I’m a student of physics and mathematics, as well as a libertarian.
I write about whatever I find interesting. I hope you enjoy it.
Character#2736
Karma: 159
The categorization is helpful in identifying an effective method for preventing evil. Of course, most people aren’t in a position to stop the greatest harms, but understanding why you, someone you are close to, or have influence over is acting in a harmful way is very helpful in redirecting those actions and potentially mitigating harm. Convincing George Wallace that African-Americans and Euro-Americans are equal would have been a fruitless endeavor, but making segregation politically poisonous would be, and the reverse is likely true for James Eastland. (This is discussed earlier in the post.)
Social evil is a form of instrumental evil; I cannot think of an instrumental evil that is not to the ends of power or wealth. This was discussed in the introduction to the post.
You can look at my methods and analysis in the “Evil People and Their Motivations” section.
What is one to do when someone genuinely says “I know my views are contradictory, but...”, “I’m never going to accept that because it just feels wrong!”, or other statements in that vein? It’s even worse if they’re otherwise sensible or intelligent.
The Horse
OpenAI has just claimed to solve Navier-Stokes. I am a second-year math/astrophysics undergrad at Berkeley, studying with the intent of doing research because I find these subjects valuable, I want to contribute, and I enjoy them. If computers can solve millennium problems, there is surely no need for second-year undergrads, particularly those who sometimes struggle to answer questions and ask LLMs for hints (nothing I would not ask my professor), to study math—or astrophysics, for that matter. Is it worth continuing my studies, or do I desist?
Thank you for your suggestion! I will promptly add a summary no longer than three sentences at the bottom of this post. As for my opinions on the reality of the system, I am attempting to create a system that is useful in that it may be used to contend with individuals committing harmful acts.
The Three Kinds of Evil
Thank you for your kind comment, and apologies for the late reply; I am quite busy with school.
Aww… I don’t agree. I think the FtM direction is just as politically relevant!! Plus MtFs are overrepresented on LW so it’s really nice to read your post!
Thank you! At least in the US, FtMs are politically invisible (thank the Lord); if I wanted to play college football or something with the men’s team and use the appropriate locker room after, governors and Congressmen who definitely have more important things to be doing wouldn’t rain fire upon my head and act as if I kicked puppies for a living.
This is a really fucked up thing to say to a child. Also, your dad refusing to speak to you for days after you got your period… what the fuck???
Eh, pretty normal in my area. They tolerate it now, which is what matters.
Is this a joke, a cry for help, or both :p
Neither, actually. Compared to how my mental health was from puberty up until the moment I started transitioning, I am actually much better off. Even though once every two weeks might not be normal for other people, I consider it such because it no longer at the forefront of my thoughts or even present at all most days. :D
I don’t attempt to elucidate a specific cause in my post because, for genetics (per my research, ~40% of the cause) we don’t have the data.
Likely because you have a higher standard for posts than me; I am alright with speculation as long as it is disclosed as such. I’m aware the studies have small sample sizes and the modern ones are tainted by bias, but based upon what can be garnered from them, I speculate upon a possibility. You, on the other hand, only post what can be confirmed, which is unfortunately not much.
I’ve spent very little time on TikTok (mostly Reddit and Discord)
Same here, fortunately; I know such people are prevalent there and on Tumblr due to outside reports (screenshots on Reddit, Fox News, people at school).
Current medicine—for legal/political, not scientific reasons—seems incapable of predicting whether gender transition will benefit someone’s health. Dysphoria is too noisy to measure as a gatekeeping tool. Reasonable people disagree here, but the social, legal, political, administrative, and financial barriers to transition are already high. So I think an informed consent model is better than trying to use dysphoria as a tool for social or medical gatekeeping. It is not good to give people an incentive to interpret their own symptoms as dysphoria.
I’m a libertarian, and accordingly
completely insanein support of informed consent for all medical procedures, regardless of how any given doctor, husband, religion, or government feels about it. There should be no barriers to medical care other than basic mental competence and full knowledge + responsibility for the procedure. (In a perfect world, finances would not be a consideration either, but we are not at that point yet.) Besides, the optical trouble is not people who want to transition, but the people who don’t, yet claim to be transgender.I don’t think it’s helpful to impugn or deny the validity of trans people who claim not to have dysphoria. … Also, nonbinary identities like genderfluid and genderqueer are compatible with dysphoria.
