alleviating the disconnection, it's finding an explanation for it, not having an explanation it what was really eating them up. They can handle anything so long as they can put a label on it and gain that little bit of control.

I mean, this is how minorities of all kinds have eventually grown their public support, even as people opposed to it are upset - by being parts of various communities, big and small. In a world without an hierarchical society imposed on-high from either an authoritarian government or religion, it turns out continued interactions with people different from you tend to make you friendlier to that group of people.

The big jump that eventually causes the loss of widespread opposition to a minority groups isn't "I love these group of people and embrace them" grows to a majority, it's "I met x, they're a y, and they're fine, so you're weird for being so freaked out" grows to a majority.

That's why even among Trump voters, their actually less harsh on immigration than even some centrist Europeans, because they've grown in a far more multicultural society than most Europeans have.

In a world without an hierarchical society imposed on-high from either an authoritarian government or religion, it turns out continued interactions with people different from you tend to make you friendlier to that group of people.

This is a typical unsupported progressive truism. As I have spoken about many times, I have lived my entire life in one of the most racially-diverse cities in the entire world, and it has absolutely not made me friendlier to certain groups among whom I have spent quite a bit of time.

I agree that continued exposure to various groups helps you separate justified stereotypes from unjustified stereotypes; if a common wignat talking point was “Mexicans are lazy”, I would know enough to dismiss this as the ignorant prejudice of someone who hasn’t met very many Mexicans. However, the wignat talking point “blacks are, on average, lazy and hostile” has actually been borne out many times in my experience, so simply living around this particular group of “people different from me” has done the opposite of making me more friendly toward them.

A "truism" is something that's obviously and boringly true, not something that's false.

truism

Except when it means the opposite. English is great that way: https://imgur.com/2t7jXIz

I mean, sure, nothing works 100% of the time. There are still people upset over Brown vs. Board of Education out there after all.

But, I'm not talking about woke self-hating white liberals like myself celebrating the end of the white majority or whatever.

I'm talking about the fact that your median Texan exurban Trump voter in a middle class neighborhood is far less likely to freak out over non-white people moving to their neighborhood than frankly, even pretty centrist to center-left European's when it comes to Muslim's or hell, Romani people. If you look at polling, even now in a fairly anti-immigrant swing of thermostatic opinion, there's still fairly decent numbers of Trump voters about immigrants in society and such, and even now, the less/more/same numbers on immigration are still far better in the US than basically anywhere in Europe.

The same thing happened with gay people - it went from only freaks in San Francisco or whatever to oh hey, that's sad that gay people are dying to oh yeah, my cousin's daughter is a lesbian to oh, Dave in the office is gay - weird, he didn't seem it to Mary & Alice bought the Newman's house and so on.

Integration is key, and ironically, America is much better at it than Europe in a variety of ways. In part because we just got a whole lot more non-white people, but also because we're not wedded to 'my family has lived within 10 miles of this village since before basically recorded history and that's the only true way to be x' or whatever the Euros have their hang ups about. Meanwhile, in America - show up, pay taxes, get a job, and learn to cheer or boo the Cowboys depending on where you live, and welcome to America. Pass the burger. We even threw on some veggie ones for Vivek and Priya even though I'd never eat any.

Same thing will and is already happening with trans people. At an accelerated pace, but partly because the numbers are so small, only conservatives stuck in very blue areas and grifting online right-wing entertainers care all that much in reality. Polling showed in a post-mid-2022 midterms that it was the least important issue among Republican voters.

Integration is key, and ironically, America is much better at it than Europe in a variety of ways. In part because we just got a whole lot more non-white people, but also because we're not wedded to 'my family has lived within 10 miles of this village since before basically recorded history and that's the only true way to be x' or whatever the Euros have their hang ups about.

Has it occurred to you that the difference might not be purely a matter of Europeans’ irrational “hangups” or “freakouts”, but might have a great deal to do with the actual nature of the specific immigrants each respective society is receiving? Over the last two decades, Europe has received a massive amount of unvetted, mostly unemployable “refugees” from the Middle East and Africa - many of whom are, plainly, the absolute criminal dregs of their countries of origin. Crime rates, unemployment, welfare usage, and other hallmarks of extreme dysfunction and parasitism are massively high among these people. So perhaps when Europeans are angry about their ever-increasing numbers, it’s not because Europeans are committed to the sort of extreme petty localism you attribute to them, but rather because they are accurately observing the extent to which these people are different in dangerous and overwhelmingly negative ways. (Hell, you brought up Gypsies and implied that Europeans irrationally “freak out” when a community of Gypsies shows up in town. Actually, the Gypsies have been consistently and widely reviled in Europe for many centuries now, because of their well-known extreme proclivity for stealing. In what sense is Gypsies’ lack of integration due to Europe “just not being as good at it as America is,” versus being a result of the actual qualities of Gypsies themselves and their compatibility/ability to be integrated?

As for why American appears to be “better at integrating immigrants”, again, so much of this is a result of the fact that for at least the last few decades, immigrating to America from anywhere other than Mexico was really difficult. America could be more restrictive about the types of people it let in, because it actually had the ability and political will to get rid of the people whom it didn’t want. This was not always the case! In fact, America’s “ability to successfully integrate immigrants” - again, I love the way this concept places the entire onus on the host society to integrate the immigrants, rather than on the immigrants to integrate themselves - has fluctuated pretty wildly throughout its history.

Famously, during the Gilded Age, America was receiving huge numbers of dirt-poor and very culturally-backward peasants from places like Italy, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Crime rates in these communities were very high; violent crime skyrocketed in many American cities due to the rise of organized crime networks staffed nearly entirely by immigrants. Political extremism, including acts of outright terrorism committed by immigrants, also increased massively. Additionally, with the lack of any meaningful welfare state at the time, huge numbers of these immigrant men eventually just went home. They didn’t have any way to sustain themselves financially in America, so they packed it up and returned to Sicily or whatever. In 1924 America passed a very draconian immigration bill, and it is only after this point did unassimilated ethnic enclaves begin to dissolve in America due to their inability to sustain themselves with new immigration.

We are now seeing the beginning stages of a similar wave of extremely low-quality immigration start to take hold in America, due to the absolutely minimal border enforcement of the Biden administration. Hordes of immigrant men from all around the world - Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central and South America - are streaming across the open border, and unlike a century ago, they will have a welfare state to utilize and the protection of powerful lobbies preventing their removal, allowing them to remain unemployed and thoroughly unassimilated. I predict that we will see a rapid shift to European levels of anti-immigrant sentiment as the new reality of this style of bio-trash immigration - the third world emptying its prisons into the United States - starts to dawn on people. (In fact, recent polling showing that a majority of Americans, including like 40% of Democrats, supporting mass deportations is strong evidence in favor of my prediction.)

It is very convenient to compare middle class non-white people of unspecified race and culture to specifically muslims and Roma of unspecified class. Now try comparing middle class european acceptance of middle class indians and east asians to american acceptance of low class blacks from their own country.

I haven't encountered anything worrying about middle class european acceptance of middle class indians and east asians.

Meanwhile, in America - show up, pay taxes, get a job, and learn to cheer or boo the Cowboys depending on where you live, and welcome to America. Pass the burger. We even threw on some veggie ones for Vivek and Priya even though I'd never eat any.

This is like a 2024 neoliberal Leave It To Beaver headcanon of race relations in America.

I feel obliged to note that the usual RW retort is that it wasn't presence that accomplished the shift with LGB, but rather the long march through the institutions and in particular the media and education system.

This is a typical unsupported progressive truism. As I have spoken about many times, I have lived my entire life in one of the most racially-diverse cities in the entire world, and it has absolutely not made me friendlier to certain groups among whom I have spent quite a bit of time.

