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Notes -
I’ve decided to stop spaghetti posting because it’s making it miserable to respond in a coherent fashion. If in the process I fail to address what you consider a major point, please bring it back up again.
Part 1 - definitions, perceptions
You accuse me, first, of hypocrisy-- of not understanding how you create definitions, even as I accuse you of not understanding the gender-ideologist’s position. I would instead characterize that as disagreement. I think either we are using the same word (‘definition’) to point at two separate topics, or your definition of ‘definition’ rests on an incoherent theory of mind and therefore incomplete self-understanding.
Let me try to describe your position as best as possible:
The words we use to describe concepts are arbitrary, but concepts themselves have a fixed, platonic nature-- at least, on a personal level. There is an objective standard for ‘car’, ‘blue’, and ‘man’, regardless of what words you use to describe them. Even if you were magically transported into a society where there was no distinction between road and sidewalk, and therefore no need to designate “bike lanes” and “car lanes”, you would still perceive the existence of ‘cars’ and ‘pedestrians’-- you would still classify the respective groups accordingly-- and you would still want to use the terms ‘car’ and ‘bike’ or some sort of uniquely-identifying equivalent, even if you were speaking in another language. Therefore, the definition of ‘car’ is whatever you perceive to be a ‘car’, and it makes absolutely no sense to talk about changing definitions.
Now, let me describe mine;
The human brain is a supervised classifier at the level of neurotransmitter feedback that ties together sense-impressions into useful behaviors. Seeing the letters C-A-R, hearing the sound /kɑɹ/, passing your hand over smooth metal, observing a precise number of wheels, hearing the rumble of an engine-- all of those things exist on an independent and more fundamental level than the concept we call ‘car’. But through repetition, our minds group those things together, such that when the network for “four wheels” fires, the networks for “engine rumble” and “C-A-R” also fire. And in particular, we discover that the same process happens to the people we talk to-- if we say “car” they’re also likely to bring up wheels and engines and metal because they’ve also pattern-matched to the same stimuli.
Except for some reason, people keep riding their bicycles on the highway and claiming they’re riding their cars. You try to explain to them the importance of the four wheels, and the metal, and the engine. They rebut with nonsense about training wheels, and bamboo and the flintstones. You challenge them to coherently define “car” and they mumble something about how any vehicle can be a car if they want it to be-- and for that matter, a car can be any other type of vehicle, too. They call you a reactionary for wanting to keep cars off of sidewalks, and in turn you come away from the experience thinking these people are indoctrinated idiots spewing the propaganda of their shadowy windmill-loving political elite.
In the end, nothing serves to change your grouping of related concepts-- your ‘definition.’ in its most fundamental sense. You come away from the experience thinking your definition is immutable.
Except it’s not! The brain is a flexible thing. If you committed to using the word ‘car’ to apply to every vehicle on the highway, and ‘bike’ to apply to every vehicle on the sidewalk, you could easily shuffle your groupings around. You’d still want to refer to your original concepts occasionally… for example, if you’re talking to a mechanic, you need to specify whether you’re having problems with your two-wheeled-pedal-vehicle or your four-wheeled-engine-vehicle. But it would be entirely doable to change your definitions.
Except… why would you want to?
Even if you concede that cars can drive on sidewalks and bikes on the highway, why would you want them to trigger the same networks in your brain? Wouldn’t you prefer to keep them separate, so that when the “car” network triggers the “danger” network is appropriately stimulated, rather than being offset by association with less-dangerous vehicles?
You can concede that your definition is not necessarily immutable, but at the very least it must be immutable to be functional. And additionally, you can only explain these people with apparently non-functional definitions by pointing to either malice or stupidity. And for that, you support your position by pointing to their insane policy prescriptions-- requiring a driver’s license to ride a bike??? Ridiculous! So definitions (whether a bike is a car), policy (whether a car can drive on the sidewalk), and goals (being stupid/evil) become inextricable.
But the reason I’m so insistent about separating definition-policy-goals is because the conclusion you’re drawing rests on unfounded assumptions about their goals. You’re assessing bad-definition bad-policy by comparing them to your goals.
