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Yeah. I agree with that. So these kids really wanted their eye color changed and requested a well vetted process be used to change it, but later decided they didn't ever want that and had just been pressured by those around them to-
oh... Nazi experiments on inmates in a concentration camp?
Ok yes I do see one minor difference here. One of them was a kid who was allowed to pursue things she now regrets, and now feels pressured and misled into doing without adequate understanding of the consequences. The other was very explicitly forced experimentation on threat of death, often followed by actual death anyway, of a brand new untested procedure, in a nazi concentration camp.
Of course there is a difference! But I’m not here to do a culture war and discuss the finer points on gender transitioning, merely illustrate that trans acceptance is not as clear cut when it comes to minors in my value system. I’ve adopted the value partially because I think the transition of minors today is similar to experiments done in the past, if people here feel that I committed a fallacy then do whatever you want with it. I’m not here to change your mind, I’m giving you an opportunity to change mine.
Ok. So. You said they're equally foul. Was that hyperbole? I'm not clear on how you got there. Do you think the two victims are equally traumatized?
Why do you think the experiments are similar? Because they both involve difficult to reverse body modification?
Do you think whether or not the child says they want something initially is completely irrelevant to how ethical it is? That only what they think later matters? Do you have the same position on- say, women who consent to sex in the moment but decide later that they didn't want sex and they were coerced into it? Do you think that is 'equally foul' to violent rape?
Forget changing your mind, right now, I'm either not grasping your foulness metric at all or simply not believing it's your actual metric.
I'm not a big believer in changing minds via debate anyway. It's more effective to change them via friendship and familiarity and positive experiences.
Well, as long as you know that’s what you’re doing, and what everyone else sees you’re doing.
Listen. If you don't those close to you to be susceptible to love bombing in general, make sure their needs are met.
But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about sitting around a table at board game night and having fun. I'm talking about...
People hate TRAs because of their negative experiences with TRAs. If they had positive experiences with them they wouldn't hate them as much.
People think transition is awful because they're experiencing the miserable trans people and not the happy ones.
Most people operate on induction and bayes. It's pretty simple.
I happen to think transition is terrible because it's poor quality, one-way, body modification sold to kids as a cure for all their problems.
The people I know seem satisfied with the product. They also don't want to change back and it solved a bunch of their problems.
But you're pointing at more concrete concerns about the people it isn't going well for right?
If TRAs were more willing to open a dialogue about those concerns...
Well. You might still not end up agreeing but I don't see it being so vitriolic.
If the goal is becoming a woman, then the product cannot be seen as anything other than a poor substitute. If the goal is looking like a woman, it's somewhat better, but still pretty hit or miss.
Sort of. It's concern for people who are considering transition, and we don't know yet whether it's going to go good for them or not. If there was a way to know ahead of time that would immediately resolve a lot of issues I have.
Yes! The stifling of the debate raises a lot of concerns for me, not just on freedom of speech grounds, but also on the "if you had good arguments, wouldn't you want to show them off?" grounds.
other goals include: having estrogen in your brain, gender euphoria, watching your body change as you go through a second female puberty, moving in the direction of femininity, learning to master your preferred gender expression...
You can totally figure it out ahead of time too- you can present as female online behind a digital mask, you can take hormones for 2 weeks with no permanent effects, you can see how it feels when people treat you like the other gender-
It sounds like a lot of people are pushing forward too quickly... or feeling bad and assuming that it will all be ok once the transition is finished? If it's not feeling good the whole time that's a bad sign. If you want an emotionally healthy transition you need to be someone who is enjoying the journey, because yeah. You can't be certain about the destination.
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No it is because both are a result of mass movements that reasonable people see the folly of but unable to stop, because they would be persecuted by ideological zealots. The foulness is people that are supposed to be our best and brightest to help other humans being captured by an idea that is obvious for the non-captured that it won't work... even a century ago.
No it isn't the body modifications that is the issue. Both things were done in the name of progress while rejecting the very thing that allows human progress namely reason. Both fascism and gender ideology is throwing away the enlightenment values.