In general though, whites who live or have lived in multicultural cities are more likely to be on the left regarding immigration than those who live in places with much lower immigration levels. It’s possible to argue that this is because those who don’t like it leave, of course, but that isn’t enough to explain the whole effect.

Indeed. Plus, when you do meet an exceptional member of a minority group you are just as often (more in my experience) to have the reaction of, "what the hell is wrong with the rest of you?"

Newton's interest in numerology doesn't make it seem any more plausible to me. It seems far likelier that he has some strong feeling about being the wrong sex and that that is enough on its own to cause him to behave this way than that his knowledge of math and computers has given him special insight (which it sounds like he hasn't shared with you) into the proper definitions of man and woman.

As a cis-by-default, I have accepted that some people care as much about their gender as I care about e.g. my sexual orientation, and some of them (sometimes very smart people) are trans. Having this mixing matrix between gender and sex chromosomes seems to be worth it to accommodate them. The amount of effort they put into it (from hormones to changing their legal name/gender) clearly indicates that it is something they care very much about.

Of course, this does not preclude that some teenagers decide that they are non-binary because it is a high-status thing to do and moves them considerably upwards on the woke victimhood pyramid.

cis-by-default

Is this Ozy's term? I must confess I still don't understand what it's supposed to mean.

What I mean is that if some magic fairy turned me into a women tomorrow, I would go along with it and not embark on a long quest to get my real body back, just as I would not embark on a long quest to find such a fairy in the first place. My gender is not tied strongly to my identity. By contrast, if a fairy cursed me to say become computer illiterate, I would grudgingly do whatever I had to do to undo that curse.

It's like... some people experience dysphoria, right? They are in a body that matches their gender, and if they were in a body that didn't match their gender, they'd feel something was wrong. That's what'd make them trans in that situation. We may model that as two facts: they have a body, and they have a body model, and when the body model tries to match to the body and fails, it generates error signals that are experienced as dysphoria. That is, they are cis - body-aligned - if they have a body that matches their model, and trans - body-unaligned - when their body does not.

Cis-by-default people have a body, and they have a body model, but the body model is a model of whatever their body happens to be. If they put themselves into situations where they experience a body with a different sex, ie. mirror experiments, VR, really good imagination, then their body map just updates to the new schema. They're cis - body aligned - not because their body map matches their body, but because their body map tracks their body. If you gave a cbd man a female body, or a cbd woman a male body, they'd go "huh, neat" and move on with their lives - sex-changed but still cis. They might even swap pronouns, purely on the basis of "well, it's female now, innit. Just look at it." Or if not, it'll be on the basis of something like thinking that gender shouldn't be about sex at all.

As an AGP transhumanist, I identify (in the literal sense of "looking at myself, I think I am described") as CBD and I think this hangs together really well with AGP. Because you know you'll be fine regardless of sex, you can start having preferences, even kinks, about sex - but they're just that, not needs.

As I understand it, a sexual orientation that amounts to "I'm sex A, and sex not-A is the one that I'm physically built to mate with, so I guess I'm looking for a not-A partner".a "gender identity" that amounts to "I have sex-A parts, and in our society sex-A people are expected to dress/communicate like this and have interests like that, so I guess that's what I'll be doing". The test case are hypotheticals like anime transmigration/body swaps: assuming you are male, if you woke up stuck in a female body tomorrow (and your preexisting social web were conveniently erased), would you be looking for male or female partners going forward? would you (1) have a strong preference to refer to yourself or be referred to as male, (2) -"- as female, or (3) a weak preference to be referred to as female because anything else would now seem factually wrong? Answer (3) is the "cis-by-default" one.

I think I'm in the set of people the label is supposed to describe, and I really understand it as the natural outcome of not having whatever sense generates the "I'm gender not-A" qualium in dysphorics but still being socialised in a society with distinct gender roles.

The way I understood it, it has nothing to do with sexuality. It's more like "if you woke up stuck in a female body tomorrow, would you feel a sense of existential dread, and would attempt to come back to being male".

Yeah, I corrected myself after making the initial post. Conflating sex and orientation is also something that's easy to do as a -by-default, though.

Is it autogynephilia? No clue. It feels a little impertinent to ponder, though that’s the sort of question that I might have said mattered a lot before.

If you gave me even odds, I would bet the house that Mark has masturbated in women's underwear before he showed up at your work in women's clothes. Whether that makes him an autogynephile is a matter of definition, but I don't think it's impertinent, and I think it's equally obvious the answer is yes. That's just what happens when middle-aged autistic men transition.

If a random person insists on referring to Mary as a man, and I’m required to say that between the two of them one is a fool, I’d have to say that Mary is not the fool.

And if you had to follow one into combat, to lay down your life in the company of other men, fighting for your home and hearth, would you rather follow Mark who calls himself Mary, or would you rather follow the one who calls him a man? Everything in this world is downstream from violence, although we've done wonders to conceal that. I might trust Mark at th

On a visceral level, it still doesn’t make sense to me, and I can still make it gross if I want to, just by thinking about it. But why do that?

Probably because gross things are bad, and viscerally gross things are especially bad, and it's a normal and healthy reaction to the abnormal and diseased world about you. Sure, you can stick your head in the sand, pretend nothing is wrong, and ignore all your warning instincts and soothe your raised hackles, by why do that? Why not instead see the world for as it is, and spare yourself the dissonance? I've never understood the desire to repress your instincts like this.

And if you had to follow one into combat, to lay down your life in the company of other men, fighting for your home and hearth, would you rather follow Mark who calls himself Mary Mary née Mark, or would you rather follow the one who calls him her a man?

Which one can hit a target at 300 metres?

I was asking after leadership, not marksmanship.

There's TWO criteria which matter, and the second is IMO more important than the first

  1. Can he/she/it shoot?

  2. Will he/she/it aim at your enemy?

It's the second which would be the one at issue here.

(this particular formulation is taken from the Liaden books, but I'm sure the idea is older than that)

If you gave me even odds, I would bet the house that Mark has masturbated in women's underwear before he showed up at your work in women's clothes.

How'd you arrive at those numbers?

And if you had to follow one into combat, to lay down your life in the company of other men, fighting for your home and hearth, would you rather follow Mark who calls himself Mary, or would you rather follow the one who calls him a man? Everything in this world is downstream from violence, although we've done wonders to conceal that.

Combat is involved in very, very few aspects of life. It's vastly more likely OP has to follow Mary into the world of finance, where Mary will crush the vast majority of people who insist Mary is Mark. For most people, trying to surround themselves with the best warriors is not a path to a succesful life.

But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded. Self-delusion is the one thing those of her profession are good at avoiding.

I don't think this is a thing. I'd say it's akin to how Major League Baseball players are good at hitting baseballs pitched by other Major League Baseball players; they're better at it than anyone else, but even the best of the best fail over 60% of the time. Though with self-delusion, I'd wager that the numbers are more that the modal person fails 99.99% of the time, and if you just fail 99.9% of the time, you're among the elite class of people who are really good at avoiding self-delusion.

I wouldn't put numbers on it, but yes. I don't think high intelligence makes anyone immune to self-delusion, or more broadly, to adopting strange beliefs and acting on those beliefs.

If the last decade of Rationalism taught us nothing else, it was yet another reminder that very intelligent people are just better at adapting to social incentives by rationalizing themselves into insanity...

listening to the facilitator explain to my genuinely confused Indian coworker why this description was problematic

I witnessed a similar exchange with another Indian guy at a presentation on pronouns. God bless the unassimilated and keep them safe from cancellation.

Man, there's a lot of things to touch on here! Interesting post.

First: yes, I share your concern about our economy. I look at it as a sort of "Dutch Disease," where smart people are increasingly getting pushed out of academic science (too bureaucratic and unrewarding) into finance or IT (more intellectual freedom, waaaaay more money and easier to find a permanent position). I hope the recent tech layoffs lead to some long-term restructing there, but I don't have high hopes.

