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Notes -
Several responses:
One of my favorite interview quotes of all time, and one I live by, from boxer Tex Cobb:
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.
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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.
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