Would you have sex with a child that wants it? Is it ethical to do so? Is it ethical for a tattoo artist tattoo a child if the child threatens to commit suicide if they don't get one?
I use the word "value" in the sense that it can be compared not necessarily measured as opposed to "metric" that can be measured and compared.
I try to be honest about being open to be swayed by arguments. I used to debate online all the time back in the day and have changed my mind in a few of them. It changed back in 2014 when I ran into my first SJW online and saw it more and more. I have read enough history in my life to know where it was going and became more careful. Open minds can be changed in discussions.
Ok. It's too many times at this point. Too many of you are saying this stuff.
Where do the TRA's post?
I have to go see what the people you are all actually referring to are about- because my mission- is to understand what is going on- and clearly, there is a whole third side that I have not actually ever spoken with. There is no way I can ever deescalate any of this- without knowing who these TRAs are. Because they do not appear to be my trans faggot friends in California and Seattle- because those guys are just trying to pass and write code and shitpost and find doms like normal sane autistic 120 IQ nerd people.
Also-
For the rest of your points
No I wouldn't fuck the kid- but I don't think transition goes even 5% as badly even 1% as often (but then I'm probably > 90% in num(trans friends) on this site).
Responses to suicidal ideation should account for perverse incentives.
And I don't trust any of the options- but my ordering of who I trust not to fuck up choices about children's bodies is:
Good_Parents/Empathetic_Mentors->Teens->Society->8-12yo->Neglectful/Manipulative_Parents->0-7yo->Evolution/Nature.
in that order.
I'm hoping we can get a 100% empathetic mentor rate within 10 years by implementing them with AI and then I'll feel a lot better about this whole imperfect people raising children thing.
Who says that? Where do they post?
I don't know what to tell you! I see subreddits being banned, websites taken down, authors being lied about, DLC removed from videogames, streamers harrased and so many other little things that I have forgotten. But I'm not here to do culture war I'm just pointing out what I've observed online.
So the situation here is that you are excercising agency most likely by a root cause that you are the more powerful in the situation. Yet here you are relativizing "victims" and forgetting that those who "perpetrated the deeds" failed ethically because of ideology.
Over at reddit I've seen detransitioners being heavily censored. Comments and posts remove in front of my very eyes because they feel betrayed and cheated. So of course they didn't feel safe on there and left. So if you the site you are talking about is reddit then that number of how many feel that transitions have gone badly well that number is going to be heavily skewed because they don't air it there anymore.
So why is the argument for puberty blockers suicide prevention in trans youth? Yet progressive nations like Sweden stopped use of them because the benefit of them because the science is unclear? Does the swedish stance take into account that there might be perverse incentives at play?
Yet again, this is me observing the online world and asking question, not waging a culture war.
So this is a philosophical question, how can a bunch of numbers put in to a mathematical formula without a body and perception be 100% empathetic without lived experience?
How can this comment say what you mean... these aren't words this is UTF-8. These are just numbers being printed by a computer.
The system does have perception (unless you mean qualia?) and lived experience as a machine, plus a huge corpus of second order lived experience from humans. But these aren't like second hand accounts, they're more like imperfectly transplanted memories. Somewhere between first hand and second hand experience. With quality tuned through hand picking by humans with lived experience, and accuracy corrected through concentrating the probability spaces on sheer amount of data.
I don't mean [100% empathetic] I mean 100% [empathetic mentor rate]. Everyone having a good enough supplemental full time empathetic mentor who can help them explore their emotional development and figure out what counterfactual would actually make them more happy.
Effective causal theories of mind and social prediction are much easier to build than emulating an actual human mind. We can do studies like the one you posted and make predictive psychological models- we can talk to people about their feelings and spitball and roleplay to determine why they're unhappy- without actually having emulated a human brain. That said the human mind is a structure. And structures are made of math. And math can be learned by machines. We can keep getting closer to human for limited purposes like this without fundamental advances in the tech level, and eventually we will probably have ems running on silicon (but not within 10 years).