In your description of this specific person, I think: "I'm shocked! Shocked!... Well not that shocked." It seems to be a common pattern among highly intelligent tech workers that they transition MtF. Eg, there's a blog I read: The Digital Antiquarian And it's jarring just how frequently the early tech pioneers later transitioned. Not a majority of them of course but like... maybe 10%? Much more likely than you'd expect from random chance.

My feeling is that when highly intelligent tech nerds like the person in your story transition, it usually ends up OK. Maybe odd, but they were odd to begin with. They've got the money for proper medical care, a community of people who can accept them, and they've probably thought it through for themselves quite thoroughly.

I'm more worred about the um... less intelligent sort of nerd/geek who transitions. Like this guy: https://default.blog/p/the-year-when-my-husband-started. Seems to be much more "fetishized," less thought out, and without a community who can empathize. That guy ended up being reported to the policy by his wife.

Then there's the ultra-aggressive athlete trans people like Bruce Jenner, and the ones who go on hormones super young. Then there's FtMs which is a whole other kettle of fish. Trans is an interesting bucket of different types, and I feel like we're just starting to get enough data to identify these subtypes.

'Genius autistic MtF transitions' appears to be an exclusive phenomenon observed among residents of the digital landscape (Esports players, Programmers, Wikipedia editors).

My pet theory is that autistic geniuses blitz down to the bottom of rabbit holes faster than anyone else, and digital rabbit holes always end in Paraphilias. Furries, Wiafus and Trans MtFs are the exact same thing. It could have been something innocuous like trains, tanks or bonsai tree cutting. But on the internet, it always ends up being 'chicks with dicks'.

I'm a degenerate internet dweller, and I have navigated deep into some pretty glarly rabbit holes. Thankfully, my curiosities have been limited to geo-politics & cars. But even there, I've had to develop a strong filter to scroll-past futas, impossibly proportioned waifus, 500 year old loli vampires and furries. They are everywhere ! I can't imagine how bad it would be if I was into a hobby that WAS tangentially to any of those topics.

Now even 'normal' people have a fondness for paraphillias. S&M, Voyeurism, exhibitionism, (name you favorite porn category) are all paraphillias too. If the appeal of sexual-deviation has something to do with the taboo-ness of it, then a no-social-filter having autistic person is more likely to end up 'an expert' by getting to the bottom of it. A trans person might be into niche-and-odd sexual fetishes for the same reason that they install arch-linux and build compilers. Next, austic people are often obsessive (trans OCD seems to be pretty big area of discussion by itself), and you can see how they'd start obsessing over trans / furry / futa-dom.

To me, the final piece is community. Autistic people struggle to fit in or find their own. They find their people deep in sewers of the internet, and some of them are feeling pretty Trans. Now you have a group of people, who think like you do, feel like you do, and can explain the obsessive source of their condition in the exact words that make sense of tanother autstic person. That is a recipe for indoctrination. Now, I don't believe this is malicious or intentional. But, I do believe this phenomenon is an emergent property of 'internet sewers'.

I believe that some base population is trans.

I belive that autistic men are most pre-disposed to gender dysphoria.

I also believe that the social patterns of internet sewers lead to dysphoria, mlp-fandom & furries as a social phenomenon.

These people are the sole reason for the survival of the internet or the tech industry. I wish them a happy life. I hope they continue contributing 100x every FANG engineer.

But, I don't think we should normalize their condition among 'normies'. These people are kinda different, doing their different thing. I don't judge, but it is fine to keep it out of mainstream media.

and they've probably thought it through for themselves quite thoroughly.

That doesn't follow. Highly intelligent people are also able to see gatekeepers as obstacles and can, using their intelligence, lie and manipulate to get around whatever criterion the gatekeeper is using to avoid later regret.

Gender dysphoria is significantly higher among people on the autism spectrum. Tech work and engineering of all sorts are a natural fit for the computer-minded person with autism. Tech fields also tend to gather blue-tinged grey tribers.

Anecdotally, you’ll also find tons of people with autism who have species dysphoria (identifying as a nonhuman, aka furries and otherkin) or another dysphoria. A porcupine I know once told me she’s never surprised when someone in tech comes out as trans and a “furry lifestyler” (early 00’s term for species dysphoria).

I do wonder how many red tribers suffer silently from dysphorias because they don’t have culturally acceptable words for them. I’m a red-tinged grey triber due to my autism and family, and while they know I’m a furry, they’ll probably never understand about my species dysphoria or how it was cured in an instant in 2009.

Sorry if this is insensitive, but is species dysphoria a thing?

I don't doubt that furries are a thing, but I would have classified them as some kind of kink or cosplay or roleplay thing rather than genuine dysphoria.

I can totally get gender dysphoria, say someone with the Y chromosome feeling that they should really be in a lesbian relationship or being a caring mother or whatever. "I am a woman trapped in a man's body" (or vice versa) kinda makes sense to me.

Using s/gender/species/, species dysphoria would be "I am a felis silvestris trapped in the body of a homo sapiens", which seems incongruent to me. A nimble nocturnal hunter of rodents? That does not sound like a fulfillable aspiration this side of the singularity.

Dysphoria doesn’t care what’s fulfillable, feasible, affordable, or possible. It rejects one’s current body plan (that’s the dys) and usually says a different one would be proper.

If you were wearing an uncomfortable shirt, it would be uncomfortable whether it was a comfortable shirt worn inside out, in need of tailoring, or just badly made. The rate of suicide among dysphoria sufferers is high primarily because of the discomfort; whether or not the shirt can be reversed, there comes a point you just want to take it off.

I do have a theory as to why the anthro animal body plan is so often approximately a dog-snouted humanoid, though.

While humans domesticated dogs, dogs were domesticating humans, both species’ brain sizes shrinking as we grew to rely on each other for survival. Dogs have neural circuitry, mirror neurons, for responding to human verbal and facial cues. Dogs can’t point their fingers (instead pointing using their whole bodies), but they’ll follow a human’s pointed finger, something even the best trained cat never does.

We aren’t just Homo sapiens and Canis lupus, we’re Canis lupus familiaris and Homo sapiens canofilia. Both of our species are conditioned by evolution to enjoy looking at each others’ faces and reacting to emotions.

Here’s where the theory all comes together. As a young boy with autism, the family dogs’ faces were more comprehensible and familiar than my human family’s. I, like many people with autism, had mild prosopagnosia: I recognized human faces but couldn’t imagine them. Not so with dogs, and to an extent, any besnouted mammalian cartoon face. I could easily imagine them expressing any human emotion.

I believe autism dampens instinctual ability to understand human facial expressions of emotion, but often leaves instinctive comprehension of animal faces untouched, thus the high incidence of anthropomorphic animal appreciation among the autistic.

At that point, picking the European wildcat or a My Little Pony as one’s fursona (furry persona) instead of the golden hamster is like finding one’s favorite sushi restaurant out of all the seafood restaurants in town.

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I'd quibble with DuplexFields about how common dysphoria is among otherkin or therianthropes, barring definitions that require it, but it's definitely something that happens. Duplex compared his version to feeling like wearing a shirt inside out all the time (uh, in now-banned subreddit, sorry for not linking), and while that's an unusual explanation, it's not a particularly extreme one.

Optimistically, if you offered a whole bunch of therianthropes a magical potion, I'd hope some of them would ask for caveats about things like lifespan or opposable thumbs or social integration in their new shapes or pants (cw: no nudity, but might not be the best thing for DuplexFields to binge read), but at best at least some would quite happily jump in after that.

The lack of such a magical solution short of a singularity doesn't really change whether people can feel it: it's a sensation, not a realpolitick'ed set of political philosophy. It changes the degree you can seriously respond to it. There's some socialization stuff that could be relevant on the edges as policy questions -- some therians do feel a lot more normal with prosthesis like tails or ankle braces, which are also socially stigmatized in ways that make them highly impractical outside of Ren Faires -- but there's also reason that it isn't a philosophy with a lot of policy proposals.

