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...and now for something completely different: Lemurs and the True Human Form,
in which a Zizian uncovers the biological basis of furrydom, which actually everyone has and is in denial about.
I actually find this somewhat plausible. While a good bit of the bodymap is propably learned as well, we should expect remnants like this. The culturewar-relevant part is how moral conclusions are drawn from it - that this is what youre supposed to be like, your True Form. The analogy between gender and species transition is hardly new, but it always gives a bit of a distorted impression, the latter is always a bit of a cardboard figure. Here, we have someone filling in part of the discourse a transspecies movement that laid similar claim to seriousness as transgenderism would produce.
This sorta concept floats around in furry, therian, and (to a lesser extent) otherkin spaces pretty often, so it's not too odd to see if pop up in Zizian thought since they seemed to pull in whatever slipped through tumblr at a given time. There's been some attempts at extrapolating how much humans map around the concept of having a tail, and it is pretty fun for furries and therians when they can add prosthetic ones (and/or more expressive ears, hackles, so on). There are other behaviors like quadrobics that seem to spontaneously develop without significant public discussion or formal artwork, for better or worse.
But a lot of it's probably just trained or learned: too much falls outside of the space of things that non-furs do.
And, more critically, too much of it's non-falsifiable. A big criticism of 90s-style spiritual therianthropy was how much even the Weird Species therians only wanted to pick up the interesting and fun habits from their totem animal/fursona/whatever, over gross or lesser-known ones. And while that was somewhat overblown (insert a dogs sniffing butts, which was a common highlight, and rimming joke here), it applies as broadly or more broadly here. There's no shortage of Weird Behaviors specific to various lemur species or to most proposed common ancestors; there's not even a shortage of weird anatomy things. ((eg, is that weird 'jump wrong and fly' dream normal people get something something leaping lemurs ancestral memory)). You can pick and choose what you think might show up in a big enough populace, but even if you had a magic wand that distinguished 'this drive is shared and has a historical grounding' from 'this is just something you picked up from watching Zootopia', you could easily pick and choose until you had some summary that matched the real world but had absolutely no predictive power.
The moral argument is... less clear; Zizians aren't (weren't?) as attached to what they perceived as True as you'd expect from the capitalization, even beyond what you'd expect from a group like this. See the mess around dual souls (or Undertale), or even the bit at the end of that piece about a dragonkin. These people aren't making a REVURN argument, and the sheer variety in beliefs or expressions of this take makes it incoherent to attempt it. There just aren't that many lemur therians, and they don't want to start online drama with the
LotRelf otherkin.There's people who do or did, back in the height of online therianthropy, though they didn't often find much commonality with out trans folk of the era, or even into the late '00s. It might return, despite its incoherence, as the least-bad-agreement point for an often wildly-incoherent alliance of varied positions, only because the alternative explanations feel worse. TW's freedom of form as the logical endpoint of freedom of expression, but it's pretty unpalatable for a political sphere that's happy to draw territorial exceptions to those principles, nevermind its contradiction to the likely usable points.
The extent any specific position can switch be switched out for today's goals is... not encouraging, and the Zizians show exactly why, but it's also not a failure mode specific to them, or their political allegiance, or to their specific political fight.
Well that was a lot to read.
What else do you have in mind? I dont remember anything about the hemisphere thing being tumblr.
I used to do this as a kid. Not sure why I stopped, but I just tried it again after reading this and didnt like it.
This guy does not understand how visual similarity works in his interpretation, and even in the extended version linked there does not tell us the ratio between the three face types presented. I dont know how you evaluate him, but consider this a Gellman warning.
Dont remember that.
Well no; as per the author animal remnants are partial, and more importantly there isnt one coherent shape but lots of over- and underdetermining ideas (understanding this even though he? propably doesnt listen to criticism in any way was a positive sign for me), so thats not really something you can RETVRN to, but he does seem to think its something worth fitting yourself into better (into the version applying best to you personally, which as per above may vary significantly).
