Scott says that I’m hosting all the race and gender discussion. So here is a thread! Go wild! I am pretty sure I have caught onto trends here and this thread will not, in fact, be about race and gender. It will be about programming.
If you would like the non-race non-gender open thread, go here.
Incidentally, does anyone know a way I can unban people for specific threads? I don’t want to acquire a neoreactionary community on my blog, because I’ve noticed that neoreactionaries tend to make every single conversation about neoreaction, and that is tedious. So I’m planning to have a strict “no neoreactionaries except Samo and Nydwracu because I like them” policy. However, I feel like the Race and Gender In The Open Thread ought to let neoreactionaries post for the Full Slate Star Codex Experience (TM).
All I have to say about gender is “Ozy is right” so here are 5 race things!
1. The London Marathon is actually 26.2 miles long (26 miles, 385 yards). The reason for this is, in the 1908 London Olympics, the distance was extended so that the royal family could watch the start of the race from Windsor Castle and the end of the race from the royal box in the Olympic stadium.
2. Speaking of the london marathon, this David Mitchell rant shows someone ready to hear the good news about our Lord and Saviour, Givewell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEC3BdFxR0c (I’m hoping wordpress still does the automatic youtube embedding thing)
3. According to the good people at UK backward run, the record for running one mile backwards is 6 mins 58 secs
4.The Wikipedia article on the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling race (an annual event where people roll a massive cheese down the hill and then roll after it for reasons nobody is entirely sure of) is a delight from start to finish, including a “Cheese rolling in popular culture” section
5. Wikipedia also allowed me to feel a few seconds of patriotism when it informed me “There are numerous snail racing events that take place in different places around the world, though the majority take place in the United Kingdom.” Of course they are.
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My favorite thing about race in the UK is the Man Vs. Horse race, which provides supporting evidence for the theory that humans are optimized for covering long distances in hot weather.
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If anyone figures out how to subscribe to this blog through RSS I will be super excited to hear about it.
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Popped up for me with Feedly Mini, but looks like you should be able to grab it from https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/feed/
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here’s a link.
I just guessed it because I know wordpress, but Firefox was able to figure it out automatically, though my other browsers failed.
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https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/feed/
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Excellent! It is good to see this!
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Conditional on biological essentialism being true and one not having any special attachment to the sex, phasing out men seems like an obvious policy. But this position seems to be much rarer than its component parts.
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Well, in the short term I can think of two issues: first, AFAIK we don’t quite have female-female reproduction worked out. We’re getting quite close, but as I understand it the technique is still not very reliable and has not been tested on humans. (I could be wrong about this though.) Second, there are some jobs which are necessary to society, but which women might not want to do in the necessary numbers. (Again, this is under the conditional that gender essentialism is true, which is something I am agnostic about personally.)
However, both of those issues will most likely eventually be solved by technology. So… yeah, under the conditions you specify, it does seem hard to make a case for the continuation of males, in the long term. As a male – even as one who isn’t particularly attached to his gender – that is a bit depressing. :/
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If you’re thinking along those lines, then don’t you also need to justify female-female reproduction, and in fact any kind of reproduction at all ?
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I’m replying to Bugmaster, but for some reason I had to reply to myself instead; I assume this is due to a nesting limitation.
I’m not entirely sure I’ve understood your question. But what I took Matthias’ comment to mean was that the species might be better off without males. Given that it’s undeniable that males cause more violence, rape, etc., the only reason to keep males around would be if we provide some significant advantages relative to females. Even with a gender-essentialist viewpoint, I think the most significant advantage would be strength, for those tasks that require it, but those will become fewer and more far between as technology continues to improve.
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If you’re willing to grant reliance on high technology for reproduction, then why not instead start creating XX men and grow them in artificial wombs, if you want to get rid of one of the sexes? Once you’re at that level, you can start to do pretty much whatever you want, and both “phase out men” or “phase out women” sound more to me like a lack of imagination than anything.
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Is “XX men” something that’s even possible? It seems like an oxymoron to me. But I will be the first to admit that my knowledge of biology is very, very rudimentary.
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It happens naturally but it’s a genetic disorder when it does, so it would take some engineering to make it workable. But since, from what I understand, there are problems w/ egg-egg fertilization unique to mammals due to chromosomes from each parent not being treated as interchangeable in some ways, so would sexually reproducing females.
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Well, by the numbers, it’s really just single men between about 16 and 30 responsible for the super majority of the violence of the world. Assuming rather modest advances in space travel technology, in the future we could just adopt a policy where all men are required to work off-world (say, mining asteroids?) until they turn 30…
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That sounds worse to me. Like, if we switch to only female-female reproduction, the men who are never born will have nothing to complain about because they will have never existed. But a mandatory job mining asteroids for 14 years sounds pretty awful. Even if there were a better alternative, I think that wouldn’t really be solving the problem of male violence so much as just moving it elsewhere.
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If the numbers say ‘single’ men cause most of the violence, then maybe we could fix it by making them un-single? All men between the ages of 16-30 should be assigned to a harem – and they could fight each other for the privilege of pleasing their mistress, thus giving themselves an outlet for their violent tendencies.
In case it’s not obvious, I came here via Ozy’s ‘injured boys’ blog.
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That’s hardly “reducing” the level of violence, is it Pluviann? :D
Although I suppose one could argue it’s being cancelled out somewhat depending on the worldbuilding … hmm.
More seriously, holodecks seem like the solution here. Give ’em all sexbots and video games.
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Historically, I believe several societies had a policy along the lines of “You cannot take a wife until you have killed someone in combat.”
We could try to hack this policy into something better. Maybe build a bunch of research labs in space, and manufacture a bunch of exploration ships and say “You can’t come back to earth until you’ve discovered something awesome or made a groundbreaking scientific discovery” with the difficulty of “awesome” and “groundbreaking” being scaled so that the most men can’t pull it off until they are about 30.
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I don’t want an all female society or nearly so, but it doesn’t take any sort of high technology.
Just have a sufficient supply of frozen sperm, kill the men, and practice sex selection on embryos. When you need more sperm, permit a few boys to be born. Let them live long enough to produce healthy sperm.
It actually feels bad typing this, but the drive to point out a technologically simple solution is very strong.
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Well, I can imagine in the future we will have a real understanding of how sex/gender works in the brain. Likewise, we may come to understand how to control these things, to manipulate testosterone and estrogen levels at different times during development to get just the kinds of people we want.
Which would be scary and amazing.
And at that point, cocks and cunts might not matter so much. Pick the one you like.
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I think that as soon as you get those men warehoused, you will find that most violence is committed by 16-30 year old women.
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Leaving aside explicitly traditionalist reactions (which start from “Are you insane?” and go from there), it seems this might create a sort of prisoner’s-dilemma game. Assuming you don’t think tech can entirely take over combat, which there’s certainly no indication it will be able to do in the next thirty years or so*, men will strongly dominate at that. (Women who exceed the male average in combat-related abilities, while existent, are very rare high outliers.) So getting rid of men reduces internal violence, while making the society highly vulnerable to invasion by some other society that still has them around.
* Unless you’re a singularitarian, which I’m not.
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Depends on if you plan for a static society, or dynamic. Men invented practically everything, and will continue to do so. Men have higher variance than women in IQ, meaning the vast majority of super-geniuses are men.
Also, if your society cares about human happiness, then given that 97% or so of people are programmed to want the other sex, you’ll be creating a tremendous amount of sexual frustration if you only create one sex. Doing so strikes me as inhuman. If you can eliminate or rechannel our sexual programming, then you can eliminate or rechannel whatever it is that makes you dislike men. (Can you explain why you find getting rid of us an “obvious” idea? Is it the criminality?)
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I know enough cases of men taking credit for work actually done by women to think that that explains some part of the disparity in known invention, and of course feminists have plenty of other stories about how sexism has reduced the opportunities for female innovators. Even if you were right about the distribution of super-geniuses, lots of innovation has not been by super-geniuses. So I don’t think the invention thing would be nearly the issue you imagine it to be. Admittedly, your other point is stronger.
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I’m against getting rid of all men, because I believe you should never get rid of your backup system. I could totally see dropping the male:female ratio to something like 1:9 though.
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In other words, you want to create a female sexual utopia.
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I only had time to skim your link, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what I meant.
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Sounds more like a male sexual utopia. (Although … in practice,?)
If it’s a female one *too* … my God, we’ve solved human social dynamics.
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Well, it depends. If you are culling the current male population, it is a male dystopia. If you are massively expanding the female population, it is a female dystopia.
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>culling the current male population
Oh, I assumed creation ex nihlo, yeah.
(How does one expand the female population without simultaneously culling the newly-created males?)
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Gamete selection.
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If that doesn’t count, then it shouldn’t count when we use it to cull the males, right?
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From reading that sexual utopia link, it seems like it would fail despite women wanting to only have sex w/ the top men because, if that essay is correct, women would no longer find the top 10% of men as attractive when that’s all the men as when there are lots of lesser men for them to demonstrate their status over. Attraction would be re-normalized and you’d just end up w/ a skewed sex ratio.
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It seems to me that biological essentialism doesn’t quite justify phasing out men. You also need to believe that most bad things about men (e.g. higher crime rate) are “biologically essential”, while most good things (e.g. higher scientific output) are “biologically accidental”. That’s a very suspicious state of belief.
On top of that, you also need to forget everything you ever learned about the “value of diversity”. That might lead you to some startling conclusions, e.g. “phasing out” some unsuccessful minority due to their higher crime rate *and* lower scientific output.
So yeah. This is my first time commenting on a SJ blog, and I can already see that it’s not going to work out well.
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Oooh, I can vouch for this person, because he’s been on LW for a good time (IIRC) and to my knowledge never participated in or sympathized with the horribleness he’s pointing in the direction of!
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P.S. if you do phase out men, it doesn’t even seem to matter anymore whether minority violence is environmental or hereditary, since the remaining overall rate is expected to be sufficiently low?
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Well, that depends on your definition of “sufficiently”. But apparently the gap between black and white violence is right around the same as the gap between male and female violence, in US crime rates at least, so your remaining black women (if I’ve interpreted this correctly) have the same expected violence rate as white men. Calling this high enough to justify removing the latter raises questions as to why it’s presumably not high enough to justify removing the former.
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As far as I know, there is exactly one feminist in all of history who seriously supported reducing the population of men, her name was Mary Daly and even radical feminists think she was kind of a crazy person. I think the relevant factor here isn’t “SJ blog”, it’s “rationalist blog”, and in particular “rationalist blog in which I just asked everyone to come up with horrible offensive thought experiments Scott would disapprove of having in his comment section.” (I am tempted to make a comment about privilege tbh.)
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So far as Mary Daly is concerned, my random sampling of blog posts after she died turned up people who were angry at her for transphobia, and people who were enthusiastic about her.
Is the idea that Daly was insane actually a mainstream feminist view?
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LOL! Yeah, Tell you what, make your female only society, let’s see how well it does against the society next door to it that’s about 50/50 male/female. Go bong another one hippy.
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Congratulations on blog 2: the bloggening.
A topical comment…
Although I haven’t trawled particularly deeply in the HBD-o-sphere, I find the focus of the supposed “race realists” as expressed on rationalist sites rather suspicious. It’s my understanding that, consistent with the out-of-Africa hypothesis, genetic diversity is much higher among Africans than among European or Asian populations (see this study, for example). Yet the HBD people almost invariably seem to talk about blacks as an undifferentiated mass while making much of differences between Northern Europeans, Southern Europeans, and Slavs, or between Chinese and other Asian populations. Is there some reason good reason not to hold that as evidence against the objectivity of the “race realists”?
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Your link is broken, but what people usually mean by “genetic diversity” is “neutral” diversity, lots of variants not subject to selection measurable pressure, probably not actually doing anything. Out of Africa went through a population bottleneck that reduced its neutral diversity. But this is not interesting.
The other thing that people could mean by “genetic diversity” is that there is more difference between sub-races. In fact, the very root branch of the tree of extant human races is not between Africans and everyone else, but between Capoids (Pygmies, Bushmen, Hottentots) and everyone else. Since Africa contains both Black Africans and Capoids, it has diversity. But the Bantu developed agriculture four thousand years ago and expanded, reducing diversity. There are far more whites in Africa than Capoids.
There are difference between groups of Black Africans. People often talk about how East and West Africans dominate different sports, or about how Obama doesn’t look like African Americans. But that last point is key — American Blacks are drawn from West Africa and do not have a lot of diversity. I’m not sure about Blacks in Europe. But people do talk about Somalis in Minneapolis and they never talk about how they differ from West Africans.
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Black people in Europe are mostly secondary immigrants, ie rather than immigrating from Africa, they immigrated from places that slaves were taken to from Africa. So Black British mostly have (recent) origins in Jamaica, Barbados or Trinidad; Black Dutch from Suriname or the (former) Netherlands Antilles. Black French are the big exception, being mostly immigrants directly from the former French colonies in West Africa (mostly Senegal) rather than from Guadeloupe or Martinique.
There are quite a lot of Somali immigrants in Europe, descended from refugees from the horrific Somali civil wars of the last few decades; other African civil wars (notably the Democratic Republic of Congo) have not generated large numbers of refugees who got as far as Europe. Outside of Britain, France and the Netherlands, a black person in Europe is probably of Somali origin.
Most Western European countries accepted large numbers of immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s when they had a labour shortage, but where they came from varied; those with a colonial past tended to take immigrants from their colonies / former colonies, while others often took immigrants from poorer parts of Europe (Spain, Greece, Portugal) and/or from Turkey.
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You need to understand that most HBDers, like most people on the internet, are American. American blacks are a restricted subset of people of African ancestry – the vast majority are from West Africa. I don’t know how good a natural category American blacks are on their own but compared to “Africans” it’s better.
