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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   29562 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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I'll bite that bullet - my opposition to gender transitioning prepubescent children does not hinge on science and I would not be convinced by studies that purported to show that it's actually very good for children. Many questions are good questions to apply the scientific method to and I don't think this is one of them.

Good news, with your attitude, you are not alone.

  • Jehova's Witnesses believe are opposed to blood transfusion for reasons which are orthogonal to the experimental method.
  • Many religions are opposed to most forms of sexuality and/or contraception without any evidence that it leads to bad outcomes.
  • Likewise, dietary restrictions.
  • Some people believe that various forms of genital mutilation are beneficial or required not as a matter of empirical evidence, but for inscrutable cultural reasons.

Of course, if you want to convince the grey tribe specifically, just stating that obviously blood is sacred or puberty blockers are evil or pigs should not be eaten is not going to convince anyone.

Edit: I wrote that taking "gender transitioning prepubescent children" as a straw man for puberty blockers, but on further reflection I think that I would even cover gender affirming surgery. Sure, I think that operating on the genitals of ten-year-olds is a terrible idea, but that is contingent on empirical observations about the state of medicine, and if our tech level was higher, I would be open to evidence that it is beneficial for kids to change their gender a few time, or that placing a brain in a robot body increases QALYs for that matter.

Let's borrow from Heidt for a second.

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.

[...]

Julie and Mark, who are sister and brother, are traveling together in France. They are both on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie is already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy it, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret between them, which makes them feel even closer to each other.

As designed, harm has not occurred in these situations. Do you feel like the people (who indeed are numerous) who feel something morally reprehensible has occurred in both are engaged in silly superstition, or are you willing to concede that morality has more dimensions than the singular concern for harm reduction?

This is a sidebar from a debate on the medical merits of the Dutch protocol, but the idea that you can't object to such things on metaphysical grounds seems silly to me given the arguments in favor of transgenderism as a theory of GD are also on the level of metaphysics.

Presumably a chicken bought in a supermarket is already very dead. The only ethical question this raises for me is the buying of a chicken corpse produced for human consumption -- which would probably depend on if it is free range or factory farmed.

Likewise, plenty of people have sex in circumstances where a resulting baby would have plenty of genetic, developmental, or social disadvantages. Drug addictions, chemotherapy (?), parental genetic disadvantage, parents not invested in a relationship, parents who were exposed to ionizing radiation and so on. This is fine as long as they use appropriate contraceptives and ideally have a firm commitment not to bring any fetus to term, but often people are very negligent over these things. Granted, the disadvantage of a baby born from a union of first-degree relatives would be much larger than that of a baby from a random drunken hookup, but Julie and Mark are extra responsible with birth control, so I don't see an issue.

Let us try two more scenarios:

A and B are two adult males of sound mind who have sex. They were tested for STI before, use condoms and are not in other sexual relationships with anyone.

C is a 30 year old woman who works as an elementary school teacher. One Saturday, she goes to a shopping mall. She is wearing a blouse which shows a bit of cleavage and a skirt which goes to her knees, as well as some makeup. The shoes she wears leave her ankles clearly visible to the public, and she makes no effort to cover her hair. She is not accompanied by a male relative.

To quote you:

As designed, harm has not occurred in these situations. Do you feel like the people (who indeed are numerous) who feel something morally reprehensible has occurred in both are engaged in silly superstition, or are you willing to concede that morality has more dimensions than the singular concern for harm reduction?

I think it is hard to argue that billions of people recognize some moral truth when they react with disgust to your examples while also claiming that the billions of people who react with disgust to my examples are just engaging in silly superstition.

This is a sidebar from a debate on the medical merits of the Dutch protocol, but the idea that you can't object to such things on metaphysical grounds seems silly to me given the arguments in favor of transgenderism as a theory of GD are also on the level of metaphysics.

I firmly believe that we should see gender interventions only through the lenses of patient autonomy (which we generally deny minors, rightly or wrongly) and outcomes.

If someone argues "woo, gender is just a social construct, so it is fine to raise your XX child as a boy", I would be just as opposed to that.

I think it is hard to argue that billions of people recognize some moral truth when they react with disgust to your examples while also claiming that the billions of people who react with disgust to my examples are just engaging in silly superstition.

I happen to recognize the legitimacy of Abrahamism as the moral doctrine of at least three distinct human civilizations, so I don't find any difficulty there, both sodomy and dressing provocatively are "sins" in those places for reasons that are both practical and internally consistent.

If anything it's precisely my criticism that modern Western Liberal morality has become incapable of characterizing the issue with such behaviors at all which makes mitigating them totally impossible. And heralds the return of more barbaric solutions down the line, which I resent.