Not sure if this makes sense outside my head, but I think one reason body modification may be more accepted than the Gadsden flag is because the former is arational. Pure preferences are beyond justification or the need for it, but the flag has real content that may be "wrong"/subject to criticism. Theres an analogous thing where True Liberals have an easier time justifying medical transition than pronouns, reversed from what normies or the trans people themselves would consider extreme.
I dont know which contradiction.
Dont understand this either, not sure how much the typo is to blame.
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CW: an explicit condemnation of gender ideology, an assertion that trans people are deluded.
At the tail end of 2014, Scott published a pro-trans article called "The Categories were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories", arguing that there's nothing intrinsic about the words "man" and "woman" that means we have to define them based on chromosomes or gamete size, any more than there's any intrinsic reason that the word "fish" excludes mammals. He argues that there's substantial evidence that affirming trans people's claimed gender identity is an effective tool for attenuating their distress, and that therefore we should be kind* to trans people and redefine the words "man" and "woman" to take these "edge cases" into account. He concluded the post with a link to the “heartwarming” story of Joshua Norton, a man in (where else, for there is nothing new under the sun?) San Francisco in the 1870s, who declared himself “Emperor of these United States” and whose delusion was “kindly" indulged by all and sundry in the city.
@zackmdavis, an admitted autogynephile who by his own account was driven to the brink of a full-blown nervous breakdown by Scott and Eliezer’s evasiveness and hypocrisy on the trans issue, wrote a response to Scott called “The Categories were Made for Man to Make Predictions”. His main argument is fairly self-explanatory per the title: it may be “kinder” to various penised individuals to include them in the category “woman” (and vice versa), but defining these words as such has strictly worse predictive power than defining them based on biological reality - and predictive power (making your beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences) is supposedly the only thing rationalists really care about. Zack doesn’t think the story about “Emperor” Norton is heartwarming at all:
For my part, I agree. If I found out that no one in my social circle really believed in the beliefs I was spouting off, but had collectively agreed to pretend to do so in order to protect my feelings, I would feel profoundly condescended to, insulted, disrespected, infantilised - perhaps I'd even go so far as to say dehumanised. If all of my friends knew my girlfriend was cheating on me behind my back but enthusiastically agreed with me when I told them about how trusting and faithful our relationship was, "kind" is just about the last word I'd use to describe their behaviour. I wouldn't think this behaviour had even the most tenuous relationship to the "rules of human decency".
In the short-term, perhaps it is kinder to play along with trans people’s beliefs about themselves and affirm their claimed gender identities, if failing to do so makes them sad and upset. But in the long-term, you are actively encouraging them to engage in magical thinking, the fantastical idea that declaring that something is so thereby makes it so. It is not just likely but inevitable that they’ll start wondering to what other domains this magical thinking might apply: if declaring that something is so can change your gender, why couldn’t it change your species, or the behaviour of one or more of your paraselves elsewhere in the multiverse? If there's nothing intrinsic about the category "woman" that means it can't include certain penised individuals, why couldn't the category "lemur" include certain featherless bipeds with broad nails? Scott would be the first to recognise that false beliefs cannot sit in one’s model of how the world works in isolation: they are destined to spread and multiply throughout one’s network of beliefs, infecting everything in sight. Phil Platt said "Teach a man to reason and he’ll think for a lifetime". Well, teach a man that magical thinking is acceptable in one context, and he’ll quickly find that it’s acceptable in lots of contexts.