When the issue comes up many will talk about differences between African populations – North Africans are not like Sub-Saharan Africans, Ethiopians are not like Bantus, and so on. It usually comes up in the context of discussions about the performance of slave-descended blacks vs recent African immigrants (such as Barack Obama) – Steve Sailer has written extensively on this topic.
In addition, there was a large debate at OccidentalAscent about whether there even was an achievement gap between blacks and whites in the UK. I didn’t follow it closely and I don’t know who won (if anyone), but it does mean that HBDers aren’t ignorant of the differences between African-derived populations globally.
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Any thoughts about the non-black part of the ancestry for African Americans?
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Someone — it might have been Steve Sailer — wrote a lot a while back about the differences between blacks in places like North Dakota and blacks in places like Detroit, and chalked it up to the former group being in the places mostly because military.
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I’m really puzzled as to what in my first comment could possibly have tripped the moderation filter.
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Everyone’s on moderation for their first comment, nothing about you in particular.
Also this is not blog 2: the bloggening. It is either blog 4: the bloggening or blog 7: the bloggening, depending on whether you count tumblrs.
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You’ll want to be banning me. But I guess I can post on this.
I rarely post anything on SSC that is not neoreactionary because there are so many smart people there who make comments such that I rarely feel I would be adding anything. Also they are all very fast, usually posting hundreds of comments before I even read the OP. So I don’t say anything about most topics. By contrast, the neoreactionary take on things is often not mentioned by the time I get to comment. So I sometimes post that.
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I feel that if you really want to have a good argument, you ought to throw in a little grist for people to push back against. Links, quotes stolen from SSC, whatever. I don’t go around talking about race and gender, even when someone says “OK you can talk about race and gender”. Rather, someone says something false and I feel the strong urge to rejoin.
Oh, congrats on the blog. Never read you before but I admire your style on SSC so I am eager to see what you do.
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Also, I agree with Leonard. You should write something controversial to kick off the debate. Or perhaps invite someone controversial. Do you think James Donald will come here if someone links him?
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>Do you think James Donald will come here if someone links him?
Speaking of horrible thought experiments which should never be carried out in real life.
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How do you know if you’re a neoreactionary? Is this one of those things where if you have to ask you’re not, or one of those things where everyone else figures it out before you do?
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If you don’t know who Mencius Moldbug is, don’t worry about it and I envy you your state of pastoral innocence. If you do know who Mencius Moldbug is and you’re like “man, right on,” you’re probably a neoreactionary.
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Thank you. I tried to read him at one point and found it unbearable for reasons unrelated to content, so I couldn’t really get to agreeing or disagreeing. I’ve read the anti-FAQ and found it mostly but not entirely convincing. But I suspect that on actual, up-for-grabs policy issues, as well as questions related to how to live, (as opposed to “should we have a monarchy?”) I’m picking them over the social justice folks most of the time.
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While this is a good rule of thumb, I want to protest that Moldbug is great and “neoreaction” is terrible.
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>Incidentally, does anyone know a way I can unban people for specific threads?
Why would you need this? Just make a list of neoreactionaries and ban us if we post outside the race and gender open threads. As Moldbug said, “every city in the world has the death penalty for stepping in front of a bus. How do we live with this draconian, irrational, and instantly enforced rule? By not violating it.”
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I may just be thinking naively here, but since we already have open threads for gender, perhaps we can have some for neoreactionaries ? I must admit that I am kind of fascinated by their philosophy (in an anthropological sort of way), so I am interested in what they have to say (as long as it’s actually on topic, of course).
Besides that, while I do agree that silencing the expression of specific beliefs is an efficient move in the short term, I think that in the long term it almost always ends up causing more problems than it solves.
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I’m not silencing anyone. Neoreactionaries can speak as much as they like on their own blogs, and people interested in their viewpoints may read them. They can even link to my posts! But IME unmoderated comment sections are less fun for me and my commenters.
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I’m not asking for unmoderated comment sections, just for a thread where NRs can air out their ideas. A sort of NR preserve, if you will.
That said though, I personally would go even further and allow NRs to post their comments if they are on topic. For example, if we are discussing which economic system is better, capitalism or socialism or a mix of the two, I would be fine with NRs posting, “actually, the system that works best is feudalism, here’s why”. But if we are discussing race and gender, and NRs are posting stuff like, “King George would sort out these issues right and proper !”, then I’d probably block them.
I’m not asking you to go that far, though.
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*Pastoral music*
David Attenborough V/O: Beyond the wild plains of the social media there is a little spot of Heaven: Neoreactoserve. Here, neoreactionaries discuss the evils of the modern world free from predators, starvation and progressivism. Insectivorous creatures, they feast on Moldbugs and GrassHans-HermannHoppes. Watch as they…et cetera.
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>Just make a list of neoreactionaries and ban us if we post outside the race and gender open threads.
It would probably be easier to just ban anyone who brings up nRx stuff, except in threads where you specifically noted “neoreaction stuff is appropriate here.”
Saves time making a list, and you get any productive content that might come from an otherwise-neoreactionary person. Also, seems nicer; I know I get a sad if I’m banned from anything.
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I’ve said before that exploring the “cis by default” idea via introspection alone is likely flawed because body dysphoria might be a very gut-level phenomenon about body/body-map mismatches or something that you can’t trigger just by imagining it. I now know that there are at least some transpeople who agree, which I found out about when the idea was brought up on 4chan’s /lgbt/. I can’t link the discussion, because it was a while ago, but the one thing on which there was complete consensus was that the best thing about fully immersive virtual reality will be that it will quickly filter out all the tumblr snowflake trans by giving them a horrible traumatizing experience w/ actual body dysphoria when it becomes a standard diagnosis technique.
So, that’s funny.
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I have a nonbinary friend who was in the otherkin community for several years and now looks upon otherkindom as a horrible and embarrassing thing they did as a teenager. They say that it is possible to induce body dysphoria with sufficient meditation. Personally I suspect that it is certainly possible to induce a belief-in-belief-in-body-dysphoria with sufficient meditation, but I’m not nearly so sure about the real thing.
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I’d be willing to bet large sums of money that I wouldn’t experience body dysphoria from an immersive VR with a female body, as long as the avatar’s body type was pretty similar to mine (in particular, not overweight). (Of course, actually making the bet would risk affecting the outcome, but still.)
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Why do “tumblr snowflake trans” need to be “filtered out”? And why would you ever wish a traumatizing experience on someone else? That seems so extreme for a group of people who aren’t hurting anyone by writing on their personal tumblrs.
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As a real legitimate trans person with sex dysphoria and everything, I cannot imagine how some nondysphoric kid identifying as trans would affect me in any way. Although I would urge them to be very cautious about seeking medical transition, of course.
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Is it really better to help conceal the truth from people?
I would honestly prefer someone show me such facts about myself. (Although I imagine that, were this to actually work, knowledge of it would rapidly reduce numbers of people identifying as otherkin.)
With that said, I honestly find it more plausible that people who identify as otherkin would love these games and form communities enjoying them. And that would be good to know too.
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Not sure why I can’t reply directly to MugaSofer, but anyway: That may be *your* preference, but you don’t get to decide other people’s preferences for them. And as the “tumblr special snowflake trans” people are not harming anyone else in any way, why would someone wish to go out of their way to cause harm to *them*?
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I really feel like “we should suppress this research because it might reveal facts that would “wipe out” a small internet subculture” is really a premise that needs to be defended, not assumed.
The “harm” of a few people briefly and consensually experiencing gender dysphoria, and a tiny fraction of the population feeling embarrassed about being wrong – versus “truth”, which is the kind of sacred value the vast majority of people would not wish to trade for it.
I’m sorry, but … this doesn’t work under deontological ethics, or our approximations of CEV, or naive preference utilitarianism.
Are you arguing for – or rather, assuming – hedonic utilitarianism?
[For the record, a society with that kind of tech can wirehead in ways much more efficient than lying to people about their special snowflake status. So this would still be unethical, just in the other direction.]
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…..what. Who said anything about suppressing research?
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Well, what else would you call stopping anyone from allowing Otherkin from entering a VR pod, because the results would “filter them out” [deconvert them] from society?
(Which, again, I’m skeptical of; but that’s neither here nor there.)
You’re preventing people from undergoing an experience, voluntarily, in order to learn about human psychology; because you’re worried that what they find out might change people’s worldview to be more accurate but – you feel – less valuable.
A rather textbook case of suppressing research. No?
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems the two of you are talking from rather different vantage points?
MugaSofer seems to be assuming a reality where VR is a useful diagnostic tool that also gives some people temporary dysphoria (presumably when they don’t actually fit the diagnostic criteria for transness), and wondering why you would want to not use similar technology if it were available.
Casey, on the other hand, is, as far as I can tell, writing about the part of the original post that was all “wouldn’t it be nice if it were possible to actually make ‘special snowflake’ kids suffer intense gender dysphoria,” and pointing out that that’s a pretty awful idea and reflects the way that certain young, tumblr-using trans kids who use unconventional pronouns are treated pretty badly in the here and now.
Like, one of you is assuming that this is a useful diagnostic tool that might also *relieve* dysphoria for people who haven’t or can’t transition, and the other is assuming that it exists mainly as a theoretical way of proving that “special snowflakes” (ugh I hate that term and have been trying not to use it) aren’t really trans, and also should feel bad. And I feel like there is probably some common ground between these two positions (if I have actually grasped them correctly)?
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Yeah, I’m kind of at a loss here. Maybe I originally didn’t reply to the correct comment? I don’t quite understand the nesting situation here. But the only thing I’m objecting to is a desire to have the “special snowflake trans kids” to undergo some kind of horrible dysphoric experience in order to cure them or whatever. I’ve said literally nothing about preventing research or any voluntary experience.
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As far as I can see, it’s a combination of some thinking that the existence of people who invent pronouns and the like makes it harder for the people who just want to be seen as women or men to be taken seriously, and also that it’s 4chan so the suffering of tumblr users is a terminal value.
What I was referring to when I said “So, that’s funny,” was that there was so much agreement on the opposite position than what I’ve seen around here, just by switching trans communities.
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Is there such a thing as racial disphoria? For instance could a guy get away with identifying as African American even though he is physically white and Irish? If not why not? Isn’t there a racial spectrum just like a gender spectrum? Gender roles, racial stereotypes ect.
Sorta joking. Welcome back Ozy!! Please remember to post trigger warnings I know you can get pretty risqué at times.
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Content warning policy is that I will warn for content I predict a significant number of readers will want to avoid, as long as it is not totally obvious from the title of the post that it contains said upsetting content and it is your own fault for reading.
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What does he want to do differently/how does he want to be treated differently on account of his dysphoria? What you identify as racially just doesn’t come up as much. There’s no separate set of pronouns. Clothes aren’t divided up by race. If he wants to, he can check “black” on his Census form. It might cause some weirdness if he checks it when applying to jobs.
There are certainly biracial people and adoptees who feel differently about their race than they look to others. I think that makes sense to people. But I doubt it comes up as much in their lives as being transgender does because of the lack of different pronouns, clothes, etc.
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It’s my understanding that transsexuals would not be satisfied by merely doing the other things the other gender does. You can’t tell a MTF “why not just identify as a man who likes to wear dresses, rather than as a woman”. In other words, the question “what does he want to do differently” *is not applicable*; there’s something about being transgender that is *not* just wanting to do different things. Likewise, there would be something about being transrace that is distinct from wanting to do different things.
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There certainly are people who have plastic surgery to look a different race, and although they get a lot of stick they must have felt *something* strongly enough to want to do that…
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Johnny Otis seems like an example.
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Which body parts is it possible to get dysphoria for? I know that lots of trans people have genital/secondary-sex-characteristic dysphoria, and there are some people who feel like they really shouldn’t have limbs, and feel much better once the limbs are removed… but is there anyone who feels like they shouldn’t have a left index finger in particular? Is there anyone who feels really wrong having toenails? Is there anyone who feels strange about having elbows and thinks their arms should be completely straight?
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According to Wikiped Phantom Limb Syndrome is known to happen w/ pretty much any body part, so if you count that as body dysphoria, the answer is “all of them.”
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Your’e thinking of BIID I think. Phantom limb is kinda of the opposite, where the body map contains limbs that are not present (as a result of deformity/ loss of limbs).
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Lambert, that seems like dysphoria in the sense that you wish you did have parts that you do not; and would be helped by prosthetics or restorative surgery.
Compare the experiences of FTM or MTF transsexuals.
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I’ve talked with someone who was very unhappy about having an organic body.
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So, I apologize for my relative ignorance, but what the purpose of custom pronouns (or, treated separately if need be, the ritual of asking people for pronouns) if we can just use non-gendered pronouns? Gendered pronouns are an artifact of PIE-influence anyhow, and don’t exist in a lot of languages — I certainly don’t see the point in _adding_ them.
An auxiliary question, although I imagine all these curiosities will have the same response: Is there any reason I would oppose adding gendered pronouns in languages that have them but support custom pronouns in languages with both gendered and non-gendered pronouns?
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*oppose adding gendered pronouns in languages that _don’t_ have them.
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Because if nonbinary people take over the gender-neutral pronouns, then nonbinary becomes the default gender. If someone refers to someone as “they”, it’s unclear whether their gender is unknown, or known to be nonbinary. This presumably has many of the same problems as having “he” as the default pronoun, which is why “he” is being phased out in a gender-unknown context.
(I don’t actually care much about pronouns, I am just playing devil’s advocate.)
