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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   32894 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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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.

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.

You call them an idiot, they call you a bigot,

maybe they really are stupid and/or evil.

There’s no doubt in my mind that plenty of gender-ideologists are stupid and malicious.

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.

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.

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 that edit: you would not see that as a valid case for government intervention?

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.

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.

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

If you believe that having a discussion this way requires to have the same definitions in the first place, why did you say this:

If you taboo'd the words 'man,' 'woman,' 'male,' and 'female,' you could actually have a productive discussion with leftists about whether people should be empowerd to advertise their sexual preferences via their mode of dress...

?

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.

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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