Encouraging someone to engage in magical thinking is probably not so terribly harmful if that person is an incurious dullard with no tendency towards thought of any kind. But it strikes me as uniquely dangerous if that person is an exceptionally curious and reflective person who spends a lot of time in his own head, as most first-generation "rationalists" were: the kind of person who gets "a sort of itch... when the pieces don’t fit together and [they] need to pick at them until they do". By endorsing and affirming one of that person's obviously false beliefs, you are condemning them to believe in and/or generate other false beliefs, if (as a curious person does) they want their model of the universe to be internally consistent.**
Ziz and his cohort had beliefs about themselves which were false according to the ordinary definitions of the words (“man”, “woman”) on which those beliefs were based. They were ensconced in a social milieu of people who invariably described themselves as no-bullshit facts-don’t-care-about-your-feelings truth-seekers. And all of these people (with the possible exception of Zack himself), rather than trying to gently steer Ziz and co. into recognising that their beliefs were false, enthusiastically endorsed and affirmed their delusions, using all manner of tortured motivated reasoning which they would never have lowered themselves to in any other context. The lesson being imparted, the perverse incentive being set up, is "if this specific batshit insane belief can be compatible with rationalism provided it’s justified using a sufficiently high density of ten-dollar words, then any such belief can also be, provided you do the legwork of writing out massive inscrutable screeds with the appropriate nomenclature to justify it". Can anyone really say they’re surprised that Ziz and his mates ended up believing a bunch of other crazy bullshit in addition to gender ideology, when their adherence to gender ideology was so enthusiastically affirmed by all the supposedly logical, rational people in their immediate vicinity? If you believed that the act of saying “I am a woman” can overwrite biological reality, why wouldn’t you believe that you can hence manipulate reality to your every whim?
(I’m not saying Ziz wouldn’t have ended up leading a violent abusive cult if he wasn’t ensconced in a trans-affirming milieu - gender ideology is obviously not a prerequisite for leading a violent abusive cult, as evidenced by the fact that the Zizians are probably the first known violent abusive cult of the gender ideology era. But I’m definitely saying that having his declared gender identity affirmed with tortured motivated reasoning by everyone around him certainly didn’t help.)
A few years ago, the FTX scandal forced Scott to confront the fact that were components of the effective altruist worldview which could result in some very unsavoury behavior if followed to their logical conclusions. I hope the Zizian debacle triggers a comparable reckoning, in which Scott and his ilk consider the possibility that indulging the delusions of the trans people in their midst wasn’t anything like as "kind" or harmless as they might have once thought.
*There is perhaps no two-word phrase which inspires more disgust and revulsion in me than "be kind", especially when used in the context of the transgender debate (Scott didn't use it in this specific article, but Freddie DeBoer has). It is the essence of a smarmy thought-terminating cliché, in the sense of the term popularised by Gawker.
**I feel reasonably confident that it was the most curious and intellectually scrupulous young-earth creationists who came up with pseudoscientific nonsensical contortions like c-decay, not the least.
Great post. But I'm pessimistic; Scott's posted about how EA is positively addicted to criticizing itself, but the trans movement is definitely not like that. You Shall Not Question the orthodox heterodoxy. People like Ziz may look ridiculous and act mentally deluded (dangerously so, in retrospect), but it wouldn't be "kind" to point that out!
When I go to rationalist meetups, I actually think declaring myself to be a creationist would be met more warmly than declaring that biology is real and there's no such thing as a "female brain in a male body". (Hell, I bet people would be enthused at getting to argue with a creationist.) Because of this, I have no way to know whether 10% or 90% of the people around me are reasonable and won't declare me an Enemy of the People for saying unfashionable true things. If it really is 90% ... well, maybe there's hope. We'd just need a phase change where it becomes common knowledge that most people are
anti-communistgender-realist.Absolutely. To a rationalist (a label I consider increasingly inaptonymous), gender-criticals are neargroup, creationists are fargroup.
This lasts until the rationalists actually meet any creationists, of course.
Well that's the entire point of a fargroup, isn't it? You don't encounter them in your normal life. Like dark matter, they exist elsewhere, not bothering you.
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I talked about this on the other place, but I think the violence-causing idea is actually a work of the rationalist orthodoxy that isnt done baking yet. This fits the OP link and the hemisphere stuff though.
Also, seems like I had interesting timing.