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Every time I hear “they” applied to a single person, my brain throws a ClassCastException :-(
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It seems like forwardsecret is at least partly talking about gendered pronouns in languages that don’t already use them, like how English just has non-gendered for all cases except the 3rd person singular (i.e., we just have “I” and “we” first person regardless of gender, and don’t have atashi/boku like Japanese, we just have “you” for all second person, and we just have “they” for all third person and don’t have ils/elles like French.)
The idea is that it wouldn’t make sense (prima facie) for an agender person to say “don’t use the ‘you’ pronoun with me. I’m not masculine or feminine: use “xou” as my second person pronoun instead.” Huh? “You” already doesn’t concern itself with gender, so why would an agender person need any different pronouns? I think that this might also apply to the third person singular in some cases like Icelandic (or so I’ve heard?).
It seems like having a single pronoun for the third person singular would also have been nice. “It” is a gender neutral third person singular pronoun, of course, but it’s considered inappropriate for people.
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So, the hyperspecific example I have in mind is Mandarin, which has one pronoun, ta1, which is he/she/it/whatever. It’s 3rd person singular. Mandarin (the spoken component — the written component could be reasonably called Chinese) has no gendered pronouns at all, but (a friend from 广州 informs me), the Chinese character 他 has historically been used for all people (as opposed to 它, which is for objects, both ta1), and then due to western influence they chucked in a new character (after thousands of years of things working great), 她, using as a component 女 (which means woman), which is specifically for women (read: she), so 他 started being used as a combination neutral/he.
All are pronounced the same, so it’s not a feature of the spoken language, but I still find this to be a decrease in quality in Chinese writing. My question is: I feel like people advocating special pronouns are the same ones who advocated that Chinese characters became gendered in the first place. I don’t want all these gendered pronouns. It’s a fundamentally weirdo idea for proto-indo-european languages. Seriously, it’s like having pronouns change depending on whether you have short hair or long hair, except harder to use (forget complex details, there are enough androgynous people to make this point by itself). Why make things _even harder_ to use by requiring I ask and remember things about pronouns for each different person?
Anyhow, you/they/their/them works. It is very rarely stilted but never ambiguous or really even confusing. Why fight upstream on this? Let’s all allow our communication to be easy (no gender showing up at all, no ritual to ask for pronouns, no remembering them), remove non-binary-erasure, remove traces of sexism all at the same time by dropping this weird habit devised by people who though eating mercury was the miracle cure for having silver-tinted skin.
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Gendered pronouns are useful because they tend to reduce ambiguity. “Alice and Bob were walking; he kissed her” is less ambiguous than “Adam and Bob were walking; he kissed him”, for instance. The reason we do this with gender, as opposed to some other trait, is that it is a (usually) readily visible trait that divides people into two groups of approximately equal size.
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This is the same thing that happened, historically, with “man”. Man once meant “adult human”, and the words wereman and wifman were used for male adult humans and female adult humans. You can see the echo of wereman in werewolf, which is literally, the man-wolf. You can see the echo of wifman in wife. It’s not clear to me what caused the change, but the etymology is there.
(IIRC, IANAL(ingust), etc.)
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I’m not completely sold on the usefulness of reducing ambiguity through more pronouns. If it really matters, just don’t use pronouns, and repeat the nouns instead. German, with all its gendered nouns, has this “advantage” of enabling greater pronoun use when writing about all sorts of subjects, not just people, and abuse of this is responsible for some notoriously hard to read prose.
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Gendered pronouns reduce ambiguity a little, but it’s still possible to have to fiddle with a sentence because you’re got more than one person of the same gender.
Are there any languages (natural or artificial) which are really good at making antecedents for pronouns clear?
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A suggestion by a friend of mine, when we were considering the goal of creating pronouns with this disambiguation goal, was to have the pronoun be the first consonant sound of the actual name plus ‘eir’, ‘ey’, you get the idea, just replacing ‘th’ in the plural. So it would be “John and Phillip were walking down the street, when suddenly jey kissed phem.” Which, I mean, it takes a couple minutes to start parsing that correctly in real time, but is generally intuitive, and doesn’t require much information (you need to know the name of your target, but since it’s typically antecedent, that’s a small cost).
It’s a lot of extra information that, in practice, is rarely needed to actually disambiguate. And adding this level of agreement between words seems malicious — I wouldn’t want to introduce another grammatical agreement constraint on English (like, plurals in nouns and verbs, “the duck goes” vs. “the ducks go” is sorta a tongue-twister of confusion).
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As someone who has a terrible time remembering names, I would rather not need them in order to use pronouns.
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To some extent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logophoricity
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a language where pronouns in subordinate clauses agree with the case of their antecedents (vaguely similar to suffix absorption / Suffixaufnahme, where genitive phrases agree with the case of their possessors), but I don’t know of one.
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There are natural languages that are really, really good at making the antecedents of pronouns clear: sign languages. Essentially, when you introduce an entity into the discourse, you do the sign in a certain place. When you then use a pronoun to refer back to that entity, you point at that place. There’s also a lot of iconicity involved in that, for example, taller people or social superiors of others tend to get assigned a place higher up in space.
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Many people dislike “they” because they view it as plural, so they’ve invented various nonstandard singular gender-neutral pronouns. Unfortunately, nonstandard gender-neutral pronouns are sort of falling into this problem.
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Doesn’t the singular they date back to at least Chaucer? I seem to recall it being used by Shakespeare, Austin, and (I believe) EB White.
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I tend to trust Geoff Pullum on these things, and his summary is that singular “they” is perfectly normal and centuries established when “they” refers to an unbound variable, as in “everyone loves their mother.” The novelty is using “they” to refer to a bound variable as in “Steve loves their mother.”
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The Correct gender-neutral pronoun is hän, with the full range of case inflections borrowed over from Finnish.
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OK, let’s have a programming thread.
One time I was a little interested in playing with Urbit, or at least very confused as to what Urbit was trying to be, but then I learned its author was also Mencius Moldbug and then decided to find other things to play with.
So. What is the deal with Urbit anyway? Is it basically just Unlambda?
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Urbit is, uh, it’s a thing.
The elevator pitch for Urbit is
“Imagine every person on Earth being able to run on a single, infinitely scalable computer. This software allows you to run on that computer, by adding your computer to it. Oh, and its filesystem has awesome, magic versioning support.”
Everybody is actually running on a shared filesystem. Also, it’s all built off of a tiny, weird, formally specified VM called Nock, which (Moldbug hopes) will make everything provably secure because deep down it’s all running on something so simple and logical its spec fits on a T-shirt. Nock is also nightmarishly obscure, esoteric, bizarre, and hard to program in, because it’s written by Moldbug. It’s also ludicrously slow and inefficient, but that’s OK because in the Distant Future there will be a Very Smart Compiler that plugs in “logically equivalent” bits of C code in place of slow Nock code. (Never mind that this loses all the minimal goodness having everything run on a provable, formal language gets you)
Then that gets compiled into a less terrible, but equally weird as shit and Moldbuggery language called Watt. Watt is very strange. “Start gibbering and mumbling the names of dark gods” strange.
And then on top of all that is Urbit. Urbit is exactly what you’d get if a neoreactionary designed an OS to enable neoreactionary politics. It’s also an IRC client, social media thingy, and stores literally every computation it ever does in the Giant Shared Filesystem so you can just step back any computation arbitrarily far.
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Wow. That sounds awesome, in that lolcode kind of way. Is there any way I can check out the Urbit stack ? I want to see if I can crash it by printing “hello world”. Their website says Urbit is “unlaunched”, which is consistent with the neoreactionary paradigm, but that doesn’t help me… which, I guess is also consistent with the paradigm, but still.
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Small conceptual core supporting a surface-incomprehensible language, forever hoping that sufficiently smart compilers will patch over the inefficiencies… sounds a bit like APL and I notice that the mythical sufficiently smart compiler for APL has not emerged for 50 years (the closest thing is, interestingly, vector/stream libraries for Haskell). I think I’d looked at Urbit sometime before and found the part about “in Nock you add numbers by counting one at a time using the inductive definition of addition” and that made me think of Unlambda.
“Urbit is exactly what you’d get if a neoreactionary designed an OS to enable neoreactionary politics.”
That’s a really provocative sentence, but I don’t know what it means. What features afford neoreaction?
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Setsize: J is an APL derivative typable on existing keyboards, which is performant enough for regular use. Might be worth taking a look at if you are actually interested in APL-type languages, and not just snarking ;-)
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Yes, I’m familiar with J. “Usable for many applications” is not what I mean by “sufficiently smart compiler” though.
To expand on that definition: The APL style of structuring computations as operations between large arrays is conceptually elegant. A naive-interpreter implementation of APL performs a sequence of array operations by allocating in memory intermediate arrays for intermediate results, even if the results are only used transiently. Compared to compiled C code written using explicit loops, a naive APL interpreter uses more memory, exhibits worse cache locality and this often means that programs are bottlenecked on memory bandwidth.
However, there are approaches to compiling conceptually element array-oriented code to have the speed of C-like code, and the most forward progress appears to be happening in the Haskell community (E.g.)
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Employed Urbit developer here, AMA; to address a few of the points mentioned:
Nock is obscure, esoteric, bizarre, and hard to program in because it’s an assembly language for a tiny VM, political offiliation is somewhat secondary. It does do crazy things like natively speaking church arithmetic, also as part of the “tiny” goal: the idea was to reduce computation to the smallest possible component parts, and all math can be built on top of increment.
As far as the C code preventing multiplication from being O(n^2), it is far less mystical and proof-oriented than you imply. Nock code signals the name of a pure function it is trying to run, the interpreter runs the corresponding low level code, and yields the result in place of stepping through the specified computation. While these snippets are extensively tested and we have no intention of declaring the system ready until everything is consistent(hence the unlaunch), this is dynamic knowledge and not backed by the compiler attempting to be clever about anything.
Watt, or rather Hoon as it is now called, compiles *to* nock, and is the most imperative-minded functional language I’ve ever seen, possibly tying with Rust. The latter does benefit in recognizability from algol syntax, where Hoon’s comparison to APL is rather apt, symbols being used extensively for structure.
Urbit is the operating system layer, and consequently the least stable. I will note that the “IRC thingy” has made its way to userspace(as has the shell), the only feature I can think of related to social networks is that each node has a pronounceable global name, and that the Giant Shared Filesystem is strictly a sum of its component parts. Individual event history is stored locally and serves primarily as a backup to checkpointing.
While we are technically in unsupporting dark mode, the public domain source code is on github, and I believe an automated system issuing identities can be found by googling the company name.
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Ok, this is pretty informative, thank you. So I’ve got to ask the obvious question (and please forgive me if this is already answered in some FAQ): why invent Hoon ? Why not just go with Lisp ?
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A mortal fear of parens ;)
My personal complaints about lisp are lack of a proper type system and unavoidable rightward drift: in hoon, an expression like
“`
(if (eq 1 2)
(add 3 4)
(dec
(add 5
(sub 10 6))))
“`
Becomes
“`
?: =(1 2)
(add 3 4)
%- dec
%+ add 5
(sub 10 6)
“`
With the diglyphs (formally known as “runes”) starting with ‘%’ denoting fixed-arity function application.
The utility of static type checking is less evocative, but it lets us do things like not confuse timestamps with utf-8 strings despite them both being stored as bignums, and use “improper” lists all over the place without a hanging spectre of the tails of tuples being confused for further elements in them. And not to start a flame war, but it does have the effect of causing entire classes of bugs to disappear, or rather to be caught at compile time.
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Ironically for a comment about rightward drift, wordpress ate my spacing (though the result was still valid lisp and valid hoon). Take two:
”’
(if (eq 1 2)
(add 3 4)
(dec
(add 5
(sub 10 6))))
”’
vs.
”’
?: =(1 2)
(add 3 4)
%- dec
%+ add 5
(sub 10 6)
”’
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I suppose I give up. http://pastebin.com/ba62XaKb
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Urbit is Moldbug reinventing LISP, badly. I am not even being unkind, see e.g.:
http://moronlab.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html
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Good going, Ozy! I hope you can keep up with the inevitable shitstorms.
In this thread, can we talk specifically about how fucking awful scientific racists are for not caring about history?
http://www.donotlink.com/casn
Like, look at that! Would he really insist that Eastern Slavs of all people lack “affective empathy” compared to Germans (our own stereotype is that we have far too much of it and wallow in it instead of constructive action)? Or has he read a Japanese work of fiction from the last 100 years?
My god, these people should take their delusions of superiority and shove them. Even the “nice” ones are so fucking horrible in ways that have nothing to do with genetics. (See: HBD Chick).
Fuck, man.
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That is your crimethink? (The article is Affective Empathy, An Evolutionary Mistake?, by Peter Frost, at utz.com.) I found it interesting.
History is not science. It is at best suggestive of good lines of inquiry. I.e., I think you are suggesting Germans must lack empathy because of the holocaust. But then by the same token, slavs must also lack empathy because of the holodomor. Can we say anything about the relative levels of empathy? No. I am afraid history (or Japanese fiction) only gets you so far.
I’ll agree that HBD Chick is horrible in a way unrelated to genetics: because she does not capitalize. It makes me angry just to see her writing. I know lots of knuckledragging scientific racists like her, but I don’t read her because of that.
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>No. I am afraid history (or Japanese fiction) only gets you so far.
Further than no history or anti-history!
>I’ll agree that HBD Chick is horrible in a way unrelated to genetics: because she does not capitalize. It makes me angry just to see her writing. I know lots of knuckledragging scientific racists like her, but I don’t read her because of that.
I…
What is it even like to wake up every morning to being the sort of person who cares more about capitalization than about dehumanization?
