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My uncharitable mental model of it is that liberals ran out of ways to paint conservatives as bigots.
Its important to the liberal worldview that they're the tolerant ones, and conservatives are the intolerant ones.
For a long time this was not a problem, because conservative had fairly negative views around gays, and to a lesser but still real extent non-martial sex.
Liberals won around those topics, the standard issue conservative now knows they're supposed to be respectful toward gays, and for the most part, they publicly at least, largely are.
They can be a little freer about complaining about non-martial sex, but they're very little they can actually do.
Liberals can't declare victory and go home though, its a forever culture war, so they need to find something that conservatives aren't yet tolerant of, so trans issues it is.
I don't think that really follows. Liberals may have won the legal conflict and even shifted the Overton Window on homosexuality, but it's not like everyone suddenly agreed in 2015 that homosexuality was fine. Yeah, maybe homophobes have accepted that they can't scream "Fags go to hell" in public anymore, but that wasn't terribly common anyway and in the mean time that hasn't stopped them from pursuing anti-homosexual policy and rhetoric.
What anti-homosexual policy and rhetoric have you seen post-2015?
"Homosexuals are pedophiles" has flared up again, laws aimed at functionally excluding acknowledgment of homosexuality from public schools, polling indicating ~30% of the population thinks gay marriage should be illegal, anti-drag measures, personal experience as a member of a community where more conservative participants regularly have a conniption about homosexual participants not being in the closet.
I don't know why it would be expected that homophobes would pack it in after Obergefell v. Hodges or that all that sentiment would suddenly evaporate.
So like I thought, all of it are examples of recent backlash against transing kids, shoving sex stuff into schools, and treating weird pomo queer theories as fact.
That's not "in the mean time that hasn't stopped them from pursuing anti-homosexual policy and rhetoric", that's "after years of tolerance the progressive movement has pushed so far, it created a backlash".
How, exactly, is 30% of the population openly supporting a ban on gay marriage a recent backlash against trans kinds? And, again, why should we expect that all the homophobes stopped being homophobic after a supreme court case they were livid about?
What tolerance? You talk like there was some sort of settlement where homophobes agreed to tolerate gay people rather fighting it every step of the way.
Sorry, I couldn't check all the links in depth before I went, and was just checking the timestamps of the first few articles and noting they were all from the current or last year.
The poll you linked is literally showing more people than ever before are accepting of gay marriage, how the hell is that showing it "hasn't stopped them from pursuing anti-homosexual policy and rhetoric"?! The trend for intolerance is in steady decline.
As to the trans kids - the laws against drag, not pushing queer theory in schools, etc., are clearly correlated with recent push for transing kids and indoctrinating them into weird pomo theories.
Check your own poll? Do you see it getting better or worse?
That's the point.
The person I responded proposed that liberals had taken up the banner of trans rights because they'd run out of material to paint conservative as bigots with. I noted that this doesn't comport with material reality (and is comically uncharitable besides, though they at least noted that), as there are still a lot of politically motivated homophobes floating around in the GOP. If half your voters want to ban gay marriage and half your voters don't care about it, you are operationally an anti-gay marriage party. And that is being reductive, looking only at the dimension of gay marriage being legal and not the broader matter of social legitimacy (see: conservative efforts to push acknowledgment of homosexuality out of public schools under paper-thin veneers).
I see it getting better because homophobes are increasingly marginalized and disempowered. The "years of tolerance" were 7-8 years in which the homophobes did not evaporate and in fact continued to oppose gay rights.
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I have to admit- I just think everyone deserves support and I suspect the fight will keep going forever or until conservatives kill all the abnormal people or stop trying to bully people who want to surgically alter themselves into giant spiders out of existence.
It's not going to end because um... why should it end exactly? I have this feeling of an underlying premise that there is an amount of weird that is... too weird. And... I just... don't have that premise. If something has pragmatic issues that prevent it from being pragmatic for society to support it, my first thought is "what technological advancements will cause support of this to be viable" not "lets suppress it forever."
But some people seem to see "technical advancements have caused support for this to be viable" and go into moral panic mode. Why?
Why are some people unhappy seeing the boundaries of the human condition expand? Why does it make some people uncomfortable?
What is wrong with your brains? Or is it me? What's wrong with my brain? Something is clearly wrong with someone's brain here.
I'm not of the belief that support for abnormal people is the motivation for liberal promotion of transgender issues.
I'm of the belief that liberal's motivation is status competition with conservatives, transgendered people are just a prop liberals use towards that ends.
I'm also not of the belief that the promotion liberals engage in should count as support.
I'm largely of the belief that transgenderism is self-destruction, similar to cutting, or suicide attempts.
People who are attracted to it need empathetic treatment, not celebration.
In large part I'm quite unimpressed with the approach that most conservatives take, their approach is genuinely unhelpful. But I largely perceive them as flailing wildly at a response to a game that liberals largely initiated.
I think people living in multiculturalist cities are more likely to have weird friends who are actually observably enjoying their lives.
I think people living in other places are more likely to have weird friends living miserable lives.
Ok so- this isn't a competition but I'm curious, how many trans people do you know personally that love their lives and how many do you know personally that hate their lives, and do you live in a multicultural city or a small town?
because for me it's like- 50 to 5? And I met most of them in Berkeley, and 4 of the 5 are miserable because of lack of societal support, and the fifth is miserable because he's just miserable and lacks emotional control but still swears by his transition so- I suspect, we are living in vastly different filter bubbles, and this is responsible for our difference in views.
Your responses in this thread have been better than I deserve, thank you.
You've quite perceptively picked up that we likely have vastly different filter bubbles. You're correct that I don't live in a large city (exurb of a medium size city probably most accurately describes it). My brother, sister, sister in law and her husband all live in places that would meet any definition of large multicultural cities, and I talk and visit them all fairly regularly, so I don't think I'm totally oblivious to what at least some people's lives are like in large multicultural cities.
My exposure to trans people mostly come through 2 sources.