I am amazed by how similar the thinking of some of the supposedly smartest people on the planet is to the kind of unchecked nonsense I thought of as a confused teenager (though in my days it was more luxury space communism and none of the gender crap). Completely divorced from reality, synthetic intellectual edifice on a house of cards of teetering make-believe on a foundation of all-encompassing wishful thinking fortified with the most selective perception possible, hasn't touched grass in far too long, but is stone-cold certain that all this is correct not because any practical metric shows it to be but because it has to be, because if it weren't you'd just be ridiculous loon.
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Good comments.
Might be too armchair for your tastes, but it’s possible that the Zizians represent this even more autistic distribution of the various representatives of rationalism such that the final result is basically this cargo-cult; the inability to sufficiently model other minds due to some internal sensory discordance would potentially lead to a given decision-theorist to attempt to find ‘less effortful’ Shelling points, such that their reliance on the lack of slack in probability-space becomes so load-bearing they are unwilling to rely on any other mode of thought in these chicken-games. Others might have their general social conditioning take over at this point, as the general black-box mentality of ‘I can see what results come out of this after I take this path on the decision tree, and it creates a genuinely monster mentality’ seems to have some representation in the rationalist sphere at least with Yudkowsky attempting to argue against utility monsters as an example.
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Our proprioception was continually better Ng perfectly adjusted to our form in healthy individuals, as any mismatches would have been brutally punished by failure during hunting or warfare.
If some developmentally defective individuals have issues with their species or gender identification, that is an indication of a problem, not an insight into our nature.
Some of it is perfectly adjusted, but not everything is that important. If I expected my ears to sit 2 cm higher than they do, how would that be punished in hunting and warfare? I dont think it would, even though thats far outside the range of normal anatomical variation.
your helmet (that you modified yourself to acomodate your delusion) doesn't sit as tight on your nogging, so that during a battle, against the army of Giktup the foolhardy, an errand sword strike dislodges it and the top of your head with it. Your wife and her sisters, know for their beauty on your little community mourns you for three days and three nights. Sad, sad stuff.
As per the link:
so I think you would still notice that your helmet doesnt, actually, sit tight after you do that. This is not like that delusion where you insist your arm isnt paralysed.
But even if it did work that way, how often would that happen? Celiacs disease deaths would have been far more, and that hasnt been selected away yet.
Aside, this was really interesting to see in my inbox, not yet knowing what conversation its responding to.
maybe you notice it doesn't sit tight, but if the quote were true, wouldn't there be a problem of clipping between physical objects and your fuzzy bits?
I would imagine it would be an everyday nuisance with every type of headgear. It could be a sword, or a low hanging timber from the ceiling or anything else.
It was an hypothetical to answer this bit:
Not sure what that means?
Even after the invention of hard headgear, I think the vast majority of people did not wear it regularly, or maybe even ever.
Yeah, I knew once I followed the link.
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Not totally sure why we should take ziz seriously. This reads exactly like the kind of thing you'd come up with if you took the poisoned dualist interpretation of why trans people are the way they are and then tried desperately to attach it back to materialism. The whole premise reads more like a fantasy writer's first attempt to build a magic system than anything grounded.
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So what you're saying is... when someone says I'm weird for wanting to be short, I have a citation to smugly tweat at them? :)
It sounds like-one of those evopsych just-so stories, though. Pre-Truescum trans medicalism seemed stronger. Not sure if that was lost in the replication crisis, or if the rapid expansion of what counts as trans and the cancel power it possessed stifled further research.
It just seems like the natural progression of gnostic cults to me.
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This theory would be a lot more believable if there weren't any furries.
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Lemurs come from a sister family to the group that includes humans. Which is to say, we not that closely related, about as close as cats are to dogs if I'm looking at the right numbers. It doesn't kill the argument, there are snouted primates and tree-jumping primates which are much closer to humans, but it does make lemurs specifically a poor supporting example for the argument.
Our closest common ancestors did look vaguely lemur-like apparently, but it also was quite a long time ago.
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Doesn't pass the sniff test.