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That article actually seemed to me to be neither history nor science. Many of his assertions are completely unfounded (high empathy supports a market economy? How does this stack up with the conditions of early capitalism? Western Europeans are suffering from “aid fatigue?” The fact that the Chinese have cultural sayings about being empathic supports the idea that they don’t have high affective empathy, because Westerners…don’t have any tradition of ethical thinking that instructs people to be empathic? What?)–and beyond that, based on the studies he cites that I could access, it looks rather like he’s cherry-picking his sources at best, and really misinterpreting them at worst.
Take his argument about Euporean marriage patterns driving evolution. I can’t get the studies by Hallam or Seccombe that he’s cited, since they’re in books, but each is over 20 years old (meaning that the field of both evolutionary psychology and early history is likely to have changed significantly since they were published), and the Hajnal study he’s using them to support (published in 1965) only makes claims about patterns of marriage in Europe in the last 200 years (he also claims that they may have gradually begun to take root early, somewhere between 1400-1650). It really looks like he’s cherry-picking old studies to try and support his idea that empathy was somehow evolutionarily selected for in Western Europe, since obviously it would be impossible to argue that it was selected for over a span of only 200 years.
He’s also cited the timeframe for acceleration in positive gene selection as “about 10,000 years ago,” where the study by Hawks that he cites in support of that figure puts it at about, oh, 40,000 years. Which is unfortunately just a little bit too early to plausibly argue that evolution was somehow being “driven by culture.” (Even at 10,000 years ago, it seems silly to argue that culture was a more significant pressure on evolution than, like, not dying of exposure/starvation/malaria).
Uh, and I have now expended much more time than I wanted to debunking this article. Oops.
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Would it be possible to add the SSC comment highlighter?
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I’ll make Scott explain to me how to use it!
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OK, here is how to use it: put the text from this in your theme’s footer. Then posts will look like this (except with the box in the top-left collapsed by default).
Same feature set as at SSC: show/hide buttons; new comments get a green border and “~new~” added to them; floating thing where you can change the date after which comments get highlighted and which you can expand to get a clickable list of new comments.
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That was a thing I made. It won’t directly copy over, but I’ll see about porting it when I get a moment, and can then explain to Ozy how to install it if they’d like (it’s very simple) or install it myself if they want to let me have temporary admin priviledges.
Ozy, if you want, email me at {my handle}@gmail and I can probably make this happen, provided you don’t mess with your theme very often. One note: for it to work, you’re going to have to turn off paginated comments. Google suggests you can do that under Admin/Settings/Discussion/”Other comment settings”/”break comments into pages” -> uncheck.
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On Wednesday,Hollaback released a video of a woman walking through New York City, receiving “more than 100″ catcalls in 10 hours of walking. The video was praised by feminist media, who called a stunningly accurate presentation of women’s real life experiences.
Until they released it was “accidentally racist.” You see, while there were some white guys harassing the woman, the majority appeared to blacks or latinos. Also, there were zero Asian catcallers. This doesn’t jive with the SJ narrative that “harassment involves people of all backgrounds” so now Hollaback is backpedaling.
The official story is that OF COURSE lots of white dudes harassed her, but “for whatever reason, a lot of what they said was in passing, or off camera,” or was ruined by a siren or other noise. They’d like to show you the footage of all the white guys who didn’t make it into the final video, but it’s deleted. We’ll just have to trust them.
Also, Hanna Roison says “if you find yourself editing out all the catcalling white guys, maybe you should try another take.” File-drawer effect much?
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My file drawer alarms also went off when I heard that. On the other hand, the video’s creator says (http://gothamist.com/2014/10/30/how_the_100_catcalls_in_10_hours_st.php) that 6 or 7 out of the 18 catcallers in the video were white. In New York City, 35% of people are non-Hispanic white, 25% black, 28% Hispanic, 12% Asian. That suggests the catcallers included weren’t disproportionately white and non-Hispanic; if anything, the opposite may have been the case. However, the black and Hispanic catcallers in the video were more visible and intrusive on average, which explains the video’s perception.
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Point of order, who are the “they” you are referring to who decided it was racist? I’ve seen it posted on a lot of feminism related sites, and never saw that mentioned until now. So it seems to be at est a small subset of the people who originally supported it rather than a mass changing of mind as you imply.
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Hann Roison was the big name but you can find more by googling hollaback+racist+video.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/10/29/catcalling_video_hollaback_s_look_at_street_harassment_in_nyc_edited_out.html
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This is hilarious on so many levels.
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So. There’s a body of work that gender constructionist people like to quote that basically says that indigenous tribes have all sorts of different gender constructions and so gender is arbitrary, or at least, super malleable.
Tooby and Cosmides seem consider anthropology as ideologically biased and say that these cases have typically been misinterpreted, with researchers focusing on irregularities, instead of looking deeper for the regularities, like scientists aught to. Even less hard line biologists I’ve read don’t seem to put much faith in the ‘I went to the jungle alone and found a village where hamburgers eat people’ kind of research.
Does anyone know of a good discussion of the anthropological literature by someone with an evo psych background? I feel like the debate may be ignoring something important.
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Is there a verb that means “to perform cunnilingus on”? That is:
Fellatio -> Fellate
Cunnilingus -> ???
(If not, then I declare that the English-speaking world has gone too long without this verb (it, at times, makes things unbearably stilted), and would like to nominate “cunnilingue.”)
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I believe “eat out” is standard. It’s a phrasal verb!
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Yes, but it often sounds sufficiently stilted that it breaks immersion, which is particularly bad in most contexts where “cunnilingue” would actually get used.
Also, I with Bugmaster.
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I like “cunnilingue”. “Eat out” is too metaphorical for my tastes.
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19th century erotica used the French word “gamahuche” for both “to perform fellatio” and “to perform cunnilingus”. (19th century erotica also used “spend” for orgasm, which seems better than “come” to me…)
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“gamahuche” is a really gross-sounding word.
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How is the last syllable pronounced? “-you”?
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I think of it as silent, so it’s pronounced as “cunniling”, in much the lame way “tongue” is pronounced “tung”. I have no real reason for this, other than it feels intuitively right (perhaps my system 1 thinks that taking the pronunciation rules from “tongue” is a sensible course of action here.)
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The -gue ending is usually a noun in English, isn’t it? Can you make it look a bit more verby? Cunniling?
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We notice “tongue” can be used as a verb. In addition to having perhaps inadvertantly answered the original question, “cunniling” seems to be a better choice than “cunnilingue”.
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I’ve heard HBD people talk endlessly about mean IQ scores by race, but I haven’t seen them do the same for standard deviation. Do they have numbers for that somewhere? Do all ethnic populations have a 15-point σ?
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I came across the claim somewhere that African-Americans have an SD of 13. I can’t find that anymore because I just saw it in passing on an HBD blog and I’m not an HBDite.
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There is very, very mixed evidence on differences in SD by race (as there is mixed evidence on differences in SD by sex –– the sex difference in SD is NOT an established, uncontroversial fact!). I don’t really know what to make of the research.
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I’ve only just started reading rationalist and HBD stuff, but I would be very interested to read something, aimed at a layman, about existing controversy in the field wrt to sex difference in SD, if anyone has links. The only thing I’ve seen was by an economist who pointed out that sex difference in SD was much bigger as little as 50 years ago, so there’s not a compelling reason to believe that the current difference represents our true nature.
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“The only thing I’ve seen was by an economist who pointed out that sex difference in SD was much bigger as little as 50 years ago”
Do you have a link for this?
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OK. Here is some of the conflicting evidence.
The original Stanford Binet did not show a gap in SD by gender. Among university students tested with the RPM, there is a mean difference favoring men but no SD difference (actually, RPM studies generally show no difference in SD). The SAT shows a sex difference in SD, but it has narrowed substantially over time, at least for gifted children (not sure about the general population).
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Nick T, I found it! I had mis-remembered 15 as 50. The author of this blog refers to something called the Benbow-Stanley study which found in 1980 that there 13 boys for every 1 girl scoring over 700 in their SAT exam. In 2005 they found 2.8 boys for every 1 girl.
http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.ca/2011/08/re-post-greater-male-variability.html
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[Warning: I am not an expert on IQ, just an interested layperson.]
From what I understand the data are not as clear on differences in standard deviation by race. I have heard some speculations that Asian SD is smaller than white SD, but they were just that — speculations. I don’t know how much they’re backed up by data. Differences in SD, however, are the most significant differences in IQ distributions between males and females. (Females have a smaller SD.)
Tangentially related: there has been significant research, e.g. by Arthur Jensen, on how well low IQ whites function compared to blacks with comparable IQ. (The whites do worse, probably because their low IQ tends to be associated with other genetic problems.) So people are interested in things besides mere mean IQ, and recognize that IQ can play out differently in different racial groups in other ways.
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Did you choose this post title with Halloween in mind? Because it nearly gave me a heart attack
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During the recent GamerGate debacle, some feminists and other social justice activists seem to enjoy using a stereotype of evil misogynist gamers as men in their 30’s with poor social and self-care skills, living in their mothers’ basements, unpopular and sexually and romantically unsuccessful (and frustrated). This stereotype is then used as a target for contempt and hatred.
It also happens to be pretty much the typical stereotype of an adult autistic person.
It baffles me that they can’t see this. I mean, although the stereotype doesn’t explicitly mention disability, I’m fairly sure that *everybody* would agree that it’d be racist stereotyping if we stereotyped “gang member” as “someone named Mohammed, who enjoys gangsta rap and basketball”, even though that stereotype doesn’t explicitly mention race.
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I’ve seen this opinion around a lot in the last month and FWIW, I had previously thought that the stereotype of the adult autistic person was incredibly neat and tidy with high levels of self-care skills? I was also under the impression that autistic people actually care deeply about the feelings of others but have trouble discovering exactly what those feelings are? I guess I imagine the stereotype to be Richard Ayoade in the IT crowd.
Perhaps I am an outlier, but I didn’t see any contempt for autistic people in the ‘misogynist gamer’ stereotype. It seemed to me that the stereotype was describing someone who was perfectly capable of consideration for others and basic hygiene but who had chosen to reject both humanity and hygiene in pursuit of elitism within games. The kind of person who says ‘get rekt’ and ‘i totally raped you’ any time they win anything.
I also remember when Obama was voted in for the first time and during the debates I read some articles from SJ people about how calling Obama ‘articulate’ was racist because it implied ‘…for a black man’ as if that was something surprising. I was mortified because that interpretation would never have occurred to me in 100 years.
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A bit meta, but I recently had an argument with an acquaintance about linking to LW because of the prevalence of people posting sexist/racist views for the sake of being contrarian, and the community allowing it.
My position is that morality aside, most of those claims are sufficiently obviously empirically false that they wouldn’t convince people so the harms were outweighed by the general benefit of allowing free discussion and the occasional interesting things that come out of discussions that would otherwise be censored.
Thoughts?
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Besides ‘convincing people,’ the harm of allowing people to post sexist and racist views is that it may drive away people who find reading or arguing with sexist and racist views unpleasant enough that they’d rather just skip reading LW entirely, regardless of what other good posts and comments may exist; I have had that YIKES NO feeling in some SSC threads, and on balance I still find SSC worth reading, but with less moderation the balance would probably tip the other way.
I mean, if you think “If you’re that sensitive we don’t need your opinions anyway,” that’s fine, but it is a position that will drive some people (and some views, and some discussions) away.
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Concur.
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It also seems to frequently put people in a position where they’re either arguing at length with a claim that’s “obviously empirically false” (of course, what you perceive as obviously false may vary from person to person) in order to disprove it, or letting it stand unchallenged. I’m not sure if this is ultimately a net good or not, but I have a feeling it probably drives away people who aren’t comfortable ignoring the sexism/racism/etc, but also don’t want to spend thousands of words disproving it.
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bem: oh yes, I used to feel like that a lot. Part of why I left.
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Why not just give posts the function of spoiler alerts for triggering posts?
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Lambert: to extrapolate from myself and partly from Matthias-senpai (aka Oligopsony): the people like me would still feel the burden and the duty of arguing, the more so the fewer of us there are.
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From my point of view, Less Wrong, and, to a lesser extent, SSC, are safe spaces. Except that rather than being safe spaces for women or minorities or social justice activists, they’re safe spaces for high-quality no-holds-barred debate. I would be sad if these safe places became unsafe for me, but I am not presumptuous enough to make any demands. In fact, if the goal of Less Wrong is to drive more donations toward MIRI, then sanitizing the discussion may be the rational thing to do — more readers equals more donations.
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No holds barred? But what if, say, using pathos with ethos and logos in a secondary role is a really valuable and important mode of argument to have, and the people most likely to use it are also most likely to be deterred by the existing culture? Seems like the object-level lack of restrictions can be its own restriction.
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I did mention “high-quality”, so either a). you should get incredibly good at pathos, or b). you should use logos to prove why relying primarily even on mediocre-quality pathos is a good idea. Both kinds of conversations sound interesting to me, though I could be in the minority on this.
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Don’t worry multiheaded, that’s not the case. Ethos and pathos are worthless, no need to fret.
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I’ve seen very few people posting sexist/racist views on LW for the sake of being contrarian.
Not every negative comment about a race or sex is
— false
— sexist or racist, or
— posted just to be contrarian
and even considering that, exactly how prevalent do you mean by “prevalent”?
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All negative comments that generalize a race or gender are racist/sexist by definition?
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That would mean that, for instance, a statement that truthfully describes the average IQ test scores among different racists countds as racist.
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The discussions of pick up at slate star codex were interesting, that is definitely something that could be discussed here.