First, when my sister got married, her husband already had an 8 year old daughter. My new niece had a variety mental health problems, many of which she might have inherited from her biological mother who also had a variety of mental health problems. At one put she started cutting herself, there were multiple episodes where she threatened to kill herself. These episodes predate her announcing that she was transgender when she was 12.
Zhe is 15 now, and has decided that zhe is non-binary now, so I'll try to switch over to those pronouns the rest of the way.
What to make of this episode? Quite frankly, I'm hesitant to make it too much about trans people.
Not sure if you've read Scott Alexander's review of Crazy Like Us https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us
In the parlance of that review, zhe had a significant amount of psychic stress, it was going to find an outlet in some manner or another.
That said, I'm unimpressed with our culture that gender confusion has become the psychic stress release valve for people such as zer.
Fwiw, zhe growing up in a large multicultural city doesn't seem disconnected from this being the valve zer psychic stress went to. The large multicultural city zhe has grown up in has a political culture where identifying as trans changes how therapists and teacher treat you in relation to your parents.
Life is confusing and full of psychic distress, for all of us, we all want validation. If you give people validation for something, people desperate for validation will be attracted to it.
Second, while physically I might be a hobbit tucked away in the shire, I'm a citizen of the internet.
I realize this sounds ridiculous.
The internet is where we are all on our worst behavior, I know all sorts of seemingly normal irl people who seem nuts when they start outputting on a keyboard.
That said, in the sea of crazy that is norm of internet interactions.
It is a distinct impression that I have that the trans community interacts in a uniquely deranged manner.
I don't have any scientific cites for you, it's just an impression I have come to.
If you imagine a community as a giant bell curve, with their median members as the big middle, their most gracious members on one end of the spectrum, their least gracious members on the other end of the spectrum.
I hope we can agree, that while there might be some gracious Trump supporters online, as a giant bell curve, the fat part in the middle of their bell curve is at a different spot than Biden supporters online.
If we can imagine different communities like that, it's my impression that the trans community is distinct from nearly any other community.
Such that the assertion that your observable ratio of trans people enjoying their lives is 50-5 kind of blows my mind.
That said, that 'there are reports that the ratio of trans people enjoying their lives off the internet is 50-5', is probably a good update on my mental model of the universe.
Thank you, I appreciate your responses in this thread, they are a useful addition to my sense-making of the universe.
Thank you too.
Hmm. This is important. I don't know what to say about it yet... might be a long time before I do.
There are a few things I suppose... this is just rubber ducking that I'm showing you because... well you spent a lot of words on your comment and I feel you should see their results:
I don't know how big of an effect this is having, but I am certain it's significant.
If people becoming trans gets them a sort of validation they are not otherwise getting, then clearly we are doing something very wrong with regards to how we are allocating validation. This is a very concerning thought but also implies alternate solutions. Big if true.
It also implies that trans people being crazy is a symptom of them being filtered into the category by forces of validation. Which means shutting down these people's transition... well certainly people who think of it as mutilation will still see it as treating the most serious symptom, but the underlying cause would go untreated, and in fact be less treated... ideally you would treat the root cause and that would reduce unnecessary transition instead.
No. I don't think this sounds ridiculous. Real life experience is important. But the internet is also important.
I think the internet exaggerates the real world a lot- and does so in an unbalanced way. For instance, people without a life are more likely to be posting on the internet all the time... and... well, your model is that the trans community is attracting people who aren't getting enough validation, so that would be an example.
but it affects the world, the world affects it, so the patterns you see on the internet always mean something, even if you can't take them quite at face value.
And some people make their living through it, and we live a lot of our lives on it.
I think we should be worried about a lot more than just liberalism or the trans community when it comes to making the internet a more free and sane place.
But problems being caused by groups on the internet are still legitimate problems, and are worth discussing.
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How I'd describe the problem, and it's one underlying your beliefs and the beliefs of your critics, is a lack of truly considering the person. The people who criticize you consider too little, you consider too much. Your critics offer no support, why would they? What they dislike is inherently wrong, why would they consider it except to explain their reasons for disapproval? You offer too much support, why wouldn't you? You see the person, you listen to what they see they need. They live their life in their own way, almost all of them are good people, why shouldn't we support them realizing themselves? Where's the cost?
What's lacking in this discussion from reactionaries (a better term than conservatives) and progressive is the judgment of the good parent. The father who sees his child abusing a drug and finds it so obviously wrong it is only right to practice the "harsh love" of stern words and refusal to understand, let alone accommodate--he lacks good judgment. The mother who sees her child abusing a drug and enables them, it's what they say they need, it makes them happy, who's she to do anything else than show unconditional love and support? She also lacks good judgment.
You could read this as weighted against the mother, so feel free to frame it as a valid prescription used to treat a real condition. But it's a medication the child is abusing. Maybe they're getting too much and sharing with their friends, maybe they're encouraging their friends to get their own prescriptions by coaching them at faking the symptoms. Not that it's particularly hard. The American medical industry is the best in the world, the treatments developed and quality of highest care truly cannot be overstated; neither can be the depravity they are willing to indulge in pursuit of profit. There is decades of evidence proving this: they might not be the bad guys, but it is empiric falsehood to suggest they could be anything better than the neutral beneficiaries of the current climate.
This is something the father would gladly cite; this is something the mother overlooks. Neither love their child as they should.
"Harsh love" is an oxymoron. The person showing "harsh love" is either not showing love at all, what you probably think of the father I've described, or they are showing love, and it only comes across as harsh because it really is love. It's deeply and truly caring for someone, caring for what's best for them, looking for what's best for them, and knowing something they're doing might be bad for them or even disastrous. It's a concept that has been difficult to understand forever, it's what Kierkegaard wrote a book about, just trying to help people get it. It's the essential idea of what Eliezer Yudkowsky worked at with his "Coherent Extrapolated Volition." The ideal AGI is one that truly loves humanity, loves us as love is meant to be. Perceptive, understanding, upbuilding. Like the good parent.