I firmly believe that we should see gender interventions only through the lenses of patient autonomy

I want to say that my Hoppean heart has no quarrel with that in practice so long as I don't have to get involved, but that's not advancing the discussion at all, and I do think that a moral standard that is solely based on consent is blind.

Mental illness is a millstone for the Liberal ethic because it is fundamentally irrational, so it destroys the base assumption that allows consent to ground judgement. People don't always want what's good for them, let alone what's right for them.

And you must recognize this because that is indeed why we deny children autonomy. Why then not do it for the mentally ill?

I could understand being afraid of people using "sluggish schizophrenia" and the like against political opponents, but insofar as one recognizes that delusions are a thing, you need to confront the fact that consent is an ill suited tool to attack this moral issue. Otherwise you end up assenting to people hacking their limbs off on whims, which is not right.

I happen to recognize the legitimacy of Abrahamism as the moral doctrine of at least three distinct human civilizations, so I don't find any difficulty there, both sodomy and dressing provocatively are "sins" in those places for reasons that are both practical and internally consistent.

This sounds like moral relativism to me: dress according to your religious community standards (whether it is a burka or just non-provocative western clothing), follow your community's sexual norms (whether you have three wives or one, and how old they have to be when you marry them), follow your religious communities dietary restrictions (especially regarding pigs, cows, humans, shellfish) and so on.

And you must recognize this because that is indeed why we deny children autonomy. Why then not do it for the mentally ill?

[...] insofar as one recognizes that delusions are a thing, you need to confront the fact that consent is an ill suited tool to attack this moral issue.

The fact of the matter is that humans did not evolve to be perfectly rational agents. As the sequences teach us, we are all loaded with our own biases. We treat the median adult as sane not because they are a rational actor whose map matches the territory who try to maximize some utility function, but merely because all the systems which did not engage in the polite fiction that people are sane have had much worse outcomes as the people who would take paternalistic charge of mankind are not sane themselves.

That being said, while I might deny that there are sane people, I will concede that some are way more insane than others. A demented person starving while wandering through the woods is likely lacking the coherence that we can apply the fiction of sanity, and we should institutionalize or MAID them per their living will.

Young people have two handicaps: first, their map is often even less accurate than that of adults simply because they lack experience, and second they are probably even more impulsive. As a crutch, societies have decided to lock certain autonomy behind age limits. This is manifestly unjust -- a tenth percentile 20 yo is likely less sane than a 80th percentile 10 yo, and yet the former can vote, consent to sex, enlist in the military, take on debt, immigrate to Saudi Arabia and so on. But until we find something better, age is a Chesterton's fence we should keep.

Still, I think that recognizing that our system is somewhat arbitrary and unfair, we should try to respect the choices of those whom we deny autonomy whenever their choices seem sane.

  • An 8 yo who wants to wear a red t-shirt instead of a blue one should get their wish, all things being equal.
  • A 10 yo who wants to get a facial tattoo should be denied -- presumably, there is a broad consensus among adults that they would have regretted getting such a tattoo at that age.
  • A 14 yo who wants to enter a relationship with a sugar daddy should likewise be denied, as there is a broad consensus that this will be harmful to their development.
  • A 14 yo who wants to quit school and live in the woods should be denied, but if they want to quit school to start a trade apprenticeship that is a different matter.

As a moral toy model, give the minor a minority of votes over their life and distribute the rest to adult society. At a very young age, they have little voting power, and only get autonomy to do stuff which a majority of society supports. At age 18 (or 21 or whatever), they gain majority, and have 51% of the votes, which means that they can do whatever they want, no matter how ill advised. Morally if not legally, it would make sense to have a continuous increase of their voting power in between these two points. Perhaps at age 17, they have 40% of the votes, so they get to do whatever at least 1/6th of the adults considers age-appropriate. Just because we don't give them full autonomy, we should not disregard their opinion entirely.

Likewise, mentally ill adults. Generally, I am against involuntary commitment of anyone who has not run afoul of the law (otherwise, sentence them normally, then give them the option to serve their time in a ward instead) unless it is very likely that they will die on the outside within a year. Plenty of people locked up in psych wards object to being locked up for entirely rational reasons orthogonal to any mental illness they might have.

I could understand being afraid of people using "sluggish schizophrenia" and the like against political opponents

I think there was recently some MAGA legislation trying to make Trump Derangement Syndrome and official medical diagnosis.

The most intuitive explanation is that the feeling of disgust at the above scenarios is an evolutionarily useful heuristic against deviancy.

It's already known that most mental illnesses are varyingly comorbid, so it's not a stretch to conjecture that even benign sexual deviancy suggests more serious malfunction. Thus, the disgust response should be treated as an update torwards moral suspicion, but not full condemnation in of itself.

