This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link