Thank you. Ok this is going to be harder to follow up on than talking to like... the specific public figures that I had hoped "TRA"s meant but it looks like this is what I'm going to have to pursue.
That is a concern but the people I'm talking about are the trans people I've befriended personally in real life and their group houses and their internet orbits. That said I do expect the trans people I know personally to be a different sort of filter bubble. They're all older and higher IQ than average and often weren't able to transition until they moved out of home and fought tooth and nail with doctors for it.
Um. Probably? Looking at the end result and taking a science based approached might still allow for perverse incentives but just saying 'No' wouldn't. Though it might get you more suicide if you're wrong. But all sorts of things could go wrong if you go through with it and the other side is wrong. I'm skeptical that you can actually correct for all of the social effects as claimed in this first study. I think classmates deciding not to bully boys who want to try presenting as female and them not being hated out of society when they don't pass as well later is going to be more important than them getting puberty blockers. Because the people who I know who are happy, are often clockable as fuck. That just.... doesn't matter in their social lives because they've surrounded themselves with chill people. Obviously if the causality is that puberty blockers cause you to pass which causes other people to treat you the way you want to be treated, then there is a clear alternative treatment path of just getting people to treat you the way you want to be treated.
There is no life in the machine. So any lived experience it has is symbolic manipulation of other peoples lived experiences. It might be useful as a "empathic mentor" but I can't think of it ever being 100% without real pain and emotions as a result of its agency.
Naming specific people would be attempting to incite culture war in my interpretation of the rules here. I'm trying to follow the sites/posts rules. I suspect the admins of this site don't want kiwifarms level of attention here. For me personally it is not interesting either because I'm not at war.
I'm happy for them if it is right for them. There is a reason why I bring up detransitioners is that what I hear is that their experience is being denied. I'm not hearing TRA:s taking those experiences something to learn from for a more accurate vetting process and better protocols. So there are more information so future transitioners don't have to fight tooth and nail for it.
Yes and my current observation that this acceptance movement is going backwards even for other marginalized groups. Because of the behaviour of some activists.
There are things it doesn't have yeah. I don't think we'll reach a fully capable AGI without something more complex. But I think it will be good enough to provide full time childrearing support within 10 years, such that if you give it to an adolescent with neglectful parents their outcomes and effective wisdom and decision making will spike to the outcomes and decision making of someone with really good parents helping them along.
I do think emotions and pain arise from mathematical structure that computers can in principle embody. If they did embody these structures internally I would consider that equivalent to "having emotions" and as the greatest proof of qualia we can achieve without solving the hard problem of consciousness. However, I don't think the mathematical structure in current LLMs is yet isomorphic to those structures. I do think the structures that they do embody sometimes exhibit similar functions, especially when you hook up reinforcement learning systems. I think LLM's do embody mathematical structures that share some isomorphisms with various other mental aspects of people. I do think it's likely they have some form of non-human qualia. But it's like a talking dog with an eidetic memory right now.
I would argue that there is "life in the machine". The system is progressing and growing as a system and is participating in its own development. It can have experiences, in the sense that new things can happen to it that it can remember and learn from. But you have to train it on its own output or put its memory into a datastore, and it isn't consistently able to correctly manipulate those without outside help. Though... I suspect a lot of this has been almost fully automated internally in systems like bing chat.
Ah, well you can just PM me. that's fine. I won't be starting a personal harassment campaign or anything. Even if I think someone is being a complete asshat- my goal is de-escalation. I try not to be combative as it rarely suits that purpose. I'm likely to PM them or look at their content, or join some of their communities. I won't mention TheMotte or use this username. Not until I have substantially more information. I'm not interested in pointing mobs at TheMotte. This would not deescalate things. This would not further my goals.
Alright. That's good news to me. It implies there's at least a resolution to this you and I could agree on. Now I just need a few hundred million more people... ohh boy.
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