I think "species dysphoria" is associated with otherkin (1 2), who are separate from furries.

From your first link, the species an otherkin believes themselves to be “may range from mythical species like demons, dragons, elves and faeries to wild animals and domesticated pets.” In my experience, these are the ferals, would-be quadrupeds instead of bipedal anthropomorphs.

Usually it’s true, the furry fandom and fandoms of mythical humanoids don’t overlap much (though the Elder Scrolls fantasy RPGs have two furry species alongside green orcs, three races of elves, and four races of humans). The biggest thing they tend to have in common is a dislike of humans, disavowing their affiliation with this species in a frankly stunning display of the human capacity for outgrouping.

I'll caveat that there's moderate overlap between furries and otherkin (or therianthropes, which was kinda a furry-specific variant of otherkin): furscience gives somewhere around 5-10%+ of furries identifying as therians or some related category, and while the higher estimates are usually coming from convention-specific surveys that have a pretty hefty selection bias, the lower ranges are not implausibly high.

But agreed that it's a different identifier, and I don't think there's any good numbers the other direction: there definitely are otherkin that aren't furries, and nobody knows what percentage of otherkin/therian/whatever they are.

That said, a significant number of therians didn't experience species dysphoria, or experience something that they don't categorize as dysphoria (eg, intentionally triggering phantom limbs for limbs they never had, but liking it), at least when I was able to follow the group in the 00s. Dunno what the internal frameworks are now; a lot of the matter has been driven off the open internet.

((There was historically more going on with the 00's-era 'lifestyler', both in philosophy and behavior, but the group that was distinguished by those differences is pretty much extinct today.))

Expand on what you mean by it being "cured in an instant".

It seems to be a common pattern among highly intelligent tech workers that they transition MtF.

The joke circulated among the politically incorrect is that it it's like frogs. Tech workers sense that the gender-ratio is too unbalanced and try to change sex to balance it.

@zackmdavis theorises that this is a (possibly unconscious) motivation for Scott and Eliezer's rabid defense of trans rights. The massive overrepresentation of trans women in the Rat-sphere is the only defense they can offer against accusations that the movement is a white boys' club.

Is it even a joke though? Like... it actually seems plausible to me. Not necessarily on a biological level but like, culturally, our species just doesn't work well in groups when it's too gender imbalanced.

I mean, the shortage of trans plumbers and auto mechanics points to there being something else going on there.

They probably have more positive interactions with the fairer sex. Going back to the original story, it seems somewhat likely that Mark, while working from home, had almost no regular contact with women IRL prior to his transition.

I don't think men working on oil rigs or container ships have a ton of positive interactions with women for the weeks or months they are away from civilization, and I'm not aware of a high rate of transness in those groups.

Could be cultural though.

In that story it sounds like working from home was used to cover up a transition that was already happening.

I suspect that something like this is true at least via indirect pressures. Gender dysphoria is based on feeling uncomfortable in one's body, gender and identity, so anything that increases this discomfort is likely to at least increase symptoms if not the actual neurological source (though might do that too), and anything that decreases this discomfort will decrease symptoms (and possibly the source).

So I can easily see it being the case that if you regularly have positive encounters with people of the opposite sex which are founded in part on them liking you for being your sex, this might make you more confident and comfortable with yourself as you are. If such things are completely lacking, if you're just kind of the same as all the people around you but a small number of women get tons of attention and praise and special opportunities because they are women, you might start to wish you were one of them because it seems nice. If everyone around you hates straight white men, and loves women and especially trans women, then that might make you feel uncomfortable with your identity as a straight white man and wish you weren't one.

Maybe, I've never had gender dysphoria, but I used to be single and alone. And then I fell in love and my relationship with my wife is founded on me being a man and her being a woman. As a result, I'm way more confident in myself and my masculinity than I used to be. I'm not an expert, but I strongly suspect that falling in love heterosexually could cause someone wavering on the border to happily settle into their birth sex rather than becoming trans, so a lack of opportunities to do so would change the frequency of that occurring.

Sometimes it's meant ha-ha-only-serious, but I don't think it holds up. Our species does fine in groups when gender-imbalanced; militaries have done it for millennia. Blue collar workers aren't turning trans at a high rate.

I read the first, autobiographical/Hemingway worship novel by James Clavell (Of Shogun fame), a fictionalized version of his experience in a Japanese PoW camp in Singapore during WWII, King Rat earlier this year. I highly recommend the book, but one character is pretty much this: Sean.

Sean is an RAF pilot who turns into a woman during the time in Changi. He's presented as the "Queen" of the camp, a parallel to the titular King of Camp. He is the only soldier given a private room, and private time to bathe. He's showered in attention and gifts, and in the regular theatrical performances he is the star attraction. It's implied he acts a bottom sexually, but it is never really the point: he traipses about in fine women's clothing, shaves his legs every day, showered in gifts and love and affection and service and praise for his beauty from other soldiers. He has immense privileges over every other inmate, far above his natural position in the hierarchy of the camp, second only to the King who runs the economy as a capitalist and above the commanding officers who have official power, simply as the star attraction in the theatrical productions. Far above the privileges given to the directors and producers of the shows! Clavell's self insert Marlowe knew Sean before the camp, and nearly killed him upon learning of his change in identity, but regrets it and considers it his own sin to fail to accept Sean, though he denies his own attraction to fSean. It is implied that Sean first takes on the female role because he was drafted to play a female role in a play, and that the attention lavished on him caused the change. That he couldn't turn down all the praise, and leaned more and more into the character until the mask became the face.

Ultimately Sean is the other main character, alongside the King and his Javert-like nemesis Grey who pursues him, who receives the news of the end of the war and their liberation with depression rather than joy. Sean, totally unable to imagine explaining his time in Changi or maintaining his new identity or returning to his old identity, drowns himself in all his finery. His privileged position in the camp, arguably a form of service from a utilitarian perspective bringing joy to the depressed prisoners, evaporates upon the prospect of returning to normality, and unable to reconcile what happened with his future, he chooses death. This is partly a strong literary parallel with the King, who is equally depressed and confused, going from capitalist king of the camp to just another enlisted ex-PoW with only a stack of the useless Japanese-Singaporean banana-money to show for it. There's a strong implication that capitalism and male dominance, as the King exercises to achieve power, is its own form of drag, no different from that used by Sean to achieve his power. It is implied that Sean first takes on the female role because he was drafted to play a female role in a play, and that the attention lavished on him caused the change, that it all started as a raft of attention paid to him and transformed over time into something more. In the same way, the King chooses to exercise dominance over other men, takes pleasure in dressing in clean clothing when no one else can, in forcing others to serve him and defer to him beyond his rank. A big part of the character of Sean, as the novel as a whole, is about examining American capitalism as a form of mental-disorder. ((Those who think Clavell's depiction of Japanese society is racist haven't read King Rat, Clavell was the kind of now-mostly-extinct British racist who thought proper humans really only came from the environs of London, and that anywhere more than 50 miles away from Piccadilly only produced gross stereotypes))

To a modern reader, its tough not to ask more identity questions about Sean: there are other sodomites mentioned in the camp, but only Sean takes it the further step of becoming female in presentation and identity, he states baldly that he is a woman causing Marlowe to attack him, leading to a narrowly averted suicide attempt due to his former friend's lack of acceptance. This is what trans looked like before trans ideology: it was ok to argue it was the result of trauma and circumstance, but attacking Sean was an act of small minded bigotry in the context of the camp, nonetheless his death is tragic, an act of desperation and sadness at what should have been a moment of triumph and joy. I would love to ask Clavell about the character, were he alive today, and how he viewed Sean in the context of modern identitarian queer politics. Did he think of Sean as having a female soul, or as having an innate attraction to men, which was triggered by the environment of the camp? Or did he think of Sean as being a normal airman, that what "happened to" Sean could have happened to anyone, even self-insert Marlowe, had they been drafted to play a female romantic lead? It's such a fascinating view into pre-movement views of homosexuality and gender.

sounds like an interesting book! It reminds me of something I learned recently- apparently drag shows were huge during WW2, especially with the US army in the Pacific theater. See: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yN1C_bPC4tc . They weren't small or hidden, they were these huge elaborate productions with costumes, choreography, and talented singing and dancing! Eventually performed on broadway! All with dudes in drag. Who, I don't think identified as trans, but maybe a precursor to that.