How so? (I speculate that) gender dysphoria is an endocrine disorder or a neurological disorder, and your organs don’t just flip on and off. Nobody but a very small subset of the population claims to “feel” a gender as some do. I am genuinely curious about how biological gender dysphoria is comparable with quickly slipping genders and genders outside the binary. (I do believe that genuine non-binary people exist, albeit in lesser numbers than self-reports would indicate.)
These identities are not inherently politically harmful.
I’m not the Pew Research Center, but the area I grew up in was generally pretty reasonable and politically neutral, and I can personally confirm from speaking to many of the people around me that the notions of gender as an identity and the conclusions that followed pushed those who would otherwise have been supportive into being ridiculing, as evidenced by the support they gave me when I provided my own speculations.
Allow me to copy-paste a segment from my other comment here, which is a bit more aggressively worded than I intend for this conversation, because it might be somewhat relevant and I am lazy: “I consider myself, my family, and the majority of my peers back home to be reasonable people, who simply ridiculed what is ridiculous. The notion of gender as an “identity” that one could pick and choose, with transgender people “feeling” like one gender or another, sometimes two at the same time, or even a super secret third animal gender that nobody else has, when people don’t “feel” a gender at all, is ridiculous. It is no surprise that I was closeted, even to myself, if acknowledging I was “transgender” meant I was that. The same is true for the people who surround me, who are generally reasonable and not politically extreme in one direction or the other. Once I was able to explain to my family what gender dysphoria entailed, that it was not a choice or an “identity” but a medical condition, and that I would not be shitting in a litter box (this was a genuine concern of my mother), they were quite receptive. Of course, there were people who would have accepted me even if I did make use of the litter box (such as my elder sister, who told my mother about such things), and there are people who do not accept me now, but both groups are by far in the minority. People can respect “poorly understood endocrine disorder”; they will not respect “gender identity”. … The people who demagogues use to frighten and provoke people like my parents are detranstioners who were told that experimenting or the usual adolescent confusion rendered them trans, those who act ridiculous/provocative/promiscuous, and those who support the notion of gender as an identity; that last group is a majority among the mainstream transgender community and progressives in general.” (Apologies for the wall of text.)
Apologies for the late reply; I am quite busy with school.
you essentially propose marginalizing
non-binary people andanyone playing with their gender expression in a nonmedical way so that they aren’t included in the transgender umbrellaYes, if by “marginalizing”, you mean “pushing out of highly visible positions, the definition of ‘transgender’, and the transgender community” and not “actively discriminating against, denying services to, or seeking to harm”. I’m not saying these people are entirely unjust or should be without support either; they are always welcome to form their own communities.
Non-binary people are their own thing and aren’t too optically damaging as long as they aren’t at the forefront.
then you’d expect there to be a gradient of gender mismatch—from subtle to large.
Yes, gender dysphoria varies in severity; I’d say mine is moderate. There are definitely those who suffer more than I did, and definitely those who suffer less, but still suffer all the same. However, what matters here is that there is significant dysphoria present.
Perhaps there’s something you’re wanting to carve out as a protected status—suffering?
Normal transgender people who medically transition from their birth sex to the opposite when they are legally, financially, and safely able to. In other words, people who have gender dysphoria and don’t behave in an optically-damaging manner.
What about gender euphoria (the reason I transitioned)
Is gender euphoria not the alleviation of constant dysphoria that you have accepted as baseline? Also, congratulations.
If people who want to be gender noncomforming don’t have a place under the trans umbrella, where do you propose they go instead? What’s their identity supposed to be? Or is that simply not your problem?
Again, nothing is stopping people from self-advocating or forming their own communities. The following is not a one-to-one comparison, but the gay community has managed to reject pedophiles and most enjoyers of kink without infringing upon either or turning into a gatekeeping cesspit; the latter have their own, separate community.