Imagine if you wanted a society with wider sidewalks, narrower roads, and harsh speed limits on both. In such a society, there might still be different prescriptions of how the people in each environment might drive. For example, road-bound vehicles might be expected to always go in a predictable direction and speed, while sidewalk-bound vehicles are afforded the right to start and stop at leisure. But it becomes wholly conceivable for a vehicle to move on and off the sidewalk at its owner’s leisure, so long as it follows the applicable laws and customs in both locations.
Or alternatively, imagine wishing for a society with a wide gradation between roads and sidewalks, each with their own idiosyncratic rules, such that any individual vehicle-user has a variety of choices for how they want to drive at any given point.
Either of those goals might lead you to adopt definitions of ‘bikes’ and ‘cars’ that allow bikes to be cars, and vica-versa, because it’s more useful for you think in terms of, “is this vehicle following highway or sidewalk customs?” than in terms of “does this vehicle have four wheels and a motor?” Either of those goals could lead you to controversial policy prescriptions about where cars and bikes are allowed to go. But they’re still very different goals-- and in any case, trying to talk to someone that has those goals about how “obviously things would be safer for bikes if cars weren’t allowed on sidewalks” is just going to be mutually frustrating. They’ll say something to the effect of, “of course it’s dangerous to have a self-identified car on the sidewalk… but I don’t see why self-identified bikes are obviously perfectly welcome.” You call them an idiot, they call you a bigot, everyone walks away mad. I smugly nod, having correctly assessed your mutual incomprehensibility.
Except… maybe they really are stupid and/or evil. Maybe you really were addressing their actual goals. I admit that the end result would still look the same-- mutual disgust, and an end to discussion. So I can’t claim, prima facie, that your inability to productively talk to cyclists-- I mean, gender-ideologists, is evidence of your beliefs about them being wrong. If we were having the same discussion about, say, flat-earthers, I’d accept that the other group really is too dumb to talk too. Why disagree here?
Well, the short answer is… personal experience. The gender-ideologists I’ve talked to just aren’t like that. Speaking just of the people I’ve met in person-- the trans people I meet tend to be troubled, but decent people. The progressives get a little hysterical sometimes, but otherwise they’re pretty OK. I admit that I don’t really expect too much from them anyways because they’re atheists/heretics anyways, but in terms of personal virtual they’re really not very far from the catholics I know. And speaking of the people I’ve met online-- and here I’m referring mostly to /r/slatestarcodex and some very interesting discussions I had on my alt-account at PurplePillDebate--the egalitarian-feminists I talked to argued from coherent principles and goals that I could tell incidentally lead to their view of gender ideology. (We weren’t actually talking about transgenderism, by-the-by, which was what made the discussion particularly interesting as a look into the substrate on which transgenderism could be reasonable derived from. I think the substrate was wrong of course, but that’s because I believe in God.)
There’s no doubt in my mind that plenty of gender-ideologists are stupid and malicious. The same is true of people who support traditional gender roles! I might share my definition of “man and women” with viking-obsessed neo-pagan neo-nazi, and even agree on a number of policy prescriptions, but our goals are very much distinct.
So seeing reasonable people in the gender-ideologist camp and unreasonable people in the traditionalist camp… I’m just inclined to believe in my null hypothesis. That being: that they’re just people like everyone else. That their intelligence/morality bell curves largely reflect the bell curves of the general population. That their goals, while alien to mine, are not some evil monolith designed to squash me flat.
So with reference to your original question-- “What would the world have to look like for you to change your mind” I suppose statistical evidence of lower intelligence + higher criminality correlating to increased support for gender-ideologists views would cause me to update my views.
Part 2 - Government Intervention
I’ll start by characterizing myself as a neoliberal, rather than a libertarian. It’s true that I don’t take a full, “no steppy snake” position… I’m pro-having-a-government even though I accept that governments are basically just machines that turn the violation of natural rights into security. People have a right to bear arms, but I still want to make any weapon small enough to concealed-carry too ludicrously expensive for the average person to own. (People should be able to own missiles, not pistols. An AR-15 is enough to defend your home, and a tank is enough to overthrow your government.) People have a right to property, and taxation is theft, but I’m still pro-theft when that money is spent on maintaining my roads.