Could this be something similar to how you see more male-male physical affection in Muslim countries? In that case it's just assumed that the affection is not gay (because being gay could literally result in death) so it's therefore more common and accepted.

Likewise the drag shows might be for "harmless entertainment" since nobody would think anything else could happen.

Great comment, thank you for sharing. I’ve written before about how interesting it is that so much of what gay society (in the Anglo world, at least) was before about 1960 is seemingly completely forgotten knowledge. As much a lost society as any other, I suppose.

I bask in your praise.

I really do recommend the book. I read it with a friend from Singapore, and we both expected it to be in large part about the cruelty of the Japanese and the struggle for survival against them. Instead the cruel Japanese are largely a far-group fact about the universe, the primary struggle is within and among the PoWs. The book started and presents as an adventure yarn, but becomes a withering critique of capitalism.

-The book started and presents as an adventure yarn, but becomes a withering critique of capitalism.

I don’t think Clavell saw it that way himself. He was a fan of Ayn Rand.

OT, not having read Les Mis: is Javert nearly as well written as Grey?

More comments

militaries have done it for millennia

Debatable. Traditionally they brought along their wives/SOs as camp followers, or spent a lot of money on prostitutes. Sailors were famous for either going nuts on shore leave or turning gay, functioning through long deployments only under the harshest of discipline. And Rome was (mythically) founded by starting with a mostly male population that raided their neighbors to abduct women.

I don't know much about the lives of, say, oil roughnecks or crab fishermen, but my sense is that it's not a very healthy long-term community.

functioning through long deployments only under the harshest of discipline

Yes. "Rum, sodomy and the lash" are the true traditions of the navy, according to a great modern figure.

If they aren't getting drunk and fucking each other, it's because they are being whipped until they stop.

Jobs mostly aren't meant to be perpetual. Men should come home to their wives nights and weekends, and things like being a sailer are unusually stressful largely because that isn't possible.

Perhaps guys in tech/finance are working too much.

Several responses:

One of my favorite interview quotes of all time, and one I live by, from boxer Tex Cobb:

After I dropped out of college, I started traveling around the country. I was 19 years old and I decided to find me something that worked, like being cool. Being cool worked, it got you out of trouble and you got a lot of good things happening for you but I never had more than maybe a C- in cool. Being smart worked for you. It got you out of a lot of trouble and got you a lot of good things and although I was actually pretty quick, I didn’t count it for much ‘cause it came real easy to me. I could memorize large sections of data and regurgitate it back to you but it didn’t bring me any happiness. But believe me, being smart isn’t nearly as good as being wise. Then there was having money, it got you out of a lot of trouble and got you a lot of good things and I never had two nickels.. . but there was being bad . . . and being bad applied across the board. Because you could take a rich, cool, smart guy and you could have him doing anything you could possibly conceive of because you were bad. So I thought, hey I found me the secret of the temple, I’ll go out and get me a Pass Master in bad, and I did. And there ain’t nobody bad believe me, I looked. I fought for world titles in boxing, karate, I fought bar wars, street corners, most everything living and half the stuff dead and darling it don’t matter there ain’t nobody bad, I know, I looked . . . just God.”

I could rephrase that last line personally. I thought intelligence was everything. And I've argued with college professors and with wall street CEOs, I've debated with Senators, Congressman, drunk philosophers and internet impersonators, gamblers on commodities and on blackjack, rationalists and bishops, ivy league lawyers and both elected and appointed judges, most everything living and half the stuff dead, and ain't nobody smart, I know, I looked...just God.

Don't get overly into the idea that there is such a thing as generalizable intelligence. I know many brilliant people who are into religious or philosophical concepts so stupid I can't imagine sitting through them, let alone making them part of my week. I consider transition a primarily religious belief, having to do with a metaphysical gender-soul which exists separate from any physical evidence thereof, and a philosophical requirement that one live in conformance with it. If I tried to believe in every religious belief that someone brilliant I know believed in, I'd have a set of contradictory and useless beliefs, some of them so stupid I can't even reckon with them.

That said, I broadly agree with your vibe. When I interact with trans people, I don't generally find them either dangerous or disturbing, and I do my best to respect their choices personally, but that doesn't mean I philosophically agree with them, nor does it require that I buy into the metaphysical framework they live under, and least of all does it require of me any political position. I simply find them to be fine enough people and don't make a big show of hurting them. I suspect most people who hold "transphobic" positions online are probably similar. I recall a tweet that went something like: if instead of asking yes/no polling questions, one interviewed Americans about their opinions on trans people, the actual answers would converge towards something both intensely bigoted and basically accepting in ways that neither political party would find acceptable. Most people go along to get along, and I believe that if you respect Mark broadly then you reasonably ought to give his religious beliefs respect in conversation.

There was a bait post on here some weeks ago asking what evidence it would take to change your opinion on HBD, iirc in some annoying fake math that I didn't feel like messing with. But my first thought about it was, well you'd have to somehow prove to me that my black friends, professors, coworkers, etc were hallucinations, that they weren't really there or weren't really what they seemed. Until then, I'm not going to buy into a strong framework that predicts that those people would be so much rarer than they seemed to me to be. Whatever is going on in the graphs, it can't change my actual experience, and that's going to predominate in how I see the world.

Reality is under no constraint to be philosophically consistent for us.

As the author of the alleged bait post: might it be that we observed nearly disjoint chunks of society? IIRC you went through a professional/verbal education at elite institutions on or near the East Coast. I did pure math at thoroughly non-elite ones in the West. The elite vs non-elite selection effects would account for a lot of the difference.

I do think that's an interesting angle on why Affirmative Action is such a crime against society, it takes the talented tenth and pulls them out of general life for most people. Harvard is, as it were, hoarding all the smart Black Friends.

I didn't get into this in the prior post for that reason, no one will get anything out of the discussion.

I consider transition a primarily religious belief, having to do with a metaphysical gender-soul which exists separate from any physical evidence thereof, and a philosophical requirement that one live in conformance with it.

I remember a particularly memorable anecdote, I'm pretty sure from The Rest is History podcast, comparing the craziness of the last decade or so to the Reformation: we've got our statue-toppling iconoclasts, and our loud philosophical debates including over, effectively, transubstantiation after terrestrial rituals. It's not "this bread and wine have literally and physically become body and blood" (here, try that and let me run it through a mass spectrometer!) but "this organism, previously male, is now female and always has been." I'm not sure it's an answer to your thoughts, but I found it comforting that this sort of disagreement has long-standing precedent in history.

But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded.

Transsexuality isn't about delusion - it's about desire.

And no one escapes desire, no matter how smart you are.

If a random person insists on referring to Mary as a man, and I’m required to say that between the two of them one is a fool, I’d have to say that Mary is not the fool.

It's reasonable to take Mark's assertion that "X is true" to be strong prima facie evidence of X, if you generally trust his judgement. But surely you recognize that Mark's beliefs are still defeasible, correct? Mark can still be wrong.

If he were to say, for example, that God is real - and that, more specifically, Islam is the one true religion - I doubt you'd be running out to convert to Islam tomorrow. Islam doesn't become true just because Mark says so. That claim still has to be evaluated against the totality of available evidence and argumentation, even though the source is trustworthy.

