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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   31950 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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This is paper, not steel. Puberty is not reversible in the same way that birth is not reversible, nor aging. These are normal, natural, and expected processes. This is what humans do, as much as trees grow to the light and fish swim upriver to spawn.

One day I'll stop running into the naturalistic fallacy in the wild and consider that my 10^28 years of existence leading up till that point worthwhile.

If someone said that 50% infant mortality was natural and not reversible, or the same for heart attacks being inevitably fatal.. They'd have been right for almost all of human history. Fortunately, we still have people alive who've witnessed this state of affairs, fortunate only in that we're not usually tempted to think this was somehow a superior state of affairs.

Pre-mature infants are far more likely to survive these days, thanks to modern incubators and resuscitate technologies doing at least some of the work a womb could or would. We've got proof of concept artificial wombs that have gestated mammalian embryos months for as long as 4 weeks without any physiological abnormalities:

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15112

With the improved incubator, five experimental animals with CA/JV cannulation (ranging in age from 120 to 125 days of gestation) were maintained on the system for 346.6±93.5 h, a marked improvement over the original design. Importantly, one animal was maintained on the circuit for 288 h (120–132 days of gestation) and was successfully weaned to spontaneous respiration, with long-term survival confirming that animals can be transitioned to normal postnatal life after prolonged extra-uterine support.

Give me a billion dollars and change, and I'll put any damn baby back into the womb and keep it there happily.

Give me a hundred billion, and I'll pocket one, and spend a few million delegating more competent people to the task of solving aging.

This is what humans do, as much as trees grow to the light and fish swim upriver to spawn.

As rabies proliferated through your peripheral nerves and is transported to your brain. As Onchocerca volvulus happily turns children blind.

Nature is not very nice. The congenial environment you find yourself in is very strongly the property of artificial efforts to keep it that way.

There is no such thing as nature, and there's no naturalistic fallacy. Just as traffic is other people, nature is just other life. The things that are not nice are other organisms trying to do the same thing as trees and fish and humans: successfully reproduce. Everything else has been ruthlessly culled by those willing to do so. This is not nature, it is life and death. It is the world as it is, not as it ought to be.

I think things that help me are good, and things which hurt me are bad. I apply that backward through time via my ancestors, and forward through time via my descendants, because I owe the former my existence and owe the latter my efforts to secure the same for them. I'm not bemoaning a roof when it rains, or heat in the winter, or light in the darkness.

Saying that hindering reproduction is the same as helping reproduction is your misunderstanding, not mine.

Since you claim that nature is a very ill defined concept (which I agree with), then what was the point of your previous comment? Why even point to something being natural?

Saying that hindering reproduction is the same as helping reproduction is your misunderstanding, not mine.

I invite you to show me where I can be said to have made this "misunderstanding". An earlier comment of mine explicitly said I don't want puberty blockers, and if my future kids did, I'd do everything I could to stop them.

The point is that in all the world, I haven't found much firmer ground to stand on than "be fruitful and multiply." It seems every living thing in the world follows such a rule, and so I think it's probably a good rule, and one I should apply to myself. It's not because it's natural, it's because that's how and why I am, instead of am not. I happen to like me, so I consider this a good thing.

All well and good, can't fault that.

Yet I must note that you accuse me of some kind of misunderstanding, and have yet to clarify what possibly could have made you say that.

You accused me of a fallacy, one which I don't think is particularly relevant or useful. Then, this:

Nature is not very nice. The congenial environment you find yourself in is very strongly the property of artificial efforts to keep it that way.

Artificial efforts are good where they do good, and bad where they do bad. They are good when helping, and bad when hindering. There are plenty of both. This is not a fallacy.

You're playing word games and being intentionally obtuse.

You initially argued against puberty blockers by contrasting them with "normal, natural, and expected processes" like puberty, framing the intervention itself as the problem partly because it disrupts something "natural."

When I pointed out that "natural" doesn't automatically mean "good" (the naturalistic fallacy, using examples like disease), you then pivoted quite sharply to say "There is no such thing as nature." You were rather quick to contradict your own starting point.

Then you accused me of a specific "misunderstanding," claiming I said "hindering reproduction is the same as helping reproduction." I said no such thing. My point was about interventions against harmful natural processes (like disease) being generally considered good, challenging your implicit framing that interfering with any natural process is inherently suspect because it's natural:

The problem is not just that it's not reversible, it's that it's an intervention to disrupt normal maturation, and also not reversible.