I have a good friend who identifies as trans. This is a person who until the chrysalis exists will never pass. To use the most descriptive phrase but one they would certainly dislike, they are too much man. Too tall, too strong, too hirsute. They do have a certain androgyny in the face, insofar as so masculine a person could be in any way feminine, but it is of course the sort that accentuated their handsomeness and made them highly desirable to the biological women they have exclusively dated before and after "coming out" and beginning chemical therapy. They were told a lie by whoever first suggested they might be trans, that was a lie perpetuated to them as they fell deeper into those communities and as they specifically, and they said as much, looked for the right therapist in town: just a glorified prescription mill. That therapist wasn't doing their job, the people encouraging my friend weren't acting as friends should. They were lied to, they were told this is right. They were told this is how you support people. They don't know what's right, they don't know how to support people. They don't know what good is, they don't know what love is.
It isn't love to believe that a condition in the black box of the human brain, a condition novel within popular knowledge and largely in medical treatment, has already been cured. Humans are diverse, there are without question individuals who truly suffer from symptoms accurately described when called "gender dysphoria." Who when prescribed cross-sex hormones, who when pursuing major cosmetic surgeries to accentuate or minimize desired and undesired features, who change their names and their wardrobes and are treated as they identify, experience an abatement in those symptoms with minimal or no other psychiatric comorbidities.
There are in ever-increasing numbers individuals with serious mental illness who self-attest to gender dysphoria and are treated accordingly, as if that is the issue with them. Like my friend. My friend doesn't fall under what was once well-known in psychiatry as the "homosexual transsexual," my friend is not actually trans. Their mental illness has nothing to do with the gender dysphoria they believe they have, this is why they still struggle with it. I love my friend but not enough, I wish I loved them enough, to tell them this when they came out. To criticize what they believe they are, to appropriately indict their supposed "friends", myself now damn well included, who encouraged them or said nothing. I "supported" them and they aren't any better, and at this point I'm just hoping that when the dissonance becomes too great and finally shatters their years of rationalization, they don't commit suicide.
As you describe yourself, you would be encouraging of them. You'd be one of the ones telling a mountain of a man how the world is wrong, how the structures of man can be ignored, how we can assert the reality we wish. How he really can be a woman, we just have to force everyone to pretend hard enough. You're "supporting" his dream that for now cannot possibly be realized. And if he really does have gender dysphoria, if all his issues really are about how he was born in the wrong body, I still ask what love are you showing for the person who cannot pass when you encourage him to become something that people have a million years of evolutionary wiring conditioning them to find irreconcilably freakish?
You're not showing any. You think you are because you don't know better.
There is something we both believe. Eventually the chrysalis will exist and a man will be able to climb inside and emerge, at least superficially, as a seamless and beautiful woman. Where it'll take a DNA test or CT, if even that and surely eventually not, to be found as originally male. Where we diverge is this: you think this moment will be the great and final realization of the trans movement while I understand it will be what buries it forever.
I always caveat myself on this subject, "I don't care." You can see above how I obviously care some but I feel describing as apathetic is still closer to the truth because what side am I, exactly? I consider a lot of the discussion here on trans-advocacy as pointless, the matters settled. Short of a dark reactionary taking power, the movement isn't going away. Best learn to live with it because that's the future. But in the future, when pharmaceuticals have advanced enough to do wild things to the human body, where we can make ourselves look almost exactly as we like, we'll see the truth. We'll see so many people who believed all their problems would be solved if they could take a magic pill and wake up as an ideal form of their desired sex will do that and still have problems. It'll work for some, as experiencing the most drastic change in lifestyle possible means even those with a variety of mental issues may find their strange new reality a cure-all, but you'll see so many stories about people who discovered how fulfilling everything they thought they wanted didn't solve the problems inside their head.
It'll be sooner than that. With the rates of kids having delayed puberty and altered puberty for identified gender, combined with advances in cosmetic surgery, novel tissue generation and implantation, the various tech being explored right now to change how voices sound, we're approaching a point where there are going to be many people who pass seamlessly enough as the sex they thought they were. Probably not 5 years, 10, 15 at the most, and those stories will come pouring out.
"It's not what was wrong with me. I wish the people who pushed me into it, or who helped me along, thinking they were loving me, thinking they were supporting me, knew better."
Love is making it hard but not impossible for people to follow this life path. Love is not cruel dismissal and hatred. Love is accepting some people really are this way and and supporting them. Love is also understanding how we do not know how the brain works and so we will not indulge the I-cannot-modify-enough, the astonishingly unparalleled, sheer fucking hubris of unquestioningly believing the cure has already been found. Love is exhausting every option before extreme body modification becomes the chosen path. Love is putting every physician and therapist who treats this and absolutely the pharma that makes money from this under the largest lens to ensure they aren't abusing and unrighteously profiting from their position. Love is helping those who cannot possibly realize their desired appearance to learn to live with and love themselves, at least until the tech is there. Love is knowing "This is who I am" is not a magic phrase, it's knowing people get things wrong, especially when it comes to themselves. Love isn't blindly supporting what a person thinks is best for themselves, it's knowing and standing firm on what's actually best for them. Love is the good parent.
Would you see this as a preferred outcome?
You have to be the change you want to see.
the preferred outcome is whatever allows the tech i describe to develop uninterrupted. that tech is connected with advancing human simulacra, and simulacra will probably be the key to keeping humanity from destroying itself long enough for us to develop the further necessary tech to pass through the great filter.
This is a fascinating thought, would love to hear a fuller explanation in another post.
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I don't have much to say to this because I agree with too much of it.
Bury is a strange word to use but yes. There will be no movement after that. There will just be people whose problems were solved by the chrysalis and people who learned that they had a different problem that the chrysalis failed to solve. When transformation is trivial it becomes the diagnosis.
But I also agree that transformation is not trivial today. It is a process with costs. You say I consider the person too much. But what you describe is a scenario where I consider what they say, but still fail to see them. Until the chrysalis is a trivial procedure... I agree. The person needs to be understood in full. But this is not easy. For someone to be seen they have to be known and loved. And the person who sees them needs to have insight that exceeds that of what even they know of themselves. Or able to guide them through unraveling and exploring their own motivations and experiences.