I expect the largest and most significant divergence between human cortical homunculi and that of other mammals (animalculi?) would have occurred when we began speccing into bipedal locomotion. That is much later than the period suggested here. Look at that damn thing and tell me that it has much relevance to proto-lemurs.
Furries are rare enough, in absolute terms, that they're far more likely a culture-bound idiosyncratic misfiring rather than some kind of primitive atavism brought to life. Somewhere between 4 to 11% of furries have formal diagnoses of ASD. About 1% of the wider population are autistic.
Not to mention that in many cultures, furries are nigh-unheard of. I can't imagine most Indians, Africans or Chinese people would know what the hell a furry is, and there's no seething undercurrent of furry-desire that gets liberated when they move to the West. Even within the West, Americans probably have the highest furry-per-capita. Within America, cities that are liberal enclaves.
I agree with Duplex below that autism and its concommitant body dysphoria and facial agnosia are far more likely to be relevant explanations. And I think connecting the dots between human and canine co-evolution is genius. It may or may not be correct, but it's better than this.
As far as I know, the only way neurological facts go into this figure is the relative size of the body parts. You could have made this figure based on a lemur model, walking on all fours, (or really any five-digited tetrapod) and it would be equally correct.
What wemp said about other cultures is a good point, but I think you really overestimate how much of this I find plausible. I think there are some leftovers from pre-bipedal bodies, and I make no claim whether this causes furries.
I find this interesting mostly in how this illustrates a way of thinking about trans-. The part where the theory is not total whack and you can believe it if you really want to contributes to the accurate immitation, just like the ultrapersonal grievances turned into a general theory of politics in the other posts, and the all around excellent mental health of the author.
There are aspects of it that scream bipedal hominid over all else.
Note the enormously disproportionate upper limbs. The absence of a tail. Bipedal hominids had their arms freed from the task of being just another means of propulsion, and hence could repurpose them for tool-use. This incentivized much finer grained control of muscles, as well as denser sensory innervation.
Furries, and the LCA between humans and lemurs, are notably fond of tails.
Fair enough, if you want to look at it that obliquely. You said it was a plausible theory in your top-level post, but if you think it's less likely to be true than not, then my only disagreement is that I think it is very unlikely to be true.
It may have relevance to the Trans Question, but only to the extent that is an attempted explanation for body dysmorphia, which I think is as unlikely to be true as the culturally-driven manifestation for trans body dysphoria as gender dysphoria represents an actual error in some well-defined gender pointer in the human brain.
If there were neurons dedicated to a non-existent tail, could we tell?
I mean, monkeys do already use their hands for holding objects to some extent, but what I had in mind is less about how much neurons you dedicate to body parts and more so the shape of those parts thats expected. Because in what sense could your body be "wrong" for a given neural emphasis? But I would say that hands are propably a part where the model is almost entirely human, because there it really matters to get them exactly right.
I said the part I quoted is somewhat plausible.
Im afraid my english isnt good enough for this grammar.
The cortical homunculus was visualized by electrostimulation of the precentral and postcentral gyri, while asking participants where the perceived sensation was localized.
If there was a chunk that mapped to a "tail", then you'd pick up a disproportionate amount of correspondence to the current sacrum. If it was to go as far as the blog in question conjectures, you might see reports of 'phantom tail'.
So yes, we could tell, and in the absence of such, it's just a tall tale about tails.
The blog claims that there must be an atavasism in human sensory-motor proprioception. The cortical homunculus is the best visualization we have of that, and in a sense is real, with a true 1:1 correspondence with our body (weighted by salience and richness of ennervation).
It does not show any such discrepancy. It can plausibly be similar in both humans and precursor primates, barring the glaring absence of a tail. I would also strongly expect more emphasis on the feet, especially in an arboreal animal like the LCA between humans and lemurs.