On a separate topic, I was chatting to a male friend about feminist creep in our society, i.e. the idea that over time society moves to the left which includes progressively more extreme feminist positions becoming mainstream. I was wondering whether this is benign or something to actually worry about; so I tried to come up with a “femenazi worst case scenario” – if the most extreme feminists got their way, what would life be like for an average medium or low status male? The condition is it has to be something realistic that people would plausibly go along with.
Anyway, I couldn’t really think of anything, but suggestions are welcome.
FWIW my friend thought feminism is a self-limiting process because eventually a significant number of women start to criticize it when it goes too far, as has happened recently with the #notafeminist thing.
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“femenazi worst case scenario”
Oh! I read one of those once. It was basically “the privileged” as an untouchable caste, living in constant 1984-style fear of slipping as they slaved away to repay their collective crimes.
It was also intended as (rather bad) comedy/satire, and featured a fair amount of … racism? … with everyone *except* the privileged being a homogenous mass of black queer folk all kicking the shit out of the protagonist, IIRC. Still, with a little worldbuilding it could definitely be shored up.
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There’s like an entire genre of 4chan post that starts with one of those settings, and ends with the male protagonist doing some chivalrous action that gets perceived as misogynist, which is “literally rape” and unleashes so much magical oppression-power that it turns the whole world back into patriarchy. The “defeated” woman says “th-thank you”, and the protagonist replies “it was my privilege”.
They’re compiled in the /r/talesofprivilege subreddit. Not all of them are dystopias, a lot just start from a normal interaction with a “feminazi” and then get weird.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t someone advocating the reduction of the male population by a factor of 10 ? And I’ve heard more than one feminist say that they’d like to eliminate men altogether. So, your worst-case scenario is pretty much that, IMO.
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You’re forgetting the suggestion that they could, instead, be used as slave labour: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/10/30/race-and-gender-in-the-open-thread/comment-page-1/#comment-53
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I don’t know… isn’t slave labour pretty inefficient, as compared to all of the automation that would become available in the far future — i.e., around the same time when the technology (and social will) to fully replace men comes online ?
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Is it realistic to expect a world in which men are eliminated?
I want realistic scenarios, not tinfoil-hat fantasy.
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Well there is that thing where the Y chromosome is supposedly degrading. Not sure what to think of that myself.
I can imagine a world where fewer and fewer healthy men are born, do to genetic {mumble mumble}, and thus scientists master female-female breeding. And then sooner or later the last man dies and there is no more Y in the human species.
But then, there are still trans men, and other XX people who have masculine tendencies.
Here’s the thing abut that: if you’ve ever been in a dyke club, you would find that such people are often popular. So maybe they reproduce a lot and slowly over time we form some new version of the gender binary, but not based so much on physical sex.
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“which includes progressively more extreme feminist positions becoming mainstream”
I’m sorry, but if this sentence is the first time you’re hearing about wages for housework, your hypothesis is bunk.
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I don’t understand, are you trying to tell a joke or is there some serious “wages for housework” debate that I’m not aware of?
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The idea that women who do housework at home for their husbands should somehow be paid wages for it has been seriously introduced.
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But the vast majority of even the vaguely progressive people are somehow ignorant of it, much more so than with the non-economic “equality” issues. Instead, we get “Lean In”. Lean out, I say!
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Is “pay for housework” a fleshed-out proposal or an ideal to be aspired to?
A market with exactly one buyer and one seller seems unlikely to be good at setting prices, though probably better than one set by the government. Not to mention the transaction costs like income tax; shuffling money between husband and wife like this reduces their ability to handle the shared expenses of a family.
I’m not really attacking it on those grounds, I think it’s crazy for entirely different reasons, just confused as to how this is supposed to work in practice.
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You may want to familiarize yourself with James A. Donald’s left singularity thesis. His model is that leftism (which includes feminism) amounts to holier-than-thou signalling which escalates ever leftward, with bad consequences for those who fail to keep up.
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What are said consequences?
I’ll take a look.
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That is the *worst* possible link to use to describe it, and links to the worst person. Why not More Right or something?
Basically, the idea is that a society with a big leftward movement in it likely has a group of leftist theorists who come up with theory more based on applying ideology and a sense of “we should be further left than we are” than looking at the world and seeing oppression.
The worry is that:
1. These people may move leftward at an accelerating rate.
2. There is no limit to what they can criticize, and will eventually criticize anything.
3. What they mandate may have nothing to do with what most people do, but will become considered normal.
The fear is that there will be some singularity of instantaneous increasing leftism to the point at which everyone must die for considering anything better than anything else. The French Revolution and the Khmer Rouge are commonly cited as examples of this — both became really dysfunctional and so weren’t able to expand too much: The French Revolution spawned Napoleon who solidified the standards at some point into a permanent New Order, and the Khmer Rouge were dysfunctional and seemed uninterested in the outside world.
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The First Republic itself was also really very competent in some aspects. And as long as we’re talking about the vague new conservative buzzword of “social technology”, it seems to have made some very successful innovations, like, at the very least. forcibly doing away with the parasitic old aristocracy.
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Not to mention the “carrière ouverte aux talents” – the concept of meritocracy, rather than aristocracy or loyalty to superiors as being the primary means of advancement.
While it was far from perfect, it’s pretty clear that Napoleon’s marshals are one of the greatest groupings of military talent ever assembled. Combining a nascent meritocracy (which worked reasonably well at junior to mid-ranking levels) with Lazare Carnot choosing who got senior promotions, it’s hard to argue that there was a level of organisational competence there.
While the civil administration wasn’t in the league of the military, they still came out with the Code Napoleon, and the departmental administration of France that has lasted more than two centuries without significant change.
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Does anyone have thoughts on arranged marriage as someone whose culture has no tradition for it?
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I think that it’s one of the things that could be better than the current mainstream Western idea of marriage being for high-aspirations poorly-defined-commitment unclear-expectations monogamous romantic love.
What we have now is so much both-of-worst-worlds that the atheist conservatives/neoreactionaries (like Sister Y) and the radical feminists (I’d say I am one? except that I’m a shitlord personally, but I agree with a lot of radfem theory) can easily find convincing arguments against it. I think I kinda approve of the creeping semi-automated arranged marriage through dating networks.
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What exactly is a shitlord ? Do you run a waste disposal facility ? :-/
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I used to think arranged marriage was abhorrent, but I’m not so sure anymore.
Now that I am happily married myself, I can see that a lot of the building blocks of a happy and successful long-term relationship are intentional on the part of the parties, rather than arising out of the magical wellspring of romantic passion. Living with another person’s flaws, anxieties, insecurities, and foibles is hard work and requires constant effortful application of empathy. Love is a choice, or at least many of the elements of this type of long-term commitment-style love are choices.
Because I feel this way, I am not convinced that the lack of an initial passionate “spark” is fatal to the happiness of married people. Some people who are in arranged marriages have written about the happiness they have experienced in those marriages even absent that “spark,” and it comes from living and growing together with another human being and allowing love to develop together with mutual respect, appreciation over the course of years of seeing each other at your best and worst.
For the task of choosing a spouse, it’s conceivable to me that some sort of deliberative council consisting of your parents and the other responsible adults in your community who have a stake in the choice of your spouse might actually do a better job than you. There may be some benefit to leveraging the collective wisdom and life experiences of these people in making this decision. The presence or absence of a “spark” or immediate romantic chemistry may be less important than the things that would be taken into consideration by the Council of Grown-Ups. Of course, the CGU might also suffer from horribly misaligned incentives, or might just be totally incompetent, or might be terrible in a host of other ways. But humans don’t seem that great at choosing their own mates either, so I’m not sure the CGU is necessarily worse.
I can see arranged marriage having some benefit from a sort of nudgey-paternalist applied-behavioral-economics perspective – in a lot of cases it’s best for people to make their own choices about their lives, but in some cases, it’s better for them to be protected from their own choices. Spouse selection might be one of the latter cases.
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I disagree with most of that!
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Yeah, I probably do too – I’m not saying I actually believe that arranged marriage is good, I’m just providing, for discussion’s sake, some reasons that I, as a person to whom it is culturally foreign, hesitate to condemn it as categorically bad.
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I’ve heard about arranged marriages where the principals have a veto, so they’re unlikely to end up married to people they actively dislike. Still not perfect, but it takes some of the edge off.
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“I don’t want to acquire a neoreactionary community on my blog.”
I think they have a cream for that.
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All right, I think I can find some Terrible Gender Things to ask:
1. Has there ever been a straight person with a paraphilia – for their own gender?
1.1 How would we know if we found one?
1.2 I know it used to be a popular theory that homosexuality was a fetish. Now this is considered Officially Discredited; I seem to recall that the reason is something to do with statistical analysis of long-term changeability in the different populations. How clear-cut is the evidence? Am I misremembering? Is there other proof (beside self-reported introspection?)
1.2.1. Actually, this is one case in which I’m deeply uncertain about trusting introspection. Looking at homosexuals historically; they often identified in quite different ways based on the worldview of the time. But am I wrong about this?
2. The usual argument is that gender reassignment surgery is the most effective treatment for gender dysphoria. I’ve made it myself. How good were the randomized controlled trials? (There were trials, right? I can’t google properly on this device.)
2.1Are there any serious objections to this, that I’ve missed because I’m in a bubble?
2.2 Has anyone tried controlled trials on giving gender reassignment surgery to *non-* transgender people? Maybe it would help everyone with depressive tendencies – get them out of a rut, perhaps. Heck, maybe it would help everyone, or some serious fraction of the civilian population.
2.3 The strongest evidence for or against the “cis by default” hypothesis or the – I’m not sure what the name is, the “any brain in the wrong body would be trans” hypothesis – would *seem* to be giving a randomized sample of the population some kind of reconstructive surgery, ideally without their knowledge. I know there was one famous case where a boy was assigned female as an infant (after an accident) and later reverted. Do we have examples from any other sources?
2.3.1. I assume an actual controlled trial would be too much to ask, right? If there was one, it would be Big News, right?
3. From a utilitarian perspective, how do you think we should count sadism and masochism? Discuss.
3.1. Net positive, I assume, as long as it’s SS&C; but I’m interested in the math. Better than with no pain? Worse? Equal? What about another hypothetical SS&C form of pain, with no sex stuff?
4. What, exactly, is the difference between someone who is “polyamorous” and someone who isn’t? I see some people talking about how it isn’t for everyone … is it purely a difference in lifestyle/perspective, or a fetish/habit/whatever, or an “orientation”?
4.1. Is polyamory a better idea for some people than others because of (say) emotional maturity?
4.2. Is polyamory a better idea now than in other times? Worse?
4.3. If possible, should we all become polyamorous? Monogamous? Celibate?
4.3.1 Does your answer change for the marginal individual changing, rather than “us all”?
5. Some people have paraphilias that can barely be assuaged without unethical activities, or only in unethical ways. Others have fetishes for things that are even easier to obtain than normal sex. How should we treat deliberately modifying these? Is there a risk of wireheading? Should we all be doing this?
5.1. Does your answer change for pedophiles? Bisexuals? Gay people?
5.2. If possible, should we *all* become bisexual? Heterosexual? Asexual?
5.2.1. Does your answer change for the marginal individual changing, rather than “us all”?
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For 3 I say yes to SSC S&M because I’m a Preference Utilitarian and some people prefer to be whipped.
BTW: Has anyone else noticed that SSC is both “Safe Sane & Consensual” and “Slate Star Codex”?
I’m a bit confused for 5 since, instead of listing paraphilias, you listed sexual orientations (unless you’ve decided to lump the two together).
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Nah, I was wondering if people’s answer was different for paraphilias vs. orientations.
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OK. In that case, self modify in the direction that makes your life most pleasant, barring negative externalities.
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Re (1), there are people who date and desire a variety of sex acts with the opposite gender, but also have extremely specific fantasies involving the same gender.
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“What about another hypothetical SS&C form of pain, with no sex stuff?”
Dude, people do that all the time!
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As in, motivated by something else. A medieval monk whipping himself, for example.
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Or highly-demanding yoga classes, or modern fight clubs…
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Not sure about yoga, but fight clubs are a good one. (Assuming we’re not talking about karate classes.)
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Interesting trivia: Chuck Paluhniuk (who wrote the book Fight Club) was gay, so the homoeroticism may have been present in the concept from the start.
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cf. Jack Donovan
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In an interview he outright said that he wanted to see how much he could get away with in view of the target audience.
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1: Would cis straight women with autogynephilia count as this? Because I remember there being a study that these exist, in numbers. (Lost the link, though)
1.2-1.2.1: Well, there have been different social constructions of gayness in different places/parts of history, and one of the interesting things is trying to figure out how much people’s behavior/desires differ in response to this. But given the historical slant to your question, it seems a little bit weird to try to map gayness onto fetishism, since a sexual fetish itself is a historical concept, and it seems like it can mean a couple different things? Like, the conventional definition is sexual attraction to an inanimate object, but it’s often used for attraction to people or bodies that aren’t considered conventionally beautiful.
2.2-2.3.1: None of this is going to happen, because you could never get an ethics board to approve the experiment. Also, I can’t help but think that, given that surgery is invasive and requires a certain amount of recovery time, that giving people “surprise” sexual reassignment surgery would probably be traumatic for reasons potentially unrelated to the shape of one’s genitalia, and that this would skew your results pretty badly.
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“Would cis straight women with autogynephilia count as this? Because I remember there being a study that these exist, in numbers. (Lost the link, though)”
Ooh, that’s a great example, thank you.
“But given the historical slant to your question, it seems a little bit weird to try to map gayness onto fetishism, since a sexual fetish itself is a historical concept, and it seems like it can mean a couple different things?”
Paraphilia would probably be a different term. I’m just faintly worried we’ll run into The Otherkin Problem, regardless of what the actual explanation is (and I doubt it’s paraphilias.)