This is Heidt's opinion too as I recall.

But the point of the questions is to evidence the fact that some people are quite literally incapable of feeling that disgust response or connecting it to moral condemnation.

Then they end up writing books about the "authoritarian personality" thinking it can be eradicated as a mere cultural quirk, and always catastrophically fail because it's eugenic and human nature asserts the advantage.

Julie and Mark, who are sister and brother...

Replace this with "Julie and Mark went drunk driving. Nobody was hurt and they got home safely and sooner than they would have if they had to walk".

The fact that a dangerous activity sometimes works out doesn't make it a good idea. In order for this to prove what it's supposed to prove, the hypothetical would have to be "Julie and Mark committed incest, it all worked out, and they had good reason in advance to think it would work out". This hypothetical is impossible unless 1) it's a limited cultural practice that doesn't favor incest in general or 2) Julie and Mark are not human.

The point is precisely to show that care/harm doesn't take those two caveats into account.

Sufficiently sophisticated utilitarianism is indistinguishable from deontology. And vice versa.

Oh yay... another chance for me to share this gem of a paper.

Maybe it is the other way around – deontology is a veiled utilitarianism when precise evidence is hard to get or understand. :)

Which part of "and vice versa" was unclear?

"It is risky behavior that often, but not always, causes harm" is basically an objection about harm.

This is not so obvious with the incest example but it's very obvious about drunk driving. People don't have some independent moral aversion to drunk driving that is unrelated to the chance of harming someone. Harm need not happen 100% of the time for the objection to be properly characterized as harm-based.

Hey, look, you’ve rederived the categorical imperative.

As designed, harm has not occurred in these situations. Do you feel like the people (who indeed are numerous) who feel something morally reprehensible has occurred in both are engaged in silly superstition, or are you willing to concede that morality has more dimensions than the singular concern for harm reduction?

I always used to be confused why people considered this a gotcha or a particularly interesting question, cuz I thought it was obvious that there was absolutely no moral impropriety in either case, that only people who held on to silly superstitions would think otherwise, and I thought that this was basically the the position of most Democrats/liberals.

Now I understand that I was the weird/foolish one for actually believing people when they said that they were liberal.

It's still silly superstition, though.

Most humans are not WEIRD, you can call them what you like to cope with this reality, but that's not going to change because the Liberal ethic is unsustainable on its own.

Liberals used to understand this when they invented Liberalism.

Yes, those are also examples of positions that people hold that empirical evidence won't move them off of. Some of that may be because they don't think the evidence is compelling, but most of it is that these just aren't questions that are amenable to rigorous testing.

I think there are good non-empirical arguments for why transing children is a terrible idea (and people have made them in this thread) but I don't expect them to be compelling to strict utilitarians, particularly the utilitarians that are credulous about any institution that cloaks itself in the aesthetics of science. If my position depended on whether some shoddy, non-replicating study is consistent with it or not, I think that would be much thinner than reaching conclusions from considering the situation with the context of history and human nature.

My point was purely meta, I am absolutely fine with the argument "in the current political climate and given the replication crisis, it seems likely that the people who devote their lives to studying the outcome of gender interventions are more motivated by activism than by genuine scientific curiosity, and that a lot of them have already written the bottom line when the study starts. Then, they engage in cargo cult science to find the argument leading to their preferred conclusion. As the activists outnumber the scientists, they can use the mechanisms of peer review and grant-making to sideline authors with a lesser or opposite bias. Thus, all their studies are to considered unreliable and we should default to our priors regarding the benefits of gender interventions in minors."

I might have some disagreements with the argument (especially with its sibling being applied to climate science), but these would mostly boil down to object level questions about reality (including institutions) which are at least in principle fathomable by the scientific method.

It is the difference between Kelvin boldly stating:

I need scarcely say that the beginning and maintenance of life on earth is absolutely and infinitely beyond the range of sound speculation in dynamical science.

and a more modest:

Explaining life is currently very much beyond physics, and we lack a paradigm to even make progress on that question. It might be different in a hundred or a thousand years, or it might remain thus forever.

Good news, with your attitude, you are not alone.

Sure, because this includes most people. Pretty sure it even includes you (I dunno, would you teach your children to be transphobic if someone came up with some galaxy-brained study that it adds a few QALYs to their life?).

Of course, if you want to convince the grey tribe specifically, just stating that obviously blood is sacred or puberty blockers are evil.

Funnily enough, it's the pro trans side that fits better with the groups you mentioned. They have - by their own admission - no evidence that puberty blockers improve the outcomes for children / adolescents.

my opposition to gender transitioning prepubescent children does not hinge on science and I would not be convinced by studies that purported to show that it's actually very good for children

What is it based on?

Morality, presumably. Ought, not is.

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