The author claims that furries have body dysmorphia that is an atavism of a previous ancestral form. Many trans people happen to be autistic, and claim that they have a sense of "wrongness" or body dysmorphia, which they interpret as gender dysphoria. They think that this sense of wrongness is a sign from their body telling them they're the wrong gender (inside) and seek to 'correct' this discrepancy by transitioning.
I believe both are incorrect. In the latter case, because autistic people have sensory processing issues, and modern culture prompts them to reinterpret that as gender dysphoria. Hence the over-representation of ASD in both furries and trans people.
Though as far as I know, the number of people who think being a furry is evidence of an atavistic proprioceptive system rounds down to 1.
I mean, you are the doctor, but its not clear to me that you would need to feel them anywhere. If you lose an arm and have a phantom limb, do you feel the sensations at the stump? And if there was a phantom tail, Im not sure the participants could easily recognise it as such. Do people get phantom limbs for limbs they never had and not the mirror image either, and if yes how do they report about the experience?
Im not sure its the best representation of what the post is talking about. E.g. expecting hunchbacks to have dysphoria - this homunculus doesnt have a determined back hunchedness. And Im not sure how, say, my hand could be that would contradict it, short of missing a finger.
That seems like a reasonable possibility.
Oh you can definitely feel something where it doesn't exist, or you could feel a body part is different than it should be. I've had some "leg" pain induced by a pinched nerve and the probem was at the spine but the feeling of pain was "general" and felt impossible to locate where exactly on the whole leg the pain was coming from. But the pain was serious enough and actually felt as the whole leg, it made me writhe for a few seconds when it decided to pulsate its ugly head. The only solution was pain killers for a while.
Try wearing a ring for an extended period of time then remove it and touch with another finger of the same hand where the ring used to be. It's a strange feeling.
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If you squint really hard, then you can connect some dots. Connecting to the spirit of animals is common across oceans and time. Among all sorts of different traditions, shamanism, and animists. Many pantheons contain anthropomorphic gods. The Japanese have kitsune. Greco-Roman, Norse, and Indian cultures all contain some amount of shapeshifting either in myths or the gods themselves. If the Chinese don't have anything I'd be surprised.
Man has sought meaning through his connection with animals or, at least, used his understanding of his relation to animals to express feeling, tell stories, and develop culture. Plus a million other things unrelated to a universal experience of desire-- in this case a desire to embody the soul of a super sexy fox.
I am also partial to the idea that this is
autismfurry apologia. I love its flavor, though.The counterpoint is that humans have closely observed animals for millennia and therefore have created stories, myths and practices around their observations of animals in nature.
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There were selkies, too.
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Wikipedia says that the prototype of kitsune originated in China, in fact, and spread to Japan, Korea, Vietnam from there. It's funny how basically every culture decided: never trust a fox. But they're sexy as hell. (Your language literally defines "foxy" as a synonym!)
Also vixen is both a term for a female fox and a sexually attractive woman.
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I dunno about proto-lemurs, but I think that homonculus has the most conclusive case of yaoi hands I've ever seen.
Look at this fine gentleman, who probably starred in an early-era Disney animated movie that has since been memory-holed and erased from polite conversation.
/images/17398192488222513.webp
Thank you for dragging me back to med school.
If British doctors must suffer from endless Continuing Medical Education, it's only fair our luckier brethren across the pond suffer with us.
Sir. On no day is neuroanatomy slide flashbacks on my dance card.
Easily the worst part of the entire run of medical education, I'll even take a surgical 36 over that shit.
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Another piece of the puzzle: humans and wolves domesticated each other so much that our neurologies meshed and matched. We humans expect snouted faces.
Being autistic means a statistically higher chance of being furry or faceblind or both. I theorize being faceblind to humans leaves the expectation of snouted faces intact, leading to a default mapping of lemurian preprioception onto canine heads and humanoid bodies.