We need more passive mentors with more time and more insight than what many parents are de facto able to provide.
I am compelled again to stop posting and continue working on my assistant. We don't need AGI for this. AI should suffice.
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"Support" is doing a lot of lifting here. Should we not execute people who want to turn themselves into spiders? sure. Should we let them eat children because that's what spiders of their size would do? absolutely not. And I think a lot of people reasonable draw the line at "Anything that is going to impose a neg negative cost on society"
What do you mean by a net negative cost on society?
Eating children sure. But that's a toy example. Where is the edge?
What happens when people are just afraid of spiders?
At some point, society isn't compatible with things- not because there's anything wrong with those things in and of themselves, but because society is being inflexible in ways it could change.
I think in cases like these, it's still reasonable... realistic... rational... perhaps even economically optimal in the short term to be antispider.
But it's braver to recognize that you're the one causing their existence to be a negative and try to change.
There are some cost inherent to accommodating extremely strange expressed desires. "normal" existing at all as a concept has some strong net positive effect because people who might think turning themself into a spider will make them happier are often just wrong. Normalizing such a thing makes it more likely marginal people might try. If we're going to start saying we should be concerned with the wellbeing of others to the degree we're trading off on our own preferences then we ought to actually also consider the second and third order effects.
We are talking about a world where you can turn into a giant spider right?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're biologically immortal.
So strong disagreement. Exploration is far more important to an immortal society than exploitation. You have forever to figure out what you like most. So you SHOULD try out being a giant spider. Trying out everything should be normalized.
The metaphor is becoming unwieldy and much hinges on precisely what is meant by turning yourself into a spider. If it's not just cosmetics then it isn't clear to me a human consciousness can run on enlarged spider architecture. If it can't then there are many reason one might not want to try out being a giant spider as it is likely to be a one way trip. And if it can, and we're able then it seems certain we'd be technologically advanced enough for you to run your exploration in virtual worlds and need not burden normal society with any downside of your experimentation. If you see any difference between doing this exploration in total isolation vs doing it when others need to validate it then you've found the objection. People do not want to be coerced into validating everything for many reasons such as doing so reduces the value of their validation to zero.
Hmm, well this is interesting. Firstly, I do think my metaphysical positions on identity are part of why it's so easy for me to have my positions around this. I think of identity as very modular and ultimately rooted in teleology and memory. That is, if your memories and goals haven't been irreversibly destroyed, you aren't really dead. I'm fairly certain we're at a tech level where Americans are effectively immortal already. Memes are the DNA of the soul- that is not dead which can eternal lie- the internet is a phylactery.
As for running your exploration in a simulation- Yeah I think we're already sort of there and the technology is getting better and better. VR does need to be more embodied to be "complete" which may not be viable for centuries, but... you can already make a spider-sim preeety easily with current tech. It just takes a few weeks of gamedev. And you can also show up as a spider in all video calls. I definitely think people should start out with that before going full spider.
That is reasonable. I actually want my validation to mean things too. And in the short term some of it is also necessary. We need some form of, preferably non-coercive, information transfer that keeps systems actually working. People need to make the food. Money is a form of validation with respect to economic production (insofar as the economic system is doing its job). Long-term- I don't want to force people to validate things. But I also don't want to force people to need validation. I want things to be more consensual than that.
If people want to have the value of their validation be non-zero in my utopia, they can, but they have to find the people who care about their opinions on principle or out of respect.
Of course, personally, I'm going to want to join up with a group that is really into morphological exploration and reward one another with validation for doing stuff like making spider bodies. But it's fine if other people never interact with my community and want to be in places with different validation norms. I... don't have strong opinions on how early people should get exit rights and information about other societies. But if we really are immortal I'm willing to be patient. In the year 10,000 I expect I'd give the neo-Amish a full human lifespan if they wanted before tempting them with the posthuman afterlife.
But if what people really want is... the value of their validation to be inherently non-zero due to non-consensual forces? Like- "You have to keep working for me because you need food" or "you have to do what we say because we have a monopoly on your shelter." and... they're in this system without exit rights or it being opt in? I'm not a fan of that. Short-term- some of it is necessary but we should occasionally be double checking and asking if it's really necessary. Long-term I want enough individual capability and post scarcity that I can print my own food, shelter, and printers from free environmental resources.
I'm not sure to what degree people agree with me there and to what degree people just really value having non-consensual influence over others. I hear things about the stereotypical middle manager that give me concerns about the central goals of some humans.
This is itself a very idiosyncratic definition of "immortal" and I really don't think it's bringing more understanding to justify how unusual it is. When I say immortal I mean life without end, or at least without end outside of my control. Under your deifnition simply being alive and doing anything makes one immortal due to chaos theory.
I pretty heavily disagree that were anywhere near simulating what it's like to be a spider. Perhaps you mean human made to resemble a spider?
This might get right down to the core. It's my firm belief that there is more to the core of being something like a spider, Ior a woman for that matter, than mere resemblance. When a male wants to be a woman he's doing that wanting with the brain of a male, to change to a female includes changing the male brain into a female brain which itself destroys the identity. It's difficult to put into words how impossible this all is. There are things that you, as a coherent identity, simply cannot experience. There are walls that even with the most fantastic technology cannot be breached. A real, actually transformation of a human into a giant spider is fundamentally just killing a human and reconstituting the mass into a spider. It would in no real way be you.
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This sounds close enough to an argument for forcing everyone into virtual reality so that they don't bother society with any abnormalities.
Everyone? No. Pedophiles? Sure. Surely you recognize there are matters of degree between abnormal and being turned into a giant spider. I get the impression that many people like this think they're main characters in an anime and are looking to conscript a supporting cast from the general population. I'm only saying what should be obvious, they are not entitled to the affirmation and support of others. We cannot all be main characters with a supporting cast, it doesn't work. If your exploration requires the support of the rest of us then it should at least be pro-social itself and I don't see a giant spider as anything in that direction.
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Part of it isn't even moral, it's frustration that the majority of Team Progress is nowhere near as forthright as you are, and are swearing up and down that the giant spider thing is never going to happen.