How plausible is it actually, to even do this? Is this actually something that could happen if a lot of smart and motivated people put a lot of focus into it? Would the payoff be worth it? Or to put it differently—suppose we put our cultural effective altruist hats on for a moment and treat trans suffering as a cause area. Is this the best use of time and energy for that, compared to other interventions?
If you look at it that way, no American’s problems are worthwhile compared to genocide in Sudan. To answer your question in good faith, it’s not something that a small group of people or a single individual could achieve; rather, it would need to be a cultural shift throughout the trans community. While transgender issues in general are insignificant in comparison to pretty much every other social issue out there, protecting one’s own interests is pertinent to most human beings, of which transgender people are a subset, so it is strongly in the interest of the transgender community in particular to enact this. Do I think it would happen? Absolutely not; as touched on in the post, those with gender dysphoria are a minority within the community that claims to represent them, and alternative communities are either too small to impress upon the public consciousness as the current “transgender community” has or have other optical problems.
To spell out the direct costs: a lot of the non-conforming people would be hurt under this proposal,
How so? They can form their own communities and will have the same access to informed consent medical transition, mental healthcare, and other resources as the rest of us (which will be none if they keep at it).
and probably a lot of people who were trans-curious but felt ashamed of it would stay in the closet.
Which happened to me because of the poor optics of the mainstream transgender community.
I think it’s likely a nontrivial portion of currently medically transitioning people got their start by playing with their gender in a way that wouldn’t have happened in the proposed regime.
When did I imply that people ought not to play with their presentation. Try makeup, men’s clothes, whatever, just don’t call yourself transgender unless you’re transgender. There’s no shame in being gender-nonconforming. In fact, reinforcing the narrative that experimenting with one’s appearance or preferring the trappings of the opposite gender make you transgender leads to more false positives and detranstioners (who suffer actual gender dysphoria when they screw up their endocrine system, and are optically terrible and convince the public to support removal of informed consent for the rest of us), and provide a narrative that is very easy to poke holes in (“I’m a tomboy and still a girl!”).
If this pendulum were set in motion, do you feel confident it would stop at “reject the noncomformists” and not swing all the way back into “reject all trans people”?
Yes, because it’s the trans community that is making the change, not some other nebulous entity. If the community becomes so small that it excludes the majority of those with gender dysphoria, it will be socially irrelevant, and the afflicted can form a new community.
Transgender people have been thought of as “ridiculous” ever since the 60s or so. The non-binaries did not start it, and it’s not clear to me ejecting them would end it.
I never deny the existence of prejudice or hatred. There are some people who will always find gender dysphoria ridiculous, just as they do for the moon landing, the heliocentric model, and the vaccine. Some people will always outrun reality, no matter how fast it chases after them. However, the public presentation of ridiculous notions greatly broadens the set of people who find it ridiculous. I consider myself, my family, and the majority of my peers back home to be reasonable people, who simply ridiculed what is ridiculous. The notion of gender as an “identity” that one could pick and choose, with transgender people “feeling” like one gender or another, sometimes two at the same time, or even a super secret third animal gender that nobody else has, when people don’t “feel” a gender at all, is ridiculous. It is no surprise that I was closeted, even to myself, if acknowledging I was “transgender” meant I was that.
The same is true for the people who surround me, who are generally reasonable and not politically extreme in one direction or the other. Once I was able to explain to my family what gender dysphoria entailed, that it was not a choice or an “identity” but a medical condition, and that I would not be shitting in a litter box (this was a genuine concern of my mother), they were quite receptive. Of course, there were people who would have accepted me even if I did make use of the litter box (such as my elder sister, who told my mother about such things), and there are people who do not accept me now, but both groups are by far in the minority. People can respect “poorly understood endocrine disorder”; they will not respect “gender identity”.
A lot of the transgender people that come to the front of the minds of cis people who don’t have a good impression of trans people, like your parents, might just literally be the people who don’t look super great because they’re early in transition and haven’t been on hormones for several years or gotten surgery or nailed their voice training. People don’t notice the ones who do pass. What % of the impact on the cisgender public do you think this might be contributing, vs. the non-binaries? I don’t think I have a good answer here; do you have solid evidence on this?