See that first bit I've bolded for you? That's the problem.

I asked you twice, directly, to clarify where you think I made that specific error. Both times, you avoided answering the question. First, you restated your personal philosophy ("be fruitful and multiply"), and second, you vaguely talked about good vs. bad artificial efforts without actually substantiating the accusation I challenged.

The error is citing a fallacy where none exists. There is no naturalistic fallacy, nor is there a problem any more than there is with Hippocrates.

Is owing something to people who are dead and to people who will live when you're long dead a thing that helps you or a thing that hurts you, and why?

Without my forebears, I would not be. If I leave no posterity, then what was the point of me? I am the continuation of a long line, and while various branches have broken and terminated, I see that as bad and not good.

Not all of us can be Caesar, but Caesar has no heirs. The history of aristocracy has a depressing number of great men who left no descendants. I also think this is a bad thing.

Not to mention that aging is to an extent evolutionarily advantageous because you're not supposed to perpetually compete with fresher, better genes.

There are animals, like jellyfish, that are biologically immortal in the sense they don't age.

You could argue that the first progenitor of life, whatever color of microbe that was, is still alive. During mitosis or meiosis, both the daughter cells have equal claim of being the original, if one insists on using that term.

Jellyfish have existed largely unchanged for half a billion years. If aging was always bad, I'd expect such exuberant youth would have been stamped out by now.

It seems to me far more likely that aging is a very difficult problem for evolution to solve in complicated, macroscopic organisms. Human females are one of the few (or only) animals that experience menopause, which is postulated to help them divert their resources towards their offspring's young instead of producing more. That seems like a consequence of blind evolution being unable to find a more optimal solution, and kludging together a fix.

Would it be fair to say that you view the word "healthy" to be meaningless outside of direct reference to atomic individualist personal preference? That is to say, the question of whether something is "healthy" begins and ends with their subjective opinion of their current state?

There is no health as such, and all attempts to define such a thing have failed miserably. Deciding what is health even for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your powers, your impulses, your mistakes and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more one allows the particular and incomparable to rear its head again, the more one unlearns the dogma of the 'equality of men', the more the concept of a normal health, along with those of a normal diet and normal course of an illness, must be abandoned by our medical men. Only then would it be timely to reflect on the health and illness of the soul and to locate the virtue peculiar to each man in its health - which of course could look in one person like the opposite of health in another. Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can do without illness, even for the development of our virtue; and whether especially our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge do not need the sick soul as much as the healthy; in brief, whether the will to health alone is not a prejudice, a cowardice and a piece of most refined barbarism and backwardness.

The Gay Science, Book Three, §120

No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.

-Socrates, or so I'm told.

Can these perspectives be reconciled?

There is no health as such, and all attempts to define such a thing have failed miserably.

Is there a good as such? Have not all attempts to define such a thing failed miserably?

...I think this argument relies for its persuasive power on either ignorance of or a peculiar axiomatic commitment to its evident results. I have in my life "enjoyed" variant and deviant forms of "health" at some length. Once upon a time, I did not care much about conventional notions of health, because I quite consciously did not particularly wish to live to advanced age. Now I contemplate that I am rather unlikely to live to hold my grandchildren, and rather likely to leave my wife a widow, despite all promises to the contrary, and I wish I had not been so foolish in my youth. I wish further that others had not been so cruel as to encourage my delusions.

Only then would it be timely to reflect on the health and illness of the soul and to locate the virtue peculiar to each man in its health - which of course could look in one person like the opposite of health in another.

Concrete examples would be really ideal here, and given the language, the higher-contrast, the better.

Can these perspectives be reconciled?

Sure.

Some men evidently accomplish a great deal without being "fit" in the physical sense. And that's perfectly fine for them. That is their "health". But we might still find it regrettable that there are opportunities they never explored, because in the general sense every choice involves forsaking other possibilities and there is always something regrettable in this despite its necessity.

One of the greatest lessons I took from Nietzsche is how to approach things with more nuance. Something can be good, and virtuous, and necessary, and regrettable. Something can be bad, and deleterious, and undesirable, and yet still necessary. You can mix and match.