Or suppose that he told you that a person can be both 18 years old and 36 years old at the exact same time. That's something that you know to be false, just based on an analysis of the structure of the sentence. Mark's statement to the contrary wouldn't be (or shouldn't be) enough to change your mind.

So why not treat Mark's claim that he is actually a woman named Mary the same as those other two examples? At worst, obviously false nonsense, and at best, a highly contentious claim that should only be accepted after a careful examination of the supporting arguments?

Transsexuality isn't about delusion - it's about desire.

And no one escapes desire, no matter how smart you are.

This. I think most Mottizens' model of the situation would be much improved my thinking of trans as primarily an unusual set of desires/preferences rather than as delusion or attention-seeking (or even, directly, an attempt to get one's rocks off). The thing that most transitioners (and a whole lot of others who don't go down that path) have in common is that they want, very badly, to be the opposite sex. The delusion, if it's there, is probably a consequence of that desire. Is that desire is born of a fetish or fetish-like sexual thing (AGP), or some emotional thing, or some complicated combination of these, or even of some external source like trauma? Probably each of these for different people (my money's on the complicated combination for most, though). But I strongly suspect that things almost never start with delusion.

Somewhat of a side note, but I find it relevant that quite a few philosophies and religions teach that mastering or overcoming your desires is a key to living well. Stoicism, Buddhism, and Christianity don't have too much in common philosophically, but they are all in agreement on that point. (Even then there are major differences -- Christianity teaches that some desires must be expunged and the others rightly ordered, while my understanding is that Buddhism thinks that they all have to go. But the common point is that if you can't rule your desires, they will rule you, to your detriment.)

The thing that most transitioners (and a whole lot of others who don't go down that path) have in common is that they want, very badly, to be the opposite sex.

I think this accurately describes pretty much all trans women who are making even a token effort to medically transition. For a lot of trans men (the canonical example being Ellen/Elliot Page), to me it looks less like wanting to be a man and more like wanting not to be a woman (including not being able to have children, not being someone who is the object of sexual desire etc.). For trans women, medical transition tends to scan as an attempt to fulfil a fantasy; for trans men, an elaborate form of self-harm and self-obliteration. The difference in the tone of trans memoirs is striking: trans women's tend to read like "coming out was the most joyous and uplifting moment of my life, I finally truly understand who I am and now I'm free to be my best self", while trans men's tend to read like "it was after my third suicide attempt during my second hospitalisation for anorexia (prompted by getting raped) that I finally realised I'm actually a trans man, and I am exactly as miserable and dysphoric since my mastectomy as I was beforehand".

You are probably right about that. The dynamics in the modal cases do seem different.

Poly for anyone not in the top 10% of attractiveness is a cope. It's the dating equivalent of renting in a flatshare instead of buying a house. It's what you do when you can't do the latter.

Poly for those top 10% is basically just farming simps. If you're the most desirable one in a poly arrangement you have it fucking made. It's just a harem by another name.

I think Poly is hypothetically possible to do in a healthy manner but requires a lot of coordination, patience and understanding between a bunch of quasi-romantically entangled people and has such a tightrope effect that it's probably not worth exploring just to occasionally hump a different partner.

but requires a lot of coordination, patience and understanding between a bunch of quasi-romantically entangled people

It also requires that you know yourself. Which requires being capable of knowing yourself.

Which is why "poly as identity" really rubs me the wrong way- because if you're not skeptical every time "it's just the way I am, and all of my relations need to just deal with it" as a go-to/the only rationalization for what you're doing, odds are you probably don't understand how love works and are thus doing it wrong.

And at that point, even if you're among the very privileged few that can actually do this successfully, are you going to be Proud of it (and thus cause other people who actually can't do it to get themselves into trouble), or are you going to shut the fuck up about it for the sake of everyone else and maybe not even devote that much time to pursuing it specifically because it's not practical (read: "being oppressed by reality")?

If you're not capable of asking yourself that question, or you're capable of asking that question but can't answer it honestly, indulging $sexual_deviance is probably not right for you. And saying that out loud to people doesn't help as a consequence, so it's not fixable.

And even if you're a very good tightrope walker a bad day or two on the tightrope and you've got to spend a lot of time rehabilitating an exponentially complicated web of relationships. In which the benefit is potentially maybe being able to occasionally indulge in a new sexual partner (and if you're longterm stable Poly you're probably not even doing that any more).

See also Eliezer's post "Outside the Laboratory". Few people have fully generalised rationality: many people who are extremely intelligent and rational in one domain can be exactly as susceptible to peer pressure, social contagion, motivated reasoning, bias etc. in other domains. I suspect that this is the rule rather than the exception among anyone of above-average intelligence. I'm not sure if I've ever met someone whose intelligence is (per your account) four standard deviations above the norm, but I see no good reason why this wouldn't also be true within that cohort.

MtF-transgenders on average scale as superior on IQ tests compared to the norm, IIRC well over 1 standard deviation, which is not that surprising given the propensity of high-functioning autistic men to transition. I don’t think the fact that people are not fully ‘general’ is fully explanatory beyond the fact of it as a basic truism, obviously autistic people aren’t fully rounded in every cognitive task, since social skills are included in cognitive tasks pretty readily.

For an obvious example of a transgender-inclined 4-sigma person acting neurotically, look at Ted Kaczynski: 160+ IQ gender dysphoric social outcast whose neuroses eventually led him to just kill people, since he was sexually isolated when he was younger. The same archetype follows, I think, in the average socially-isolated high-functioning autist whose mind is obviously elevated beyond the masses generalistically in terms of ability but not morally, which is the main culture war issue we’re currently discussing (the high-IQ nature of the transgenders is also similar to the nature of the Askhenazim, which is why ‘ideological capture’ is such a charged notion likened to trans-genocide).

I understand that your intention with this post isn't anything as simple-minded as "this genius came out as trans, therefore trans is legit and TERFs should shut their mouths". But even if you're not doing that, some people may take it that way, and I see similar arguments for all kinds of political stances all the time, so I'm going to lay out here why the argument is fallacious.

Years ago, Scott had a post arguing that brilliant people also holding some very strange (and presumably incorrect) beliefs is precisely what you'd naively expect. A genius (broadly defined) is a person who identifies actionable patterns that no one else has noticed before, which means that they must have an unusually sensitive pattern-matching ability, which can very easily devolve into fully-fledged apophenia if left unchecked:

Linus Pauling thought Vitamin C cured everything. Isaac Newton spent half his time working on weird Bible codes. Nikola Tesla pursued mad energy beams that couldn’t work. Lynn Margulis revolutionized cell biology by discovering mitochondrial endosymbiosis, but was also a 9-11 truther and doubted HIV caused AIDS.

To Scott's examples I'll add the laundry list of mathematicians who went mad, including Alexander Grothendieck, Kurt Gödel and John Forbes Nash among others.

"This extremely smart person is also trans" is not a persuasive argument that we should take the empirical, experiential or normative claims of trans people/trans activists seriously, any more than the argument that no one should eat sugar because Hitler did too, or that we should all be Christian because that student's name? Albert Einstein. If you think the arguments in favour of this or that component of trans rights make sense, it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference if the only people advancing them were the dumbest people you've ever met; if you think they don't make sense, it likewise doesn't make a difference if everyone advancing them got into Harvard on an academic scholarship, is a card-carrying MENSA member and/or has a PhD in theoretical physics. It's Bulverism in reverse.

Is it brave to have HR waste hours of everyone's time with a degrading struggle session as a preparatory bombardment for your triumphant return? To me that seems like only seeing and valuing other people as your obedient audience...

I don't really know what to say. You're clearly smitten with this guy, but to me the story sounds like a typical case of mid-life crisis autogynophilia from a successful guy who wants to feel inherently valued for something, rather than just for his job skills.

successful guy who wants to feel inherently valued for something, rather than just for his job skills.

