People throwing accusations all over the place, calling transsexuality a “delusion”,
Aw c’mon, that’s a bit unfair, the context was this:
You could go LW-extreme and say that delusions are always bad (i.e. a man who thinks he’s a woman isn’t any better than a man who believes in god, no matter the emotional implications of either belief). Or you could apply the reasoning Yvain used in his “diseased thinking” post, and ask whether society is better off accepting this or that deviation from the mean, or trying to “cure” it.
“Delusion” was used only used in a hypothetical that was immediately followed by a better alternative, there’s not much use getting hung up over that particular word—cousin_it even apologized for his choice of words afterwards.
Actually I often feel kinda bad about people upvoting my comments when they contain subtle mistakes I can see in hindsight. I felt this way about my comments in the previous thread even before I saw lucidfox’s current post… Anything that drives away a thoughtful user certainly counts as a mistake and I’ll try to update my sentence generators to avoid repeating it.
Can you explain what your mistake was, in this particular case? Was it just not being careful enough about offending people, or more than that? How would you change your comment, if you could go back in time and do so?
(ETA: Sorry, but I don’t think we should let people off the hook with a vague “I apologize for making a mistake.” :)
The root mistake, IMO, was not immediately noticing the obvious idea of classifying transsexuality as a value rather than a belief. I could’ve noticed it if I’d spent ten more minutes thinking instead of commenting right away.
The root mistake, IMO, was not immediately noticing the obvious idea of classifying transsexuality as a value rather than a belief.
I’m not sure that “value” is the best way to think about transgender/transsexuality either. Standard decision theory only allows values and beliefs to influence decisions, but human behavior seems to be influenced strongly by identity, and transgender/transsexuality is usually described as identifying with a gender/sex other than the conventional gender/sex.
How to translate identity-based decision making into values and/or beliefs seems non-trivial, and can perhaps be compared to the problem of translating anticipated-reward type decision making into preferences over states of the world or over math. It’s not even clear that such translation should be done.
If not, there are least two choices: one, just stick with our human preferences / decision process, or two, discard the old preferences / decision process, and generate fresh preferences from other applicable intuitions, as steven0461 recently suggested.
Aw c’mon, that’s a bit unfair, the context was this:
“Delusion” was used only used in a hypothetical that was immediately followed by a better alternative, there’s not much use getting hung up over that particular word—cousin_it even apologized for his choice of words afterwards.
And I can apologize again if that helps!
Actually I often feel kinda bad about people upvoting my comments when they contain subtle mistakes I can see in hindsight. I felt this way about my comments in the previous thread even before I saw lucidfox’s current post… Anything that drives away a thoughtful user certainly counts as a mistake and I’ll try to update my sentence generators to avoid repeating it.
Can you explain what your mistake was, in this particular case? Was it just not being careful enough about offending people, or more than that? How would you change your comment, if you could go back in time and do so?
(ETA: Sorry, but I don’t think we should let people off the hook with a vague “I apologize for making a mistake.” :)
The root mistake, IMO, was not immediately noticing the obvious idea of classifying transsexuality as a value rather than a belief. I could’ve noticed it if I’d spent ten more minutes thinking instead of commenting right away.
I’m not sure that “value” is the best way to think about transgender/transsexuality either. Standard decision theory only allows values and beliefs to influence decisions, but human behavior seems to be influenced strongly by identity, and transgender/transsexuality is usually described as identifying with a gender/sex other than the conventional gender/sex.
How to translate identity-based decision making into values and/or beliefs seems non-trivial, and can perhaps be compared to the problem of translating anticipated-reward type decision making into preferences over states of the world or over math. It’s not even clear that such translation should be done.
If not, there are least two choices: one, just stick with our human preferences / decision process, or two, discard the old preferences / decision process, and generate fresh preferences from other applicable intuitions, as steven0461 recently suggested.
For most people, their contrarian beliefs are also values. (A heuristic that could make the hypothesis salient, even if it doesn’t exactly fit here.)