As to the rest, it's a bit hard to explain when our moral worldviews are so different, but in a nutshell your approach to life would render it pointless to us, and it's equally weird to me that you can't grok at all where we're coming from. When you see people hiking up a mountain, do you also think "those fucking morons could have taken the cable car!"?
No. I think enjoying the hike is neat. I also think enjoying the cable car is neat. I also think enjoying the experience of being a fly and laying eggs in a carcass would be neat.
If the concern is that your way of life will be eradicated, that's understandable, but if your concern is that your children might not choose the same way of life as you if given the choice...
Well... I guess... I sortof get that? It's just... It feels like the empire of Mankind in 40k. Treating everything that isn't human like a resource or an enemy or an infection. Being proud to be human isn't bad but- does that have to mean you have to prevent others from choosing to be a fly? Do some people just find... such an inherent lack of meaning in anything else to the point of wanting to treat it like atoms that could be used to make more humans? Like all humans are just bodies for holding their culture? Or like their children are just bodies for holding their culture? Are some people really just humanclippers? christianclippers?
I can understand the premise. I have a primal, echoing understanding of the premise. I just don't want to assume something so totalizing. I don't think most conservatives feel like that. It's just... a primal terror. The thought that most people might actually be such totalizing existences that they would leave the cosmos just as empty as it is today. Merely tiled with the same thing over and over.
What do you value?
Diversity and exploration. Curiosity bordering on aspirations of omniscience.
Ease of dancing through state-space. Mapping qualiaspace. Intimacy with the Other.
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Does pedophilia get the benefits of this expansion? What if you get the kids to consent to it?
Do you think encouraging children to engage in recreational use of heroin or methamphetamines is a good idea? If not, why not? Wouldn't this just be allowing them the freedom to make their own decisions about their own brain chemistry?
Like, I understand that dropping the pedo card is generally considered bad form. But you're the one saying letting people do what they want expands without limit. I don't think you actually mean that, because there are some very obvious limits I don't think you will, now at least, actually endorse! But you are emphatically saying those limits don't exist, so it seems necessary to point them out explicity.
So which is it? Do you actually recognize that some decisions, even personal decisions, should be restricted, or are you committed to "anything goes"?
The conservative position is that people are not, in fact, infinitely malleable, and pretending they are, or allowing them to pretend they are, can have serious consequences both for those people and for society as a whole. We can point to a long serious of fairly heinous consequences over the course of history to back this idea up.
[EDIT] - Would it be fair to say that you see gratification of one's desires as a terminal good? Would it also be fair to say that, excepting desires that clearly harm another, you don't believe there's such a thing as a bad desire?
I think there are better conservative positions, like- "we're not ready for this- yet. And won't be in our lifetimes so give up on it."
The conservative position that humans are not infinitely malleable is... either intended in the context of our lifetimes or just ridiculously shortsighted. We evolved from single celled organisms and we'll do it again.
Social progress is the ongoing process of distilling the baby out of the bathwater. Separating good from evil, and adopting the good while negating and subverting the evil.
I'm not saying everything should be permitted now. Far from it.
"Which technological advancements will make pedophilia viable?"
Well. Better systems to make sure they never fuck actual children.
Deepfaking technology.
Android technology.
Viability timeline estimation - 100 years
Will they ever be allowed to fuck actual children?
"Which technological advancements will make adults having intercourse with children viable?"
Very difficult to say. The costs are too high to explore...
the costs... are too high... to explore...
Absurdly predictive theory of child development and trauma formation.
Much better trauma treatment in cases where things go wrong, to the point that there are no known cases of even illegal violent rape that leave residual trauma after a week.
Enough supervision that every instance can be monitored even as it becomes socially normalized.
Viability timeline estimation - 1000 years or post singularity equivalent.
...
Will there even be human children in 1000 years or will pedophilia just mean intercourse with day old AI forks? Is sexting a fresh LLM instance pedophilia? Nah. Nah the concept just falls apart at that point. It's like asking ChatGPT whether its a man or a woman.
[EDIT] regarding your edit.
I think desires can be conditionally bad, but not innately bad. But this is usually a moot point. We live in conditions after all.
Having a strong, debilitating desire to be a squid as a 16th century peasant is not very useful, and you should work towards mitigating that until it is not debilitating and accept that you are probably going to be a human your whole life. Though- it would be fine to also accept that you still have the desire, if you can channel it to something tangible. Maybe that peasant becomes a famous squid painter. Maybe he just makes his family just a little richer through hard work so that maybe his children can follow their dreams one day.
It would be more accurate to say- my desire is to see humanity moving with the intention of shifting conditions so that more and more desires are supported, and fewer and fewer desires are bad.
It's less about the gratification of desires and more about them not being frustrated as they unspool into acts of creation that give birth to intense and unique existences and experiences.
There is a sort of desire that becomes a religion. A driving need. A purpose. I don't know how many people have even experienced what I'm talking about. It's difficult to describe because thinking about it is placing me in an intense state of... blissful thirst for new sensations. I need to go.
What evidence can you offer that you in particular or Social Progressivism generally has any fixed definition of "good" or "evil", "baby" or "bathwater"? If, as seems obvious to me, you have no such fixed definition, what do these statements even mean?
Why not? How do we adjudicate which changes can be permitted now and which later?
You're reducing the problem to one of logistics. But of course, previous iterations of Social Progress, including the Trans issue that prompts this discussion, have demanded changes to values and social systems now, with logistical solutions promised in the indefinite future. Why should I believe that Social Progress will confine itself to thoroughly tested and engineered solutions when it has never done so before?
And this ignores the question of whether it really is just a question of logistics. What if they really, really want to fuck kids, for real, and are not satisfied with your simulacra? In that eventuality, on what basis do you deny their deeply-held, arguably-innate desires? What if they promise to only fuck the kids they clone and grow themselves?
How do you even know their desires are wrong? On what basis? Because "studies show"?