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What exactly is The Otherkin Problem? I’m not familiar.
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Well, almost everyone is highly skeptical of Otherkin existing – there’s an incredibly low prior for something like that. But they claim to have subjective experiences; and subjective experiences are, obviously, very difficult for anyone else to observe.
So we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of having to tell someone that they’re wrong about what they think and feel. Not lying, *wrong.* Which would usually violate the standard liberal rules of discourse and useful habits of thought for avoiding the Typical Mind Fallacy.
(Well, we don’t have to tell them personally, as such, but you know what I mean.)
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Oh, I see. I guess my assumptions about that are less “Otherkin need to be convinced that they’re wrong” and more, “well, they’re probably experiencing *something.*” Mostly because that seems to be the best way of minimizing harm in this case. And I really dislike arguing that other people are suffering from false consciousness.
So, back to the original topic, would it be right to say that you’re worried that you’ll run into a situation where you have some, or even the majority of, gay people saying, “I’ve been attracted to people of my own sex for all of my life, I was born this way, I can’t imagine changing etc” in the face of persuasive scientific evidence that suggests that homosexuality is caused by environment, or fluid, or something similar, and you’ll have to contradict people’s subjective picture of their experiences to get at the Correct View of Things?
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4.3: Society must enforce monogamy; that is the only way in which society can exist. Men are polygamous, while women are hypergamous. Polyamory always devolves into harems, with a few sultans and many eunuchs. Men are the builders of civilization; they must be incentivized to build civilization. Men are only incentivized to create wealth if they can pass it on to children of assured paternity; otherwise, their time horizon is only as long as their life expectancy. Having children of unknown paternity does not decrease time preference, because then you run into the tragedy of the commons. Monogamous marriage privatizes the commons of posterity. Without posterity, men do not work, do not build, do not save, and do not fight. They live in grass huts or in their parents’ basements. Monogamy is virtuous, polyamory is degenerate.
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I think you’re describing a scenario where:
1. women have no control over fertility and are pregnant or lactating for most of their lives.
2. power is concentrated in the hands of very few men, representing very few families.
3. families control a daughters destiny – whether or not she goes into the harem isn’t her choice
Some modern factors that might prevent your scenario ‘all polyamory devolves into harems; civilisation crumbles without monogamy':
1. Women earn their own money and control their own fertility, drastically reducing their need to find a man to provide resources while they are incapacitated by pregnacy.
2. Contraceptives, abortion and paternity testing mean that a man can know with soem confidence if a child is his; he no longer needs to control a woman’s sexuality in order to be sure of paternity.
To give an example: a sultan has a harem. A women is given to the sultan by her father to curry favour. She lives in the harem, the sultan summons her to his bed frequently in the first few months, but after her first pregnacy she gets laid less than once a year. Her children become minor princes. She never sees another man for the rest of her life (except eunuchs).
What incentive does she have to leave this arrangement? If she tried to, it would only mean poverty for herself and her children and death if she’s caught.
A modern billionaire wants a harem. Every prospective harem-girl needs to be seduced individually (since he can’t buy them from their fathers). Already he’s at a huge disadvantage compared to the sultan. However, he persuades a woman to join his harem and after a few months he stops having sex with her and moves on to his next acquisition.
What incentive does she have to stay in this arrangment? She could leave him, and find a whole man to have herself, with whom she would have plenty of sex, conversation, a life built together and enough money to raise her kids as well as a father who has time to devote to them (rather than shared between his 200 other kids).
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The term harem seems to be equivocating two unlike things.
Traditional harems, like those of oriental despotism, are an extension of the traditional idea of marriage. The logic is the same as marrying a young daughter to an older man, or a daughter from a poorer household to a wealthy man: he is established and thus has proven both that he can support children and that his children would themselves be valuable. It can be taken too far, generating a mass of permanently single men, but the same can be said for any form of excess.
The modern “harem” on the other hand it exemplified by the groupie. A man, or often a small group of men, use a combination of good looks and antisocial personality traits to attract a large number of unattached women who they then use for pleasure and money. In other words it is precisely the opposite situation; men who prove their children would be drains on society get women to support them. Needless to say this is not particularly conducive to civilization even at modest levels.
Judging by the different attitudes towards Mormon or Islamic polygamy (excessive forms of traditional harems) and that towards self-described pimps and thugs shows we’re headed for the second rather than the first.
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” Without posterity, men do not work, do not build, do not save, and do not fight. They live in grass huts or in their parents’ basements.”
This is some bs. You have reversed the causalty. More men seek to become fathers *when* they have attained some success or at least security.
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>Society must enforce monogamy; that is the only way in which society can exist. Men are polygamous, while women are hypergamous. Polyamory always devolves into harems, with a few sultans and many eunuchs. Men are the builders of civilization; they must be incentivized to build civilization.
If women are naturally hypergamous, then won’t men be incentivized to”build civilizationn”, in order to acquire a harem? Why would they sit around all day in basements?
I disagree with pretty much all of your assumptions, as I imagine you guessed before writing this. But I’m only going to bring up a few questions here:
>Monogamous marriage privatizes the commons of posterity.
Since traditional marriage has essentially broken down; what do you think is responsible for this?
>Men are only incentivized to create wealth if they can pass it on to children of assured paternity; otherwise, their time horizon is only as long as their life expectancy.
Do you consider it plausible that transhumanism will save civilization by extending male life expectancy beyond “escape velocity”?
>Men are only incentivized to create wealth if they can pass it on to children of assured paternity
Do you … have any evidence for this claim? Are there any nuances missing here? I’m basically really interested in this one claim.
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@multiheaded: A proponent of the idea would argue that it’s the *prospect* of (the possibility of) fatherhood that’s making them strive for things. So your argument about causality doesn’t really work.
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For 2.2, not really, but occasionally someone badly messes up a circumcision and the (cis male) infant is raised as female. Most famous case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
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Re 2.2, Iran effectively forces many homosexual men to undergo gender reassignment surgery. (Homosexual sex is a crime punishable by death, but if caught one can claim to be a trans woman and receive state-sponsored surgery.) Anecdotally the outcomes are often poor. Obviously there are lots of confounders and other issues with generalising from this, but it might be a place to start.
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Why conservatives but no radfems on the sidebar? I absolutely wouldn’t wish for you to remove the former, but do you know any of the latter that would make for OK reading? How about Lisa Millbank? And, um, who else is out there with a non-horrible non-toxic blog?
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Modern radical feminists are a blight upon the good name of radical feminism tbh. And I made the blogroll by putting every blog I read; I don’t happen to read any radfem blogs. (Radfem books, yes. :) )
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Same here! How sadly predictible. I just hoped that you’d have something up your sleeve.
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Huh, that’s interesting; I don’t know of any radical feminism besides the modern kind. Can you point me to any non-horrible (and thus, presumably, non-modern) radfem sources ?
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Firestone (transhumanist, biodeterminist, awesome). Dworkin (problematic, edgy, very cool).
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Isn’t Dworkin the embodiment of the “all heterosexual sex is rape” straw feminist archetype ? Or am I confusing her with someone else ?
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@Bugmaster — Yep, that’s Dworkin. Go read her words in context and see what you think.
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For a brief and cryptic metaphor: as a mostly sex-positive person, I *do* kinda agree that PIV sex is… well, saying “rape” is horrible word choice… “sexual violence against women” IN THE SAME LIMITED SENSE that turning a prayer mill is “Buddhist”.
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Speaking of GamerGate, is there a good (as in, not-terrible) summary of events floating around? The last one I saw was in, like, early September, and the fact that I am still seeing references to GamerGate now at the end of October means other things have happened in the meantime. (My boyfriend’s mother even asked me what I thought about GamerGate….wasn’t sure how to answer)
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Know Your Meme has a pretty good article/timeline about it.
It’s surprisingly non-partisan, as they’re willing to include everything people called gamergate, rather than only things pro- or anti- folks prefer.
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TL;DR:
1) Some people made a reasonable complaint about neutrality and ulterior motives.
2) The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory proved itself true once more.(http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19)
3) Everything exploded in a tirade of monkey-poo-flinging between feminists and gamers.
Score:
Trolls (on both sides):1
Sanity: 0
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Encyclopedia Dramatica has an amazingly comprehensive article on GamerGate. Unfortunately, like all other ED articles, it is NSFW, so make sure not to look at it during office hours.
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Ozy: if you are looking for “SJ-ish/cultural/media thing that’s actually good and not toxic”, you might want to take a look at The Flounce: they appeared on my radar after letting that one dude say the correct thing re: Zoe Quinn, and now I’m liking their own content too.
http://theflounce.com/harassment-abuse-apologism-sanitizing-abuse-social-justice-spheres/
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(correction: that one nonbinary dude)
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(just don’t look at those fucking comments, omg, I forgot about them, fucking gamergators)
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Good to see you blogging again, Ozy. You’re on the very short list of people in the overlap of (Feminists) (on the internet) (capable of showing empathy to actual humans), and I appreciate that.
Though, your commentariat is already taking about if it’s reasonable to kill all men, (ok, “phase out men”,) so I don’t think it’s off to that good a start. ;-)
Just for fun, I’ll not that both the most toxic of the radical feminsts, and the most toxic of the PUAs want to change the gender ratio to be 9 women: 1 man. Strange Bedfellows? Horseshoe theory?
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RadFems want to be 1 of those 9 women; RadPUAs want to be that 1 man.
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…no, they don’t. That is not what radical feminist means. Radical feminists are usually sex-critical in general and heterosexuality-critical in particular. Read a fucking book. I’d recommend starting with Dworkin’s Woman Hating; it’s a good overview of what radical feminists actually believe, and very readable.
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Would anyone care to taboo “RadFem”?
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Rather than tabooing RadFem, let’s try this: A compact addressing schema for feminist thought. (Something like the geek codes, maybe?) Then, instead of arguing over the meaning of “radical”, and if the groups adopting it have changed over time, we can easily say, “I’m a sex-positive anti-porn pay-for-housework lean out Marxist feminist,” and everyone will know exactly what you mean. ;-)
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I have a fairly Victorian view of women, especially female sexuality. For that reason I have a lot of sympathy for “sex-critical” philosophies, although most people would describe me as a misogynist.
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elijah: explain the Soviet social relations and gender norms.
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@multi: no clue. I am not a sociologist.
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I don’t know of any feminists who want that gender ratio, radical or not.
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The extreme feminists (let’s avoid confusing terminology) are assuming the 9 women would coordinate effectively while the PUAs are assuming the individual women would defect post haste in competition for the man.
Historical examples of much less extreme sex imbalance suggest the extreme feminist view is delusional and the PUAs are correct (about this one thing).
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What historical examples? Because I’m guessing they’re ones where the male minority still wielded most of the political and economic power, which wouldn’t be a feature of this particular thought experiment…
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A few weeks ago someone on SSC posted a comment saying that they a disgust reaction to interracial couples despite being self described very liberal. If said person is reading this I’d like to ask them some questions: (If you have the same reaction, feel free to answer them)
Is it only with certain race pairings? What about couples whose ethnicities are taxonomically close like say Japanese and Thai?
Do you have the same reaction to couples with an age gap?
Does this reaction disappear if it is someone you are close with?
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The only time I’ve had something like a miscegenation reaction was when I saw a white footfall player supporting a white cheerleader on one of his hands. He was huge, she was tiny. My reaction was something like “My God, they aren’t even from the same species.”
This is tangential to what you asked, but I thought I’d throw it in because it’s tangentially relevant and you don’t have any other replies.
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Thanks, I expected more replies since just a few decades years ago, it was the norm to find interracial couples disgusting (in the US). Which is very alien to me, I’ve never had a visceral reaction to seeing a couple no matter how different the persons are. Then again, I am biracial …
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Hey, does this double as a regular open thread? Because – [Meta] – I’d love an edit button, but that has nothing to do with race and gender.
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You can link it to gender. You see, [men/women/genderqueers] are more [conscienscious/likely to mess up] and therefore need an edit button. Failing to provide one biases the discussion against them. :-)
I would also like an edit button.
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A question for scientific racist neoreactionaries who believe that interracial IQ differences are mostly genetically determined and that a growing proportion of nonwhites in the US is going to cause dysgenic pressure: why don’t you just favor massive (or maybe just enough) immigration from East Asia, where average IQs are higher than they are in the US or Europe?
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I think it would be a good thing, though I don’t think it would have much of a chance politically (how much votes would the “unrestricted immigration, except from genetically inferior countries!” guy get?).
A better policy might be to just go with a point-based system like some countries (Canada, Australia) use, which includes human-capital criteria, and would be more fine-grained than going by countries or continents. A more HBDish version would put more weight on heritable characteristics, and include criteria on family members (do you have a cousin or uncle or brother in jail for a violent crime? how many of your relatives are unemployed? etc.), though that would probably be more trouble than it’s worth.
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Dysgenic pressure is only one argument; there are negative consequences of diversity in general, which will likely hold even absent IQ/impulsivity concerns. Thedish conflict, the Putnam study, and so on. You put a bunch of different people with different alliances and interests in the same place, what do you think is going to happen?
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TGGP has long ago mentioned the libertarian argument for diversity, which is, essentially, the modus tollens of your argument against it. I’m highly intrigued by that idea.
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How does that work?
I could imagine a libertarian argument along the lines of “more diversity leads to smaller government / less welfare”, but even if you grant that that’s good, the benefit there would be outweighed by the decline of civil society, the Putnam effect, and increasing ethnic competition over everything.
But I’ve never been able to think like a libertarian.
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More diversity and disrupting strong ties forces people to engage in weak-ties structures instead, which might be the state (bad for the libertarian) or the market and free exchange (good for the libertarian). So it can grow the state *or* give unrestricted capitalism the center stage instead, depending on the other variables.