Is there a good as such? Have not all attempts to define such a thing failed miserably?

There is such a thing as "the good", but it escapes any attempt to define it in terms of basic axioms or repeatable guidelines.

Once upon a time, I did not care much about conventional notions of health, because I quite consciously did not particularly wish to live to advanced age. Now I contemplate that I am rather unlikely to live to hold my grandchildren, and rather likely to leave my wife a widow, all promises to the contrary, and I wish I had not been so foolish in my youth.

You probably just made the wrong decision then. No one ever said that people couldn't just be wrong. There are innumerable healths, which means there are innumerable unhealths as well.

Concrete examples would be really ideal here

Concrete examples illustrating which part, exactly?

I think that when I use the word "healthy", it reliably constrains expectations. If I tell you my shirt is red, and then you examine it, you wouldn't be expecting it to emit or reflect only light that's 460nm in frequency, even if the term "red" leaves room for subjective interpretation where it bleeds into orange or pink.

It would be rather awkward if I had to append the WHO definition (Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity) every time I used that phrase. Even said definition is implicitly subjective.

So no, it's not meaningless beyond an individual observer. If I delivered a baby missing a head and handed it to a mother, I'd be rather aghast if anyone in the room called it a healthy child.

That is to say, the question of whether something is "healthy" begins and ends with their subjective opinion of their current state?

I couldn't really be a psychiatrist if I subscribed to that notion, could I?

Sadly human language is rather imprecise. It's still useful. I'm unable to define health in a way so rigorous I could program it into a computer in Lisp, but LLMs prove that that's not necessary.

I couldn't really be a psychiatrist if I subscribed to that notion, could I?

Consistancy is the hobgoblin of small minds, or so I'm informed.

I think "healthy at any size" is crap, and I say this as a member of the target audience. But in order to take that position, I'm implicitly making an objective claim that some states are healthier than others, regardless of what the people experiencing those states think. It doesn't seem to me that this sort of position is compatible with your critique of the naturalist fallacy above. The argument against obesity is that it's divergent from our natural state, from what we ought to be. But as you say, rabies, infant mortality, etc, etc, and it seems to follow that any downside to obesity could easily be framed as just a matter of insufficient technology.

I would argue that we should value the places where nature is consonant with our desires, and we should be skeptical of places where our desires require wholesale rejection of nature. To the extent that our desires potentially bring us into conflict with nature, I think we should favor the desires that are as concrete and general as possible, over the desires that are highly individual and unusual. I think doing so would allow us to pursue common ground for a supermajority of the population.

To the extent that values are sufficiently mutually incoherent that the rabies vaccine, reduced infant mortality, and prepubescent gender transition can't be distinguished, it seems to me that Dril rules are in effect.

It doesn't seem to me that this sort of position is compatible with your critique of the naturalist fallacy above. The argument against obesity is that it's divergent from our natural state, from what we ought to be. But as you say, rabies, infant mortality, etc, etc, and it seems to follow that any downside to obesity could easily be framed as just a matter of insufficient technology.

I don't follow. I'm not the one arguing that obesity is bad because it's not natural. I think it's bad because it makes you slower, weaker, ruins your QOL, makes you more likely to die early and less likely to find an attractive partner.

If there was a magic pill or surgery that let you be obese without any of the present downsides, that's a matter of aesthetics. It would be no different to dying your hair a weird color or getting a garish tattoo.

Being super fit and muscular isn't natural at all. Yet that's the revealed preference in terms of what people look for or aspire to, and they at least feel bad about not being there. The closest humans to a "state of nature", hunter gatherers, aren't super models or killing it on dating apps.

I would argue that we should value the places where nature is consonant with our desires, and we should be skeptical of places where our desires require wholesale rejection of nature. To the extent that our desires potentially bring us into conflict with nature, I think we should favor the desires that are as concrete and general as possible, over the desires that are highly individual and unusual. I think doing so would allow us to pursue common ground for a supermajority of the population.

Humans have been rejecting nature ever since they sharpened sticks and lit fires. It's worked out pretty well overall.

I think that questions of whether something is natural are often irrelevant to whether its good or desirable, noting that this unavoidable requires a subject to decide what counts as good or desirable. If that was you, then you might intrinsically think natural = better in many situations.

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