Based on what, your opinion? People like me tell you that [$thing] has a cost too high to explore, and you laugh us off and explore the fuck out of it anyway, and then expect your own pronouncements to be treated as holy writ? Progressives disagreed with your opinion in the past, and actively encouraged and enabled pedophilia through the power of the state, because they knew better and "studies showed". Do you have some radical new insight that they somehow missed the last go-round?
...Rather than go point by point, let me try to draw this together: you talk as though there is an obvious good and evil, an obvious moral standard of correctness. You reject my claim to possess such a standard out of hand, and then you presume that your preferred standard is simply, obviously correct and needs no further justification. You do this in apparent blissful ignorance of the heaps of skulls previously generated by exactly the attitude you're currently displaying.
You frame the concepts of drift-of-form and drift-of-values in the most anodyne ways possible, ignoring all the obvious, glaring pitfalls, as though it's all about body-shape and inside we're of course all be true-blue (Berkeley progressive circa 2023) Americans. What if I decide I don't like having a conscience? What if I want to bake hatred of [$group] into myself on a genetic level, so I can pass it on to my kids? What if I want to self-modify to reverse my empathy so that observed injustice gives me orgasmic pleasure? What if the giant spider morph wants to eat children? What if trans surgery doesn't actually help and is actually mutilation? What if marketing heroin to kids is super-profitable and highly effective? What if the definition of human shifts, and some former persons don't make the cut (60 million abortions and counting, government-sponsored ads for Euthanasia as a cost-cutting measure)? What if it turns out some sector of the population is, like, really harshing your vibe, man?
What if, in short, the line between good and evil really does run through every human heart, and solving hatred and malice and greed and the urge to predation is not just a matter of engineering everybody into a sim-pod?
...And of course, all this is done, ignoring the fact that right now we don't have the tech, and you're arguing in favor of the people who push the "start" button anyway.
And the idea that these mostly-fictional or literally unimaginable desires might be frustrated weighs on your moral thinking, such that you're willing to assist in the radical, arguably-coercive restructuring of a society built and largely peopled by individuals who have no idea what the fuck you're on about, but are not interested in what you're selling? Like, Progressives collectively make this pitch, I and people like me say, "fuck no", and you try to push us into the hopper anyway? That about the size of it?
Have you considered that maybe you just have a fetish for novelty?
Arguably coercive? My friend. We live in a society. It's always been coercive. You see progressives say that they want more diverse sets of people to be permitted to exist, and conservatives say they want to be allowed to force people to all fit a certain mold, and you call the former coercive?
Very well. It may well be. We live in a society until the day we are all so powerful that we no longer need to and can live in deep intergalactic space off the skin of our hydrogen collectors. But don't tell me the society crafted by our forefathers isn't just as coercive if not moreso.
Holy writ? No not by everyone. I expect combat. I expect culture war. I would prefer a peaceful unfolding. But I am here to change the world. Not to coddle it.
I don't expect- I think our world is built up from the tragedies of the violent birth of our species into a hostile world. Our precedents are the sacrifices we have made to keep ourselves alive. And even thinking about it costs energy. Costs scarce resources. Time spent arguing over whether it is time to remove Chesterton's fence is time not spent growing food. The legal system costs millions of dollars and the time of our best and brightest just to print and execute precedent at a grueling rate. I get that it's not cheap. I get that it has value that we have paid dearly for.
But- this is probably because I am an American born in the Live Free or Die state. But I expect people to not terminally value fences- to merely instrumentally value them. Even though I do understand- you can terminally value just about anything.
What I want... I want people to have... reasons beyond inertia or precedent for why things are bad. I want people to actually be interested in understanding why Chesterton's fence is there, and remain aware of when it can, or should be torn down. They don't have to be objectively correct. I don't expect all humans to have the same understanding of good and evil or the same predictions of the consequences of actions. I just want everyone to remain aware and humor the idea that there is a point at which we outgrow the fences we have erected for our safety. I want people to imagine when tearing it down would be viable, so that they can give one another firm expectations of what they have to build if they really need it torn down. If the suppression of trans people and enforcement of gender norms hadn't been so coercive, if conservatives could have made some compromises and set firm expectations for what trans people have to do before they're allowed to remove that fence-
If we had been cooperating on this from the start with clear expectations then this culture war never would have happened.
Of course this is a fantasy. Our history didn't build us up as people who could have cooperated like that.
Skulls? I have seen millennia of skulls. Skulls of the strange and the outliers. Skulls of the weird slaughtered in the name of conformity to make sure food could be grown. Are we simply looking at different skull piles here? I get that sometimes, when the weird grow in power, walking off the beaten path, the food stops getting made, and the skulls become myriad. I am told "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". And I agree, but I also contend- "Do not let the good be the enemy of the better."
Morality? Everyone has one. Get yours now. 50% off. If you don't like having a conscience get rid of it. Don't worry. I won't get rid of mine. If you hurt someone I'll just kill you. If you can erase your conscience without doing that- or want to die- go for it. That's not a threat. It's more... this all just seems so simple to me. We are all here. Just don't let go of the parts you want to keep and they'll stick around. Yes. It doesn't escape me that conservatives are doing the same thing- to a degree. I can appreciate that trans people may have pushed too deeply too quickly for systems to adapt. I can appreciate that where exactly I draw the line is somewhat arbitrary, that some people might not want to let go of the gender binary for reasons more terminal in addition to the pragmatic. But my concern is more the lack of interest some people have in letting the systems ever change to support more types of people. Some people don't seem to be looking for how the world can become better, they are only looking at how the world can become worse.
I have a fetish for novelty. Definitely. Novelty and intensity. Glory, expression, fire, intensity, fearlessness.
Ah, yes. perhaps I do expect other humans to at least taste a hint of why those things are good. Even if they weigh them against other values.
I think conservatives have a fetish for safety. I think many of them have very reasonable takes around safety and sustainability. But I think some of them have a fear-driven blindness to almost everything else that makes the universe wonderful. I think conservatives, as the leaders on caring about safety and sustainability- should have been the ones thinking about global warming. Not necessarily cutting emissions earlier- there were real economic tradeoffs there that merited consideration. But actually recognizing and thinking about the problem. But instead it was fully denied because of the implication that we might have to change the way we live our lives over it. Something has gone horribly wrong- when precedent is the thing blinding us to the safety it was built for. When safety is the thing stopping us from living the lives it was built to preserve.