OP didn't mention any particular romantic success on his coworker's part, just that he was good at job skills. I'd be willing to wager that they're sufficiently far onto the spectrum that the dating market had essentially completely rejected them, leading to trans affiliation as a hugbox.

It's often not that. Many of these guys are already married. They're not failures, they're just tired of only being valued for the things they do rather than what they are

It’s funny, people talk a lot about men not being valued for who they are but that doesn’t describe my own experience. I get the logic of it, but I don’t know how to explain the discordance between the view and my experience.

But I guess I’m just lucky. My family, friends, and partners have always seemed clearly to value me for who I am. I haven’t had many partners but the ones I’ve had have been lightyears beyond the descriptions of wives and girlfriends I hear online.

Right. Chris from Mr Beast was by all accounts the very picture of success -- money, wife, kid. Dude had it made. Then he blew it all up to cosplay as a girl. That's not a rational move by any stretch of the imagination. It's something that must be driven by emotion. Either in the way you say, or simple raw fetishism.

Then he blew it all up to cosplay as a girl.

Pretty sure Kris still has money and a kid. From what I can glean from light Google searching the amicability of the their divorce isn't known, but it's entirely possible it's what Kris wanted.

Based on the first four paragraphs, I was expecting this post to lead to Mark refusing to attend the "mandatory" harassment training, and management being unable to do anything about it because Mark is such an invaluable asset. Kudos on the curveball, didn't see that coming.

I'll echo what AshLael posted and state that the handful of trans people I've met IRL have all been perfectly fine. Some passed ok, some didn't. None struck me as fetishists or AGP. And none seemed to particularly care about "trans issues" that you would see online.

It has led me to conclude that online trans activists are a huge net negative for trans people in general. I wonder if a big advantage for gays and lesbians is that the internet didn't exist for the majority of their activist eras, thus most people would never encounter the weird and disturbing subcultures that mostly stuck to small enclaves in major cities.

None struck me as fetishists or AGP.

If they were, you wouldn't know. That's another problem with the "highly intelligent people are doing this" idea. Highly intelligent people are better able to hide anything questionable.

In general, I think it's a big mistake to confuse "X" group with "X activists".

I cannot stand trans activists. But the actual trans people I know are cool. And this applies broadly. I mostly dislike unionists but actual construction workers are great.

Internalise this, and the world suddenly feels a lot more chill.

As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that there is any level of intelligence (that has been attained by humans) at which the ability to delude oneself disappears. It is facile to bring up the famous historical examples like Newton or Pascal, as to begin with it's hard to answer the question to what extent they would even resemble our modern understanding of a "genius" , but even in modern times there is no shortage of examples such as the cavalcade of Physics nobel prize winners (Pauling, Josephson...) who went off the deep end, or even cases like Mochizuki where the cancerous growth of delusion happened near the center of their actual domain of expertise. By any account, these people are the sort of geniuses you describe: their competitive advantage was taking leaps of correct intuition over gaps others could only bridge with lots of meticulous work.

Moving in a slice of academia where it seems that we're good enough to be the "thousand-year-old vampires" (TW: Yudkowsky being himself) to a distinct stratum of people below but also have a distinct layer of people above us who appear the same to us, I've had a friend and colleague in academia who is probably quite similar to the case of Mar(k/y) that you describe. His->her transition did come as a bit of a shock to me, but as I thought about it more the signs had been all there. Since I first met him there was always a class of topics that made him act squirmy and avoidant, mostly to do with his own romantic relationships as well as even seemingly non-romantic ones with some people around him that one would casually describe as "queer", but also whenever other people's romantic relationships came up, as well as anything to do with his own seemingly quite religious upbringing. This was not the avoidance of someone calmly deciding to not talk about a topic, but the avoidance of someone with a fear of heights suddenly pushed onto a suspension bridge, and it seemed quite likely that he would be struck by the same sense of vertigo if his train of thought hit upon these topics on its own. I can only imagine that she came to be either somewhere in the depths of the avoided area, or as a mechanism to cope with the inevitability of having to engage it - but how would I know? I don't have the social wisdom to know how to keep engaging with someone who broadcast a choice to discard the social identity I was acquainted with, and academic contingencies made us go different ways at the time either way. The thing is though that if I accept this cluster of anxious avoidance as being a "pre-delusion", there is no shortage of people on "the level above mine" that I have seen it from.

Mar(k/y)

Mark and the Funky Bunch.

I think the fatal flaw in your line of argument here is that you assume someone whose job requires rational analysis is not going to delude themselves in other matters. That's simply not how humans work. Everyone - everyone - has blind spots where they don't have a clear view of their own weaknesses. If anything, very smart people tend to be a bit more prone to this because they tend to believe their very clear understanding of one thing applies to all things.

I'm not saying your specific coworker is self-deluding - I don't know him. But you definitely shouldn't assume that because he's really sharp at the job, he therefore thinks through everything with the same clarity.

How often do you see your co-worker tackling problems beyond their profession? In my experience raw intelligence and domain expertise can very easily give the impression of a deep and profound wisdom that simply isn't there. Do not be too surprised if one day you see them out of their element and the illusion shatters.

On a similar note, I have always wondered how much of the stereotype of computer programming being a common career path for trans people is because it is a lucrative profession (=able to afford treatments) where competence matters enough to make a certain amount of "weirdness" tolerable, and how much of it is because of the apparent link between autism and trans people?

It's also interesting to me how often seemingly unrelated hobbies end up converging for certain neurotypes. The first trans person I ever met was one of the organizers at my Pokemon TCG league as a kid, and now as an adult my local Magic: The Gathering shop has several trans people who show up for Commander nights, and a few of them are the ones you go to if you need a ruling on a complex rules interaction and the actual judge is busy.

Heck, some of the smartest computer scientists I know from college came out as trans at some point.

I don't think your story comes off as propaganda, /u/ffrreerree. I think your experience is the tip of the iceberg, and doesn't necessarily say anything about the validity or invalidity of trans people one way or the other.

My first interactions with a trans person (or at least someone who I knew had transitioned) was as an audience member to a speech they were giving. I wasn't there to listen to a trans person speak, I was there to hear from Deirdre McCloskey a famous economist that transitioned in 1995. The fact that she had once been a man was an interesting side fact about her. It wasn't what defined her. The same could probably be said of Caitlyn Jenner. I also had a few colleagues that transitioned. It was generally not something we ever talked about. I tried not to make a big deal of it, and they didn't either. I have parts of me that are culturally conservative. But those parts of me mostly say to shut up about sexual topics and health issues, especially in professional settings. Something can be a huge cultural issue, political disagreement, and interpersonal dream/nightmare. But it need not impact the professional workplace at all.

I do agree with you about having a real worry about the opportunity costs of smart people. I see it with myself all the time. I wrote a semi-popular online web serial. I mostly stopped because I have kids and because I liked spending my time writing to argue politics on themotte more. I very selfishly chose a path that benefits far fewer people. I work a salaried non-profit job that has me working very low hours, but also pays about 40% under market price for my labor (or maybe I'm accurately priced given how much I work). Not everyone is in their optimal job, for whatever way you want to define "optimal". Personal happiness / pay / comparative advantage / benefit to the world / etc.

It does leave exploitable holes in the market. One of those holes is that a bunch of space and engineering nerds thought we should be doing more to establish a human space presence. Elon Musk gathered these people into space X and got cheap high quality engineering talent.

I read a bit about this Deirdre on the wikipedia page, and saw the failed cancellation campaign in 2003. I mean, probably it is true that this is not what defined her, but still I can see the germs of cancel culture in it.

A couple unorganized thoughts:

  1. Of the people I've worked closely with in my software engineering career, the women are smarter and more competent than the men, by a significant margin. This is entirely driven by most of the women I've worked with being trans women.