Ideally resulting in the large-scale, weak ties systems putting human effort to more productive use with a wider impact, increased innovation and large-scale projects, and therefore prosperity and more innovative potential.
I don’t completely buy it, but I see the appeal, and it does seem to fit some views of history.
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Firstly, for the same reason I would rather my children be biologically mine rather than using a Chinese sperm donor of greater intelligence than me.
Secondly, races differ in more than just intelligence.
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I’ve been wondering what the sequence of events which leads to the murder of trans people is, and this might be a safe place to ask about it. Is it a sort of attack-on-sight behavior? (I suspect but don’t know that this is the majority of murders.) Disappointed customers of prostitutes?
I did a little research and found this, a very SSC-ish piece attempting to find the source of the 1 int 12 will be murdered statistic. There is apparently no scientific source for the statistic, and no way to get an accurate number, none of which denies that the level of violence against trans people is very high.
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The level of violence is frighteningly high. But yeah, we don’t have good counts. We know how many end up on the TDOR list each year, but that surely misses quite a few.
Why do people do this? Well, each murder is its own thing. Murder after sex seems to happen enough — again, no counts, but it is something trans women talk about. It is “street knowledge.” Pretty much everyone thinks Venus Xtravaganza was killed that way. She was chased and attacked often enough post-sex.
The murderers often claimed they were surprised, that they did not know the woman was trans. No doubt this is true sometimes. However, no doubt it is often false. For example, the killers of Gwen Araujo claimed they did not know she was trans. I find that hard to believe.
I can personally testify that when (some) men just observe a trans woman, they become very uncomfortable, often hostile. Abuse follows, even violence.
This is as common as fucking dirt.
To me it seems easy to guess why: men are attracted to femininity, but they are terrified of homosexuality. These men are unsophisticated. That have little self control and almost no metacognitive ability. They seem to careen through their days alternating between callous amusements and unbridled rage. Trans women are a paradox to them, a “male” they want to fuck. They cannot handle these feelings, and the only tool they have is to lash out.
I share the subway with them every day.
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This would predict that the level of violence against trans women would be lower in places that don’t have the American conception of homosexuality. Is that true?
(I would guess so, but the American conception of homosexuality is going to be spreading alongside all the other easily-transmitted aspects of American culture, and that’s an obvious confounder — so that may not even be testable.)
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That makes sense.
Anyway, we have this: http://www.transrespect-transphobia.org/uploads/downloads/2014/TDOR2014/TMM-TDOR14-map-TDOR.pdf
Which does not break things down per-capita. For example, Brazil leads the pack, but it is a big country with a large trans population. On the other hand, 113 killed in a year. WTF?
Plus there is no doubt underreporting. For example, was there really only one trans person murdered in Africa this year? Does that seem plausible?
They list Jamaica as “no data,” which is just as well. The truth would likely be depressing.
Anyway, this list does not begin to show the human cost. It doesn’t show the women who do not go outside due to fear. I know women like this, here in the US, here in Boston. For trans folks, PTSD is just kinda normal-the-way-it-is. The loss of human potential is really awful.
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Oh, and if you want to get sad, this: http://www.transrespect-transphobia.org/uploads/downloads/2014/TDOR2014/TDOR-14-Namelist-EN.pdf
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>To me it seems easy to guess why: men are attracted to femininity, but they are terrified of homosexuality. These men are unsophisticated. That have little self control and almost no metacognitive ability. They seem to careen through their days alternating between callous amusements and unbridled rage. Trans women are a paradox to them, a “male” they want to fuck. They cannot handle these feelings, and the only tool they have is to lash out.
This strikes me as a stereotype.
I do think that the conflict of self-image and worldview – created by a self-identified heterosexual feeling strongly attracted to an individual they simultaneously believe to be of their own gender – is a likely culprit here. People often attribute ulterior motives to trans people (especially trans women?), and it’s easy to see how this could result in violence – this person “tricked” you into doing something disgusting, after all!
But, while both certain forms of conservatism and violence in general may be [i]correlated[/i] with low IQ, I think that you are attacking an outgroup here: “careen through their days alternating between callous amusements and unbridled rage”, “men are attracted to femininity, but they are terrified of homosexuality”; “the only tool they have is to lash out”. This doesn’t seem like the best way to actually solve a problem – rather, it’s what I’ve seen called “eliminationist rhetoric”.
It also, if I may say so, betrays a [i]distinct[/i] lack of empathy for people with a genuine phobia of homosexuality.
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Is nationalism correct? Let me get more specific. Nationalism as loosely layer out in this FAQ. The key feature of a nationalist is that they value ethnic homogeneity in a nation – their conception of a nation is as an extended family. The claim is that such a conception of the nation state leads to greater prospering in a nation – less crime, more equality, more fairness, and most importantly more trust and community.
Here are specific claims I’d like to here people’s thoughts on:
1: Ethnically homogenous populations have higher levels of trust because the presence of multiple ethnic groups leads to competing interests.
2: Ethnically homogenous populations have higher levels of equality for many reasons. One of them being that people are more okay with redistribution in a homogenous nation (multiculturalism tends to reduce welfare).
3: Higher levels of trust tend to lead to greater sense of community, less corruption, less crime, and a higher quality of life.
4: The above are sufficient to warrant nationalist policies.
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I’d say 1 looks wrong (Korea and China are pretty homogenous but low-trust – but maybe there are confounders and the effect holds when all else is equal), and 2 and 3 look right.
Also, regardless of the instrumental benefits of ethnic homogeneity, there’s also the argument that a government makes more sense as working for the benefit of a group of people that feel that they belong together, and “people who consider themselves ethnically French” is a group whose member care more for each other than “the people who happen to live in the territory under the administration of the French government”, i.e. the “moral authority” of the Government depends of how much the citizens feel they belong in the same group.
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China is homogenous? That’s certainly what Chinese rulers, from the Han to the Communists, have always tried to convince people is the case, but if you look past the propaganda, the situation is a lot more complicated.
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Re: low trust, can I go off on a tangent and observe that authoritarian capitalist East Asian states (SK, Singapore, Japan – c’mon, Japan is not a liberal democracy) all seem to have shockingly low fertility rates well below European social democracies? Is it really only because their aggressive birth control and family planning programmes have worked “too well”? (Singapore has been characteristically trying to solve the problem in its signature way; import more cheap labour, in this case as maids to help the working citizen mothers?) Or do the socioeconomic conditions and the cultural atmosphere leave people even more unwilling to reproduce? Women’s status and independence are still rather resticted, but fertility has plummeted! In the latter case, isn’t this a terrible warning to all of their fans?
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I could weaken the claim to “only an ethnically homogenous country can be high trust” or “the highest trust nations will tend to be ethnically homogenous”. Or “all else equal, homogeneity will lead to higher trust than diversity”.
But China isn’t homogenous. There are many ethnic minorities, and the “Han” classification is pretty broad – there is a lot of diversity within it. People between villages, are not that close genetically.
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There are many ethnic minorities — 55 officially-recognized native minorities — , but China is >90% Han. The ethnic minorities are not very large.
The minorities were apparently exempt from the one-child policy, so they were probably an even smaller percentage of the total population before.
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Could the low birth-rates in those East Asian states be attributed to low-immigration?
European social democracies generally have many more first and second generation immigrants who generally have higher birth-rates than the established populations.
If we exclude first and second generation immigrants and their established-population partners from the population, we get a much lower birth rate in Western Europe, does that drop to East Asian levels?
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Nationalism is an interesting example of a left-wing movement that was left behind by history and became “conservative” by default. The areas where they are right (to abuse a double meaning here) tend to be beliefs so utterly uncontroversial at the time that no-one seriously criticized them, such as racial and ethnic characteristics being important and hereditary.
But looking at what distinguished nationalism when it was new shows the ridiculous elements clearly. Nationalists split stable and prosperous empires into warring fragments, smash regional ethnic and class differences between their own peoples to create homogeneous ‘national’ cultures, even go so far as to commit mass murder seemingly because it makes for easier bookkeeping. Nationalism is essentially realizing that Empires (the organic multi-ethnic states) are inherently hierarchal and attempting to reach equality by drawing borders between the different groups. It’s saner than the more modern alternative of mixing them together into a promiscuous grey mass but not by much.
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Relevant to this whole chain: http://nithgrim.wordpress.com/tag/benedict-anderson/
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A big part of the problem is that ethnic groups are all at least sort of fictive anyway, and they can be very unstable. For example, for a long time, the inhabitants of Yugoslavia considered themselves to be members of a single ethnic group (or at least, of groups closely related enough to each other to be members of a single nation), because they all basically spoke the same language. But after the end of Communism, people started focusing on religion, and subgroups like Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, and Bosniaks became salient.
Also, in some of nationalism’s paradigmatic cases, homogeneity only exists because it was imposed for a long time– and frequently long after governments embraced nationalist programs. France, Italy, and Germany didn’t have linguistic unity until well into the 19th century (the 20th for the Italians), and mostly achieved that status because their central governments forced everybody to learn the national language.
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Quick note: by nationalist policies I mean the removal of all government involvement into how communities are able to define themselves. In particular the removal of both forced homogeneity (like the language laws) and forced diversity (like anti discrimination laws) thus people are able to cluster along ethnic lines if they want to and empirically communities tend to do exactly that (not always of course, which is why multiracial societies would still exist in a nationalist world). Nations tend to do the same but the size of some modern nations is so unprecedented that I have no idea what to expect.
Under this version of nationalism, if people want to define themselves as Yugoslavs, let them! If they want to define themselves as Croats, Serbs etc., then let them! Whatever fine graininess people want to identify as, this is the level at which we would expect to see all of the benefits in 1 to 4 and they would be allowed to form their communities. Possibly at the nation state level, but maybe not. I think confederates could exist in a nationalist world. And if those community boundaries shift over time, then I don’t see the problem.
Second quick note: I’m not sure if the way I’m using ethnicity is non-standard. Under my conception, ethnicities are overlapping not discrete. East Indian is an ethnicity insofar as East Indians are genetically distant from say Europeans, but Naikpod is also an ethnicity insofar as Naikpods are relatively genetically distant from say Kashmiris. People can (and do) define themselves at any level.
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Henry, Yugoslavs never considered themselves a single ethnic group.
Alexander, what you are describing is practically the opposite of what everyone else means by “nationalism.” In particular, the programs Henry mentions of unifying Italy and Germany are usually given as the paradigmatic examples. Yes, of course one can be both Prussian and German, but what people usually mean by “nationalism” is to choose one and emphasize it. This leaves unidentified the decider.
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@Douglas: There was enough sense unity that a pan-Yugoslav communist guerilla movement won the country back from the Germans during World War II, mostly without help from the Allies, and then ruled a unified country for forty stable years without the assistance of the USSR. It might not have been an identity like “French,” but it was strong enough to build a ground-up state (rather than a multiethnic empire or state with arbitrary colonial borders) around.
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Just testing formatting: html-style, *markdown-style*
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Further test:
bulleted
list
table
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I find your lack of an edit button disturbing.
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I think the matter of evil people having an easier time obtaining sex is worth a lot more discussion. Including, having a massive incentive for people to become more evil is a bad thing.
I’ve heard two theories, neither of which is satisfactory. The first is that evil is sexy. This explains observations pretty well, but very few people will admit to believing it. Granted, people are diverse, but we need an explanation for why finding evil sexy and discussing seduction on the internet are so strongly anticorrelated. The other is that evil people want sex more, but they don’t seem to be doing a ton of stuff they hate in order to get sex. If anything, decent people are more likely to be doing that.
I have another theory. I don’t claim it explains everything, but it probably explains some things. It’s about communication.
For simplicity’s sake, we’ll take the case of an active and a passive partner. The active partner is responsible for every escalation (opening a conversation, first physical contact, first clothing removal…) and is responsible for determining if the escalation would be welcome. I realize not all sex follows this pattern, but enough does for it to be worth considering. Likewise, I realize the question of “what is an escalation?” does not always have a clear answer, but it does often enough.
It’s tempting to get Aristotelean here and say an active partner should only escalate with certain knowledge of welcomeness. We know better. There is no certain knowledge. When it comes to sex, there is rarely good knowledge.
So we estimate the probability and the two utilities and proceed, right? Not quite. If the escalation is welcome, the benefit is shared. If the escalation is unwelcome, the majority of the harm is suffered by the passive. (For the time being, we will assume the passive is not vengeful.) So how the active weighs consequences to each person is relevant.
Estimating the utilities is also tricky. If you assume that an unwelcome escalation will be met with a quick “no”, then it’s not as bad as if you fear the unwelcomeness will be hidden, and the same signals that suggested welcome will continue. For that matter, information about just how bad various sorts of boundary-crossings are is terribly unavailable.
I had a lot of math here, but it wasn’t very readable so I’ll skip it. Let’s get back to the evil thing.
Suppose two actives each estimate the badness of an unwelcome escalation 100x greater than the goodness of a welcome one. One active is a decent person, and weighs their own benefit equally to the passive’s. The other is evil, and weighs their benefit 10x the passive’s. The first needs 98% confidence to proceed, but the latter only need 90%.
It’s a lot easier to achieve 90% confidence. Therefore the evil person has a lot more sex. Note that the vast majority of the evil person’s escalations are still welcome.
This suggests four categories of actives who have a lot of sex:
* Evil people
* People who sincerely believe that unwelcome escalations aren’t a big deal
* People who are really good at reading signals
* Overconfident people
Categories 1, 3, and 4 are well known to do well. Category 2 is a novel prediction. I wonder if we could study it.