You:
Also You:
You say you want to tear down restrictions without end. I point out that some of those restrictions are load-bearing, that they're there for very good reasons. You say it's fine, because you're only going to tear down unnecessary restrictions, and of course are totally fine with coercive punishment of bad behavior in all the usual ways, so long as you get to be in charge of judging which restrictions are unnecessary, and which behaviors are bad and deserve suppression through force. You offer zero grounding for those judgements other than your personal aesthetic preferences. You indicate that your judgements are entirely relative and change over time, such that the arguments you make and accept now will not be the arguments you make and accept next month or next year, so any agreement we arrive at is simply a temporary respite between aggressive renegotiations. You appear to be incapable of good-faith agreement, of reaching a solution and then sticking with it long-term. Your positions cannot be reliably predicted in advance, even by yourself, because they do not derive from an axiomatic structure, but rather a meta-structure where the only constant is change.
Those skulls were produced as an apparently-irreducible byproduct of stable, prosperous civilization. The skulls people like you produce come in much larger volumes on much shorter time-scales, and the byproduct they produce is failed states and large-scale immiseration. People arguing that we should ditch the old structures and just figure it out through reason and the scientific method killed somewhere between 100 and 200 million humans in a mere century, and ruined the lives of many hundreds of millions more. They created what was arguably the greatest concentration of misery and injustice the world has ever seen, based explicitly on the logic that you are preaching.
We have reasons beyond inertia and precedent for why we think things are bad. Do you have reasons beyond aesthetic reaction? If so, you have failed to describe them.
...Then we'd be right back here regardless, with you arguing that we did it wrong and the fence has to come down anyway, because your only standard for when the fence comes down is whether you can imagine a different solution working better. Between cold fact and your imagination, imagination will always win, and so you will always vote to gut what we've built to chase your dreams of a brighter world, and to hell with the consequences.
It sounds like you think it's impossible to know that a change will improve things, that it will inevitably kill tons of people, and we shouldn't try. But you seem to be talking about communism and the French revolution and so on. I'm willing to build things up via incrementalism rather than revolution. I'm not willing to stop moving altogether. I am certain that there are restrictions that most people think of as unthinkable to remove, that will prove worthless and die after the thousandth cut to their necessity. But that certainty is just a prediction. Whether I'm right or wrong will be obvious enough when the time comes. If I go crazy and pretend it's obvious when the opposite is true. Stop me. Sorry for the hassle in that timeline. I aim to avoid it.
I'm not here to tear down the wall per se. I'm here to tear down the thing it's keeping out, then share the good news once that's done. And expect that- at that point someone else will tear the wall down for me.
And the thing I keep saying that I want- for people to focus more on what the wall is keeping out than the wall itself, is a good idea anyway. You have to maintain the walls as they rot. And in order to maintain them you have to know what they were for. You have to know whether it's actually true when someone like me says the thing on the other side is dead. You can't just coast on your ancestors cached outputs and assume they will be applicable forever, because even if you wanted to, you can't make the world stand still enough.
Besides, those piles of skulls were made by people who didn't know what the fence was for weren't they? It seems that at some point or another, the people who don't know why the fence is there overdo things in one direction or the other. And we start seeing revolutions and skullpiles.
It depends on what you mean by "improve"; I think moral progress, in the sense most people understand it, is impossible. We can certainly make ourselves richer and more comfortable though. Being richer and more comfortable is not morally better, but if we can do it without compromising our moral values, why not do so?
On the other hand, I think stable, peaceful, prosperous society is not the normal state of humans, and is actually a fairly rare and highly valuable thing. I don't think it happens by accident. I think it's easier to destroy than most people appreciate. If damaged or destroyed, I think it's much harder to reconstruct than people commonly appreciate. I think we should be very, very careful about monkeying with the social systems that serve as its foundation.
Incrementalism is great when you have stable values and axioms, and use incremental adjustments of policy in an attempt to reconcile what is with what ought to be.
You are incrementally modifying the values and axioms themselves. You don't seem to have a fixed understanding of what ought to be. Scott once wrote a parable about "Murder Gandhi" that talks about why this poses a problem for optimization, but the short version is that your opinion of what ought to be is derived from how things are, so if we agree to your proposed changes, you'll just change your proposals and demand further changes. You've declared that you can't possibly be satisfied, so there's no point in attempting to satisfy you. There's no concrete objective you're actually aiming for, and so for those of us that do have such an objective, our best play is to exclude you from the process because you are indistinguishable from a defect-bot.
On a deeper level, you seem to be arguing that most moral states are good, and we should explore as many of them as possible. It seems obvious to me that most moral states are bad; injustice comes in infinite variety, but justice is boring and regular and repetative, one of those stolid, archaic fences you complain about. Notably, justice loses all coherence if the principles behind it are not stable over time. If we do eye for an eye today when you poked my eye out, and then we do mandatory forgiveness tomorrow when I poke your eye out, that isn't a system of justice that anyone is actually going to accept. Your obsession with change destroys the entire foundation of cooperation between individuals; by constantly changing the rules, you remove any incentive to consent to the game.
Why not? Why should murder and rape and thieving not stay illegal and immoral four thousand years in the future, as they were four thousand years in the past? What is gained by changing our principles on them?
Then it should be trivial to point to basic restrictions that have previously been successfully removed. Certainly there is no shortage of historical examples of such attempted abolitions: take the various attempts at abolishing the family, for instance, or the attempts to stamp out religion, or attempts to radically reshape definitions of justice, or property, or economic principles, or sexual/relationship norms. Which attempts to undercut old systems stand out to you as successes worthy of imitation?
Of course, since you have no fixed position, you are immune to contrary evidence. If your proposed changes result in disaster, well, that would just mean we need to change things even more, wouldn't it?