  2. There is absolutely a very significant correlation between all of mathematical capabilities, having at least mild autistic tendencies, and identifying as trans. My running theory is that the causal arrow runs from not being neurotypical to not fitting into the very narrow social role for men (which is hard to navigate as an autistic person) to very rationally deciding to just start identifying as trans so you have more flexibility in how you present yourself. I'd be interested to hear Mary or another highly capable trans person talk about if this resonates with them at all (I'm always too sheepish to state this belief in polite company).

  3. I don't think trans people are the primary drivers of corporate woke struggle sessions. I've heard from two that they actually dislike them. Constantly having people tiptoe around them and someone making a performative point to always ask for pronouns in front of them is, if anything, triggering and othering. Instead, it's mostly white HR women who are pushing it: it establishes a social hierarchy with arbitrary rules that they can assert themselves as enforcers into.

  4. Trans people on Twitter are not at all representative of typical trans people, who are much more normal than you'd think if social media was your primary exposure to them.

It seems like people in the field are more likely to be a bit all over the place. There are more people doing things far out of the mainstream in every direction.

As for the trans thing I find it perplexing as the typical developer especially in the nerdier fields is far from being feminine. Even the ones who are trans aren't very feminine. Stick a transgender haskell developer in with at a Taylor Swift concert and he will really stand out. Much of the femininity is missing from them. They aren't talking with their friends for four hours about nothing, they don't really love kids, they don't really have feminine habits. Developers tend to speak in bullet points rather than the free flowing emotional output that women speak in.

Mathematics/CS is hyper masculine. It is purely logical, incredibly concise, black and white and doesn't care about your feelings. It is for somewhat unempathic types who answer the question "do you like my shirt" honestly. They aren't very girly. I find the autist to trans pipeline to be truly perplexing as autism is linked to high prenatal testosterone and is in many ways a hyper masculinized brain.

My guess is that they don't fit in with the bros and are desperately searching for an identity while needing attention.

I imagine some of it is also that stereotypical masculinity is not the self-image of many nerds.

Is it though, nerds throughout history are nearly all men. Pretty much all major scientific discoveries were made by men. Technology has been dominated by men. Nerdy occupations have some of the highest over-representations of men.

It is a different male archetype than the chad but it is hardly one that isn't male.

My running theory is that the causal arrow runs from not being neurotypical to not fitting into the very narrow social role for men (which is hard to navigate as an autistic person) to very rationally deciding to just start identifying as trans so you have more flexibility in how you present yourself. I'd be interested to hear Mary or another highly capable trans person talk about if this resonates with them at all (I'm always too sheepish to state this belief in polite company).

I wonder about this myself. I know a transman who is likely autistic, and from what I have gathered talking with him, it really seems like part of the motivation for transitioning was his difficulty fitting into the female social role as an autistic person. He was raised a conservative Christian, went to a Baptist college, and was married to an emotionally abusive man for 10 years, so I wonder if he didn't experience the female role as rather more restrictive than most women experience it?

I would be curious to find out whether trans people are more likely to come from communities which emphasize hard-to-navigate social rules (for either sex) in the modern day. I could easily imagine a pipeline that looks something like: born autistic in a community with strong gender norms > doesn't fit in to natal sex role due to autism > labels that difficulty "gender dysphoria" and questions if they might be the opposite sex > transitions and enough people give them a bit more leeway for them to learn the rules of their new sex role > they're much happier in their new role as a result.

That's possible, but then one would like mainstream society to be sending a message like: it's perfectly alright to be a nerdy masculine woman or an effeminate man!!! You definitely do not need to go on hormones and cut off your breasts or other parts to deal with this! Go find yourself a supportive community in a big city, they totally exist!

Mainstream society should definitely not be sending a message that medical procedures and messing with puberty are a good way to deal with the situation, or at least not until they've tried other things like finding a supportive subculture, finding their own preferred aesthetic, etc.

one would like mainstream society to be sending a message like: it's perfectly alright to be a nerdy masculine woman or an effeminate man

That's the tack that society has been taking since at least the 80s or so. Obviously there's no blinded experiment or anything and lots of different overlapping trends, but it seems pretty clear to me that downplaying gender roles led to an increase in people desiring to transition rather than forestalling transitions.

That's the tack that society has been taking since at least the 80s or so.

It used to be. Then a certain kind of angry, selfish person started problematizing masculinity and proclaimed that "nerdy/masculine woman" (masculinity as action) and "effeminate man" (masculinity as identity) were all bad.

That started around 2010 or so and has done nothing but get worse. It seems that the trans stuff is just responding to that worldview.

That's the tack that society has been taking since at least the 80s or so. Obviously there's no blinded experiment or anything and lots of different overlapping trends, but it seems pretty clear to me that downplaying gender roles led to an increase in people desiring to transition rather than forestalling transitions.

Hypothesis: Downplaying the traditional norms effectively removed the training wheels from the kids who would have really needed them. It may be difficult to adapt to unsaid social norms if the well-meaning adults are too drunk on their utopian koolaid and insist there being no norms. If a task is difficult, some people do not succeed.

If you complain, the well-meaning adults may say that you've got it all wrong, it is how it is meant to be: the kids (later grown-ups) who take non-standard paths have been liberated from oppressive structures and are finally able to find/express their non-standard identity.

I would be curious to find out whether trans people are more likely to come from communities which emphasize hard-to-navigate social rules (for either sex) in the modern day.

There isn't any other kind.

I feel like that's a bit presumptuous though, unless you mean it in some trivial sense like, "All communities emphasize hard-to-navigate social rules (for either sex), therefore all trans people come from such communities."

I would tend to think that so-called "autogynephillic transexuality" would be a kind of transness that only requires that men and women wear different kinds of clothes and look physically different, which isn't a "hard-to-navigate social rule" in my book. Heck, even so-called "homosexual transsexuals" don't require the existence of hard-to-navigate social role for either sex, just for a "gay" person to realize on some level that they'll have more of the sexual options they prefer if they transition.

I'm inclined to give my hypothesis a label more like "pseudo-dysphoric autistic transsexuality", and would tend to consider it distinct from either of Blanchard's two categories (though I'm sure there's comorbidities.) I actually wonder if most transmen in the modern rise of transness don't belong to this category. Though I could also see an argument for something like "pseudo-dysphoric cluster B transsexuality" or a more general supercategory of "pseudo-dysphoric 'weird outcast' transsexuality" (which I suspect would often line up with neurodivergence of some kind, though it might never be diagnosed.)

Perhaps I'm far more intelligent than you or perhaps I've just not met as brilliant people but I've never ever experienced the sort of general intelligence gulf you describe. If anything my experience has been the opposite, I've assumed general competence and found just general overconfidence.

Sure, there are people vastly superior to me in specific domains but not in general. They're often competent in other areas as well but not experts to the degree they are in their chosen field. Conversely, there are people less intelligent than me that occasionally are right about things that I'm wrong about even if they can't articulate why they believe what they believe very well, especially when they have a lot of experience in the subject matter.

To me it seems very common for great domain specific expertise to lead to generalised overconfidence rather than being an indicator of general competence.

This sort of thing seems especially true about mental illnesses. I'm sure John Nash was incomparably superior to me at math but that doesn't mean that the FBI really was sending him messages through light beams or that literally everyone wearing red ties are commies.

Ideology is almost as bad as mental illness at polluting thinking.

I'm not anti-trans. Not by my own definition of "anti-trans", anyway. Take what I am about to say to be not specifically about transgenderism:

My personal experience has taught me to be very pessimistic about predicting wisdom from intelligence, or even predicting future wisdom from past wisdom. Social norms and other more general sources of folly are a better poison than intelligence is an antidote. You're not overestimating quant traders, but you are underestimating folly. When I see a folly-resistant person, I expect the pattern to continue until it doesn't.

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