Evidence: Many pieces of furry art of anthropomorphic felids are actually a dog with feline features. Having lived with a cat, they’re far more alien than all the dogs I ever had. Even My Little Ponies have evolved from cutesified dwarf horses to basically dogs with hooves. (The gallery at the top is what I’m referencing. For Generation 5, they deliberately reduced the horse-like haunches of G4 to dog proportions to reduce the “male gaze” appeal.)
Many animations of animal art basically apply dog animations and gesticulation to other animals (not just in a furry context).
This is especially annoying in animated movies where horses act and move like dogs.
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My god the gen 5 designs look awful, and they're even worse in the Steven universe Tumblr style they used for the 2d versions. The ride ending was a mercy.
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You might be onto something, but I think it's less about dogs specifically and more the issue of human faces. I'm a furry autist and while absolutely not face-blind, there's something about the human face that is just a tad off-putting to me. Not to say I'm disgusted by it or anything, but recognizing a face as "a guy" always makes whatever it's attached to look a little bit worse in my mind. Just a little. Even when a character is clearly human, I always like them more when they have their face obscured by a helmet or something. But having a dog head instead works too.
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Maybe Im autistic, but I dont see how this dog with feline features isnt just a cat, and if Im supposed to see some changing style with the ponies I dont either, other than the face between 2 and 3.
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Reference: I can't picture faces in my mind, but that's probably downstream of being unable to visualize anything. If I want to imagine what someone looks like I have to back-propagate from distinctive features and hope I get lucky, or simply trust that the inaccessible part of memory that holds face data remembers. Which, generally, it doesn't.
I don't expect humans to look like dogs or cats, because humans do not look like dogs or cats. Then again, I don't think most furries expect that either.
Humans kind of do have snouts, though. They tend to become more pronounced when they are distressed.
Compare G4, contrast G5. See that, compared to the anime girl examples, G4's faces are much closer to that pattern than any of the earlier generations- just like the above examples, the snout is "cheated" and forms the lower part of the eye in profile, making it look less pronounced than it should be. In 3/4ths, the 'nose' begins just above where the eyes end.
Furries, by contrast, tend to heavily accentuate the snout, which you'll notice is a [small] part of G5's changes; the switch to 3D doesn't help, partially because 3D can't be similarly cheated (so you get the snout as distinct from the eyes rather than blending seamlessly). It helps that since basically all the G4 cast is female (and the male character that gets the most screentime isn't a pony) they can get away with rounding the snouts; contrast the other side male ponies and their squared-off snouts.
G5 characters look quite a bit more childish than G4 characters do- by comparison, G5s have truncated lower faces- (note specifically the one on the left)- and are generally lankier than G4s were. That, combined with being less objectively cute/aesthetically pleasing than G4 (big heads, huge eyes, blended well) generates uncanny valley concerns that aren't present with G4.
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Can you provide a source for this? I would be surprised
Well, not "expect", but @DuplexFields might be onto something. Dogs and humans can read each other's facial expressions. A sad-looking dog is sad, a guilty-looking dog is remorseful, an angry-looking owner is angry, a scared-looking owner is scared. Dogs have bigger and more pronounced eyebrows than wild wolves to emote better to humans. A mixed human-canine face is perfectly legible and able to express the whole range of emotions in a way a different combo is not.
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Sorry, I mean we expect most nonhumans we meet to have some variation of a snout, and we generally believe we can understand their emotions by their facial expressions and eye gaze.
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Autistic males(which seem to be a… large contingent of furries) also seem to bond better with dogs than other people.
Dogs are predictable, cannot speak, and can't generally pose a martial threat.
Cats are like that too, but they aren't predictable; they're more advanced/internally mature than dogs but (partially as a consequence) are completely useless. Some autists make their peace with that, or accept that fickleness as the price of having an animal that doesn't beg to be let outside at 2 AM, but judging by the above e926 link dog-furry art is twice as popular as cat-furry art so they clearly aren't as highly regarded.
Humans are very unpredictable, speak, and are technically capable of killing you (either directly or by proxy) without warning roughly coincident with their having learned a language. They're much more complicated and interacting with them is extremely dangerous.
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