How much easier is it to achieve 90% confidence than 98%? That varies by circumstance. For example, if you are allowed to just *ask* someone what their boundaries are, it’s a lot easier. This leads to another prediction: in communities where clear communication is permitted, the tendency for evil people to have easier access to sex is decreased. Anecdotally, this appears to be the case. (I’m not sure if this counts as an advance prediction: I was aware of the trend before I wrote this, but hadn’t explicitly considered it when putting this theory together.)
I don’t think this explains everything, but combined with positive feedback (social proof, practice) it may explain a fair bit.
It even comes with concrete recommendations:
* If you are a passive who would like a smaller percentage of your partners to be evil, communicate more clearly and encourage clearer communication.
* If you are an active who is unwilling to become evil or overconfident, either seek a community that permits communication or in which you have good reason to believe the occasional boundary-violation isn’t that big a deal.
* If you have access to any relevant information about how bad various boundary violations are, or about signs of individual variation in that, please publish it. Everyone will benefit.
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I suspect I’m in your Category 2 as an active; I tend to alieve that me telling someone who’s not into me that they’re pretty or asking them to make out with me (for instance) is going to be positive utility for the person I hit on, because they get to know that someone finds them attractive. (Obviously this is not true of physical contact, but I tend not to do physical contact without asking unless I’m very sure.)
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Yeah, I think this is a lot of correct.
I put it this way (warning, this is gendered and a waaaaay over simplification):
There are two kinds of guys: guys who care if we are comfortable and guys who do not.
The second type of guy will hit on us no matter what. He just tries and keeps trying.
He freaks me out. Those guys terrify me.
Then there are guys who care how I feel. They’re going to be cautious and wait for signals.
But I suck at giving signals cuz I’m super shy and terrified and OMG he’s flirting but he cannot possibly like me cuz I’m hideous AHHHH, so they keep back.
Since they don’t want me to be uncomfortable.
Now, I don’t always feel this way. I can get past this stuff, and some people are better at reading me and interacting. But this happens a lot.
I don’t get nearly the amount of sex I wish I did. And it’s all cuz of my fucked up brain and nerds are shy.
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Is there anything anyone else could do that would help you?
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I’m not sure what level of knowledge to assume, so some or all of this you may already know.
1) Men like it when women feed our egos — even if we’re not interested, so long as there are no status concerns. If you’re markedly low-status for the group, displaying interest is likely to cost you even more status (you might be made the butt of a joke, or the man might have to distance himself from you to preserve his status in the face of the threat you represent); but if you’re markedly low-status for the group, the best option for you is probably to find another group. However, you’re much more likely to underestimate your status than to overestimate it — a common nerd problem.
2) You can’t escalate too quickly. It’s certainly possible to use rapid escalation as a strategy — I knew some girls in college who did this, though at least one of them definitely gets categorized as evil (I mean, I didn’t turn her down, but she basically forced herself on me — moral: even if you adopt a strategy of rapid escalation, always leave the guy an out that requires less I-can’t-think-of-the-word-right-now [social-norm-breaking energy?] than him shutting up, getting up, and walking out) — but it’s going to cost you status big time. Better to have a few days of ambiguous-as-to-whether-attraction-signaling-or-innocuous ego-feeding beforehand; if it comes out of the blue, you’ll scare the guy. (But he may or may not run off, depending on his strategy.)*
3) There are certain socially-prescribed contexts where risk is lowered — parties, alcohol, etc. The currently-dominant opposition to doing much of anything while blackout drunk or close to it still applies — I would recommend against getting close to blackout drunk in general — but displaying interest after a few beers is less likely to go down negatively than displaying interest while sober, since if it’s not reciprocated, you can brush it off as “I was drunk” and the guy will probably forget it.
* My strategy is to sit back and wait for basically-unambiguous signals of interest, hence the caveat that rapid escalation can work; to use the language of Nice Bayesian’s comment, I weigh the interests of the ‘passive’ above mine, for various reasons mostly rooted in traditionalist opposition to taking the initiative in such matters, at least in environments where I can’t assume cultural similarity with regard to traditionalism and the resulting goals / life-scripts, which for the past few years has been all of them. The irony of a self-proclaimed traditionalist rewarding the most un-traditionalist of the strategies is not lost on me, but oh well.
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@Nice Bayesian — No, but thanks for asking.
And it’s not as if my life is terrible or anything. I have my moments.
@nydwracu — Yeah, I think I get that stuff.
One thing, I do get kinda turned off by people who seem obsessed with status — which is a thing in nerd spaces. Some folks kinda have an ease with status, like, they are not the highest in the room, but nor are they the lowest. Instead, they seem kinda happy to be wherever they are somewhere in the middle.
(And, yes, I know about counter-signaling. I think this is sorta that but not exactly.)
Keith Johnstone talks about this sort of thing, folks who are playful with status. I try to be this way. I like partners who are as well.
I’ve never tried rapid escalation. Actually, the thought terrifies me. I worry that I am overcommitting, taking on too much, like, I’ll get to a place and then suddenly not like where I am. And there he is, expecting what comes next.
This is a bad scenario.
“Always leave the guy and out” is great advice for everyone pretty much always.
Thanks.
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Interestingly, this fits my experiences perfectly. Y’know, gender-swapped.
I get the impression that you’re a noticeably more freaked out by people who send unwanted signals, though; which has obvious potential gendered reasons.
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I wrote a comment arguing that communities allowing for clear communication are probably unlikely for various reasons, but that was about initial negotiation of potential mutual attraction; for sexual activity given already-established potential mutual attraction, I think I agree that clear communication is stable (i.e. not prohibited by various aspects of either human nature or social conditioning too ingrained to realistically be large-scale rooted out (the distinction isn’t really important here)) in the absence of the obvious social-norm-related hangups.
…Actually, most of my objections apply much more strongly to male communication of attraction than female, and I’ve certainly benefited from being on the receiving end of that form of clear communication. (Unclear communication of attraction only works up to a certain cultural distance; beyond that, the “do you like borscht?” signals that one person can recognize and will transmit with those intentions don’t map to the other person’s. I think. I’ve been in situations where signals I read as normal were obviously-from-her-perspective intended to communicate attraction — cultural difference. The other possibility is that I am a lot more attractive than I think and the signals that I have been perceiving as not intended to communicate attraction were intended to.)
Anyway, I agree with this, with the caveat that “really good at reading signals” isn’t culture-neutral.
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I’m not sure this is exactly about gender but it might go that way:
1) How do various (ethical and legal) standards of consent deal with the huge amount of sex that happens where both/all partners are too drunk to consent? Are both guilty of rape? Neither?
2) There seems to be widespread consensus that it is possible to be too drunk to consent (and roughly how drunk that is), but what about other kinds of altered states/drugs? Marijuana? Amphetamines? SSRIs? Antihistamines? Sleep deprivation?
2.1) The signs of impaired/altered decision-making ability might not always be clear to a partner not very familiar with the drug (or the person); for example people on Ambien can seem fairly lucid but I’m pretty sure they’re not competent to consent. How confident must someone be that their partner’s ability to consent is not impaired?
2.2) When does mental illness render someone unable to consent? What if it’s undiagnosed?
This all falls under “altered states are SCARY” in my mind, but that does not seem to be a very popular opinion.
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The ‘standard’ responses of the feminist crowd I run with tend to be:
1 – Tricky, and we don’t know, but the solution might be for people to make a strong precommitment to not initiating sex when drunk, on the basis that your judgement is too impaired to judge whether your partner is fully consenting. And we *do* hold people accountable for choosing to do things like drive when drunk.
2 – Other altered states do count, and it is up to the individual involved to determine whether the altered state is sufficient to make consent impossible, with the optimal solution being to not do it if unsure. It’s better to not have sex with people you just met because if you know them at normal, you’ll be able to tell what altered looks like. SSRIs would not cause the kind of altered state that is worrisome most of the time but might occasionally – just like you can drive on them unless you get a certain kind of unusual reaction.
2.1 – Negative utility of being a rapist is far larger than positive utility of having sex. So even if purely selfish, when in doubt you should not do the sex until zie’s sober.
2.2 – Counting all mental illnesses, very rarely. A lot of mental illnesses can make people more vulnerable to manipulation into coercive sex, but the problem there is the coercive person, not the mental illness. The points in a mental illness wherein someone is unable to give proper consent (that I can think of right now) are pretty easy to spot as altered states even if there is no diagnosis. At the very least, someone who is paying even a little attention would be able to tell that something was off if their partner was disassociative or psychotic.
We mentally ill people tend to be entirely competent to consent to sex the vast majority of the time.
The only times I could imagine something could be up and the partner wouldn’t notice is if the badbrains has convinced someone (for instance, a depressed person) that they are terrible and don’t deserve their partner and should show their gratitude for having this person they don’t deserve by never saying no to sex because if they do the partner will realise they are terrible and leave.
In this case, if the partner knows this is going on in the depressed person’s brain, they probably shouldn’t have sex with them at that time. If the partner doesn’t know, they may well have no idea their partner is having sex with them when they don’t want to, and that’s just a tragic horrible situation that is nobody’s fault but the badbrains’.
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1) The point of these laws / ethical standards seems to be banning things on paper to enable selective enforcement if the woman (either partner in theory, but let’s be serious here) decides later that she wasn’t able to consent at the time (which does in fact lead in the limit to the total legal banning of sex, which is AFAICT almost indistinguishable in practice from the burden-of-proof shift that’s already being seriously advocated for), to both directly attack the perceived-as-very-large problem of inability to consent while drunk and create a chilling effect that will indirectly attack it, so by the spirit of the things, both are.
2) It depends on the drug — but by the spirit of the law, probably all of them except sleep deprivation, which I don’t think registers the popular consciousness as an altered state.
Now, the traditionalist support (which does exist! I’ve seen it!) of that reading of the spirit of the law (chilling effects will create a general reluctance to sex outside marriage / close relationships) doesn’t convince me; the people who make that argument both overestimate ability to prioritize perceived-as-unlikely future penalties over concrete present benefits and dramatically underestimate the skill at manipulation of a certain subset / part-of-the-relevant-bell-curve of the population — and anyway, trying to solve the problem of casual sex by plunging the entire country into an atmosphere of pervasive mistrust is hardly in keeping with the spirit of actually-existing traditions, but my generation and the one before it have already forgotten that, probably due to the degree of mistrust (brought about by increasing diversity, the crime wave of the ’60s-’70s-80s, and the more recent political polarization and mainstreaming of political ‘callout culture’ and pseudo-Maoist struggle sessions) that they (we) already take for granted and assume is inevitable and unsolvable in the same way that my parents’ generation assume that two-hour commutes and horrifically disordered cities are simply part of the natural order of the world.
And I’m surprised (not at all, actually) that I haven’t seen anyone advance the argument that the solution to the supposed alcohol-fueled campus rape wave (I haven’t looked into the statistics here, but feminism isn’t exactly known for its statistical credibility) is to solve the part of the problem where people get too drunk to consent — not directly, of course, since presumably these things don’t arise causelessly from the aether, but by finding and addressing the root causes of it.
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I don’t have a tumblr but wanted to reply to this post by Scott with a “who doxxes the doxxers?” pun.
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This thread might be dead by now (would you be against reposting questions in future open threads that weren’t answered?), but I find myself having a visceral digest reaction to the adult baby. And I’m irrationally annoyed when I hear couples talking to each other in baby voices (I’m trying to fight this reaction). This is unusual because I have a very high disgust threshold*, and there is no obvious consequentialist or evo psych reason why I would have this reaction.
An adult acting like a baby in their own home but normally otherwise seems completely neutral from a consequentialist point of view (its just a form of leisure). And form an evo psych perspective, I’m not sure. Perhaps an adult acting like a baby isn’t really vulnerable, so I have the unconscious sense that such person is somehow an imposter or a cheater – a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
*Things that do not cause a visceral disgust reaction in me, even if I might object to some for other reasons: BDSM, corophagia, beastiality, incest, eating live insects, fisting.
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Interesting you should mention that, as I have a similar problem that’s MUCH more easily explained.
I have an intense, visceral disgust at the use of the word “daddy” in BDSM communities and scenarios (and of daddy/daughter incest play in general, but this is the lightest form of it). Like you, I have a high disgust threshold; I’m easy to rile, but anything eliciting this kind of visceral EWWWW reaction from me is very unusual.
But it’s not hard to figure out why. I have a young daughter, and like most fathers, I’m rather protective of her. So I figure my reaction to the (from my perspective) misuse of the word “Daddy” is a reaction to other people sexualising my daughter’s name for me and by extension, my relationship with my daughter. Cue adrenal response, nausea and a desire to set fire to FetLife.
So outside of the possible evo psych options, are you a parent or guardian? Cos if so, it’s possible that your disgust at adult baby presentation might be caused by the same category crosswire that my issue with “daddy” comes from.
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This sounds like a very similar phenomenon. And your explanation seems plausible. I’m not parent, but I think that evolutionary parenting instincts and emotions can happen to non parents. Although I’m sure they will tend to be stronger in parents.
Despite it being similar, I’m not put off by the “daddy” roleplaying in BDSM. Are you put off by the adult baby? Here is a video:
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Nope. Nada. “Nothing, flatline, right across the board,” to quote Alan Davies.
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I suggest not going all the way to evo-psych. People are both trainable (think about cultures where there’s a strong disgust reaction to eating insects, and societies where there isn’t) and imprintable (I’m inclined to think that’s what’s behind strong sexual preferences and fetishes).
Evo psych might give some information about the range of possibilities– I’ve heard that feet are near the genitals in the brain map of the body, which could explain why foot fetishes are relatively common– but if (as evidence suggests) we’re a species that learns as individuals, then evo psych doesn’t give you information about specific cases.
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