But in general, I still believe in the aphorism that a person’s right to swing their fist ends where another person’s nose begins-- and I believe the justified role of the government is to prevent nose-hitting, not fist-swinging. It’s often impossible to do one without the other, but I just don’t see how that applies to transgender procedures and medicines? If you choose to hurt yourself… okay? It’s not like taking drugs, where by hurting yourself, you become more likely to hurt other people too. Well, I guess taking testosterone specifically is a little like that, but also we just allow men to walk around with high test levels anyways so it doesn’t seem like an issue. Regarding sports-- you implicitly agree to a level of danger by participating in a sporting event, mediated by the rules. Whether female athletes want to agree to the dangers of male involvement is up to them. Whether sporting organizations want to set the danger level at a particular point is up to market incentives. Either way, there’s no place for the government to intervene… unless it’s funding the sport for some reason, which it shouldn’t be doing anyways. (I voted against a recent stadium tax in my municipal elections.)
It’s reasonable for the government to set up guardrails when it comes to medicine. And verifying that patients (and if applicable, the parents) are giving informed consent and that the drug or procedure given will be successful at giving it to them is extremely non-trivial. I suspect a “perfect” implementation of the system would result in a lot fewer minors ultimately getting medically transitioned. But I don’t think the government should prevent people from inflicting what I would consider to be harm on themselves. People should have a right to cut off their limbs if they can prove they really, truly want to. (They shouldn’t have a right to accept disability payments after but that’s a separate discussion.)
And yes, it’s true that you and I were able to discuss this issue without reference to the definitions of “man” and “woman”, but that’s because we more-or-less agree on those definitions in the first place, and additionally agree that it would be personally immoral to crossdress and go into women’s bathrooms. Therefore our disagreement probably hinges on the definition of “government” and “intervention” and “right” instead, and we will almost certainly go around in circles if we aren’t careful about making sure we’re talking about the same things.
Don't get me wrong, a disagreement between us most likely exists as well, but if you understood my position you'd be able to describe it in terms I would recognize as accurate, and you haven't really done that yet. This is much broader than the disagreement over my approach to definitions, so far, whenever a second person pronoun was followed by a description of an idea or behavior it has failed to match thoughts I have or approaches I take, which is why I believe you don't understand where I'm coming from. You've been informed of that repeatedly, and instead of trying to correct any misunderstanding between us, you're confidently claiming I lack self-understanding. It's quite clear you're not living up to your own standard here.
Funnily enough the position you describe as yours is much closer to mine than the one you describe as mine. I don't believe there's anything fixed, or platonic about concepts, and if I depend on "objectivity" of any kind it's only to the extent I believe there's a physical reality external to us, which doesn't much care what we think of it. You're right that the lack of various lanes and sidewalks would not affect how I see vehicles and pedestrians, but I hold that you're wrong it makes no sense to talk about changing definitions. Definitions are necessary to express ideas, and if you're using the word "car" in some other way than I am, it's pointless to fight over who has the "correct" definition (and I'm pretty sure you were making that point yourself), and much easier to just switch over to yours, express my ideas with your concepts, and make-do with pointing fingers at objects when all else fails.
I like the idea of the brain as a supervised classifier, nothing you said about the mutability of definitions goes much against anything I believe, and I don't think there's any one true way to classify things, but where it falls flat for me is the insistence that definitions are derived from goals. I believe that not only is it possible to have the same goal while having different definitions, or different goals while having the same definitions, I believe it's not even possible to talk about goals, unless you have a set of coherent definitions to begin with.
That's great, but the words "stupid", "evil" and "malicious" never left my virtual mouth, so you've been essentially talking to yourself throughout the train of thought. This was a particularly egregious example of not meeting me where I am.
So to take another example, if a patient goes to a doctor and asks for an opioid prescription, not because he's sick, not because's he's in any sort of unbearable pain, but because it will make him feel good, and the doctor runs his clinic by the motto "the customer is always right",
you'd see absolutely nothing wrong with thatedit: you would not see that as a valid case for government intervention?I don't think you have to go as far as "perfect". A very basic implementation of the system would result it that, and it would likely limit many adult transitions as well.
If you believe that having a discussion this way requires to have the same definitions in the first place, why did you say this:
?
I'm pretty sure I share the definitions for all of those 3 words with you and I simply disagree on whether government intervention is actually wrong in this instance, or whether people have a particular right. This is a good example of why it's backwards to claim that you need to have a goal in mind when creating a definition.
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