I take it you are situated in a very liberal environment or MAGA central (if it is the latter, my condolences); in either case, your perception of politically neutral and (normal) conservative individuals is largely influenced by stereotypes on social media, which are largely false. The people who demagogues use to frighten and provoke people like my parents are detranstioners who were told that experimenting or the usual adolescent confusion rendered them trans, those who act ridiculous/provocative/promiscuous, and those who support the notion of gender as an identity; that last group is a majority among the mainstream transgender community and progressives in general. I’m not the Pew Research Center, but among reasonable people, it is not non-passing but otherwise respectable transgender people who are the target of ire.
I get that you sorely wish you could’ve transitioned earlier and easier, and this pain needs to go somewhere. I wish I could’ve too, having grown up in a red state myself and not even knowing I could transition until I was 19. But I think this pain might be coloring your reasoning—are you sure you picked the right target? Have you tried modelling gender non-conforming peoples’ minds in good faith?
Ah, so MAGA central. My condolences. Of course, power hungry politicians are at fault for the current situation, but the way the transgender community conducts itself makes those with gender dysphoria a very easy target. I believe genuine non-binary people exist, albeit in lesser numbers than reported, and I believe the vast majority of “non-confomers”, as you call them, are not explicitly acting in bad faith or are too young to know better. Modeling their minds in good faith, they are either people confused by the current narrative of “gender identity” or adolescents who saw a shiny new cool thing they could use to distinguish themselves from their peers; in either case, neither are (entirely) to blame, unlike the narcissists, attention-seekers, and people who really ought to know better.
Why I Transitioned: A Third (FtM) Perspective
Thank you for your post!
You can’t make someone see what they can’t already see. Doesn’t matter if you speak their language.
What do you mean by “language”? If you mean English, Spanish, Chinese, and the like, you’d be correct, but the choice of words you use can be incredibly powerful. Twitter is not a place for good-faith discussion; try people in real life.
Thank you for your reply! I will try my best to address your concerns. Apologies for my late reply, I am busy with schoolwork at the moment.
Sequences are just a message from Eliezer, not a message from God.
As such, it is not contrary to disagree with Eliezer, or other rationalists, in some regards and remain a rationalist.
what kind of interaction are you looking for?
I am seeking general interaction between the religious and rationalism, as well as the application of rationalism to religious principles. You put it perfectly: My goal it “to retain some of the premises of scriptural belief, but employ rationalist epistemology within that framework”. @Viliam made a good point that the requirement for faith is inherently not rational; however, rational discussion of topics that are not points of faith may still be rational, albeit with such points of faith as axioms.
Note: I will be referencing Protestant Christianity, as this is the only religion I can provide informed conjectures about, and I am not comfortable speaking when I am ill-informed. I will assume the same is true for other religions.
Thank you for your comment! You make some good points, so I will amend my framework accordingly, but there is ultimately no reason why we shouldn’t try to introduce theists to rationalism or why rationality cannot be applied to religious scripture in some contexts.
...religion requires some sins against rationality: motivated thinking, privileging a hypothesis, writing your bottom line first.
These are things that everyone does. Best to recognize that nobody is a perfect rationalist. I will concede that religions which prioritize faith require privileging a hypothesis, which is inherently antithetical to rationalism. However, this does not mean that religious people cannot be rational about topics that do not involve that specific point of faith, or apply rationalism to topics that involve religion but do not involve the specific point of faith. (Alternatively, a point of faith may be taken as an axiom.)
Most religions assume that a book written a few millennia ago … contains the true answers to the secrets of the universe and beyond.
Most Christians, at least in the United States, know that the Bible is a collection of historical documents are written and translated by humans, who have biases and flaws; the notion that the Lord personally took a pen to paper, wrote each scripture Himself in American English, and distributed the result to hotels and dollar stores nationwide is a minority position, to put it lightly. (In regards to the linked survey: The difference between “God-inspired but not to be taken literally all the time” and “fables/moral precepts recorded by man” is not relevant and probably would not be of much interest; if you care, feel free to reply.)
And this is something that religious people would probably feel uncomfortable about, because the motivation is obvious: to separate the useful parts and then throw away the rest.