I complain that someone stole my wallet. Friend A says he saw that guy over there pickpocket me, and look, there he is looking through my wallet, we should go over and take my wallet back and maybe kick his ass. Friend B says that the real problem here is that we live in a society where money is needed to satisfy our material needs, and we should all come together to coordinate a general solution to the problem of scarcity and want.
It seems to me that you are claiming that Friend A is "focused on the wall", while friend B is "focused on the thing the wall is supposed to keep out". I call it "dealing with the actual problem", as opposed to "ignoring the actual problem by focusing on pointless speculative abstractions".
Points for nominative determinism, though.
A task made easier if we restrain people like yourself who are actively trying to rot them.
Suppose I told you that you can't just coast on your ancestors' cached outputs and assume they will be applicable forever, which is why you need to respond to my endless arguments about why 2+2 actually equals 5, and that even if you wanted to, you can't make the world stand still enough. Get with the times, man!
Only, that's not how it works, is it? Math doesn't give a fuck what year it is. Correct sums are correct sums in Sumer and in New York City. I observe that it is the same with morals and values: what humans are and what we want does not change over time, neither what is healthy for us, neither what causes us to grow strong and to wither. I can observe that the principles underlying the Code of Hammurabi are entirely clear and sensical to me, and in fact that my own society is built on largely identical principles, with at most only minor adjustments in weighting despite vastly different material conditions, a temporal distance of thousands of years, and a completely alien culture. The historical record argues against you.
They thought they did, they claimed they did, and they convinced a lot of people that they did. Evidence indicates they were mistaken or lying. I think the nature of the mistake (or lie) can be observed and analyzed, and similar mistakes and lies therefore become easier to detect, which is why I'm objecting when I see you making what seem to me to be similar claims. Society is an intricate, alien machine designed to minimize the size of the skull-piles humans naturally produce. The really big piles of skulls happen when people deliberately break that machine in an attempt to get it to do things it can't actually do. That is why demands for outcomes that seem impractical or impossible should be treated with suspicion.
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To me, this seems backwards. For as much of a difference there is between our single celled ancestors and homo sapiens, the differences between them are not infinite. In fact, compared to infinite differences, the 2 might as well be identical, as hard to distinguish from each other as distinguishing one electron from another. And infinite malleability would require infinite time (or being able to do things in infinitely short amount of time). Not small beans like "until all usable energy in the universe is lost to entropy" - in comparison to infinite time, that might as well be a nanosecond. Otherwise, just from the simple math of a finite number of humans doing things in a finite amount of time, the malleability of humans can't be infinite.
If you're merely using hyperbolic language, then it's just a question of where one draws the line in terms of how malleable humans are. But then the question becomes more nuanced and hinges on the specifics, of course.
...
Sure. I think there are limits to the diversity mathematics can express given a finite universe or effectively finite universe given speed of light restrictions.
But like- I think we are like ants in a terrarium. We have explored a single drop in the ocean of possibilities. There are game theoretic considerations that will probably hold across all agents, but the things that are obviously bad for humans right now are not obviously universally bad in all possible situations.
I think if you want to argue that humans are not infinitely malleable "arbitrarily large is not infinity" is... technically correct. But of no use to the conservative.
I would expect them to go for "that's not human" instead.
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Look, there’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes she doesn’t feel like polishing your spear.
Anyway. Let’s imagine that your enemies aren’t purely cynical operators, scrounging for facts to hold up their worldview. Can you think of a principle that might lead to similar conclusions? A reason to decide that both gay and trans people deserve support?
Wild. Well, only half, apparently. Which raises some other questions about what she means by “other contexts.”
I think your construction is a much more realistic principle. Centering conservatives doesn’t match the way people justify progressivism. Underdog support might not be specific enough, though. It’s a popular tack across societies.
The pre-war Progressives campaigned for collective (government) action against business interests and entrenched politics. Communism attempted to harness underdogs via class consciousness. Postmodernists asked whether the narratives and structures underpinning the modern world had any rational basis, or were merely fictions. There was always an idea that the underdogs were temporarily embarrassed millionaires. More importantly, there was an excuse for any non-embarrassed millionaire to remain a good leftist, so long as he or she was awoken to the plight of the underdog.
Strategically speaking, this is very useful. It also suggests a broader progressive principle: one’s circle of concern can (and should) be very large. Race, creed, nation are not supposed to be barriers to empathy. “Workers of the world, unite.”
But that phrase retains one caveat, because no ideology survives if it cannot defend itself. A hostile ideology is the one remaining target for discrimination. For the Soviets this was nominally decided by class. Modern progressivism updates it to account for a more liberal concept of free will. The circle of concern does not have to include those who have chosen to reject it.
That caveat is what sneaks in most of the modifiers and exceptions. It’s defensible on classical-liberal grounds, which makes it very familiar for Americans and our cultural umbrella. I think this definition—a broad but selective circle of concern—best fits the modern progressive philosophy.
You're probably right. "Underdog" does a better job of covering the nominal choice for power dynamics. For making predictions about who gets the benefit of the doubt. The "circle of concern" covers a lot of the ifs/ands/buts, though it is not unique to progressivism.
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...But then you are forced, if you are honest, to admit that you are not in fact doing anything fundamentally different than the system you've replaced. You haven't actually made a world without discrimination, only changed who gets discriminated against. All the same postmodern and materialist and nihilist critiques apply equally as well to your new system as they did to the old one, and your values are exactly as arbitrary and ultimately pointless.
And once you've admitted that, we can agree that you have nothing to offer but might makes right, foreclose the moral arguments, and get down to the mightying.
Perhaps.
Theories derived from liberalism do tend to pick up speed until they hit the ski ramp that is “coercion.”
There is a loophole. Should everyone choose progressivism, the circle gets to cover all of them. No discrimination necessary. Also, poverty and violence are ended forever, and the Age of Aquarius is upon us. We did it, Reddit.
I assume most every American thinks something similar about their ingroup, mind you. It’s the natural intersection of tribalism with our civic religion. And tribalism is really, really adaptive. The catch is that cooperating in this game has huge advantages. There is an equilibrium where progressives tear themselves apart trying to draw a very careful circle of concern. Call me an optimist, I guess.
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