At least in regard to Christianity, this is what precisely religious discourse does. Every time you see a Christian eating shellfish (forbidden in the Old Testament, or the part of the Bible recorded before Jesus’s birth, but allowed in the post-Gospel New Testament, or the part of the Bible recorded after Jesus’s ascension) or wearing clothes without tassels (forbidden in the Old Testament, implicitly allowed in the New Testament; for a simple explanation, see here), they have already “thrown away the rest” without issue. While I cannot speak definitively, as I am ill-informed, many members of other religions do the same; I have known Hindus who are vegetarian and Hindus who only abstain from red meat as well as Muslim women who wear the hijab and Muslim women who do not, and I assume they all have some religious justification (other than apathy) for doing so.
Like, smart people were thinking about things
So would it not behoove rationalists to invite such to discussion? Would it not behoove those discussing religious topics to use a successful framework (rationalism) to do so?
Attach Yourself to the Right Person, and You’ll Go Far (a nerdy poem about bugs)
By “emotional concern”, I intended to convey that you feel an emotional impulse in response to how someone else feels; you are physically/emotionally upset by seeing someone suffering, and you are made physically/emotionally joyful by seeing someone succeeding.
Hello, different trans person replying here. (FtM, if it matters.)
I would be completely fine if there was some “trans gene” that was identified and eradicated, so as long as the already-living people who possessed them were not killed or otherwise infringed upon. Gender dysphoria has been nothing but a net-negative on my life. Being suicidal since the onset of puberty, paying for medicated perpetually, and being socially displaced (and not just due to prejudice; well-intentioned people will mistake your identity sometimes, and treat you differently than a normal person) are not positive experiences, nor have they led to any positive experience or insight I would have not arrived at otherwise. Nothing of value would be lost.
I would make the stronger preposition that any trans person who disagrees is either being disingenuous (likely for rhetorical reasons), is overpowered by emotions, or does not have gender dysphoria/is not transgender, but I’m not in a position to defend it.
A quick example I like to use when people around me appeal to nature is that smallpox and arsenic are natural, air conditioning and manufactured clothing are not.
My stipulated definition is not “small-scale kindness”, it is the emotional concern for other’s well-being that causes an “emotional inclination to be kind”. Politicians lack concern for others’ suffering because they cannot have sonder, and therefore cannot have emotional concern, for the suffering of everyone their policies will affect. (Just about everyone has intellectual/abstract concern for others’ suffering; we can all say, “children dying in a war is bad”, but when we hear news about such, we don’t have the same emotional reaction that we would have if the dying children were members of our own families or communities.) Emotionally identifying with and caring about people is known as affective/compassionate empathy; those with ASPD lack this, though they may have cognitive empathy (which is how they can manipulate people).
I don’t believe that empathy is the sole cause and determiner of political polarization, only that it is the root. While tribalism is present in all societies (Europe and Japan are not free of racism, for instance), social factors such as the identification of ethnicity/culture/religion with politics, influence of social media, and presence of charismatic individuals (the modern American right would not have existed to the same extent without Donald Trump) drive tribalism along political lines.
Just went to my first rationalist/EA meetup; it was wonderful to have a friendly and measured discussion with people who valued rationality. Would highly recommend real-life conversation!
Thank you for catching that! I will fix the post once I have the time. Still, even if Dunbar’s number does not directly define the limits of human empathy, it does limit the amount of people you can really conceptualize or understand in an intuitive manner; anything beyond that has to be abstraction. (That is, it limits the amount of people who you can really feel sonder for, even though we all know abstractly that all eight billion of us have inner lives as valuable as our own.) You cannot feel empathy towards something that is not a person (to empathize with inanimate objects or animals, you need to humanize/anthropomorphize them), and since Dunbar’s number limits the amount of people you can conceptualize, it limits empathy.
I was in a disagreement with a family member over MAID. After a long discussion, we agreed that patients have full autonomy over their body, that allowing terminally ill patients to pass away by their own will would reduce their overall suffering, and that decisions in healthcare were best left to doctors, patients, and families rather than the government. We also agreed that this led to the conclusion that MAID should be legal for terminally ill patients. However, she refused to agree that MAID should be legal because “it just feels wrong, I know its wrong, and I’m never going to agree with you”.