If you can offer a rigorous, general procedure for that, I’m willing to listen.
lucidfox
Karma: 589
Moreover, if nobody can know my mind better than I, this is a big problem. It means psychology hasn’t advanced enough.
Psychology hasn’t advanced enough. It’s been discussed here on LW over and over again. It is ultimately based on an inherent degree of subjectivity and something more akin to a collection of best practices than actual science.
And most important—this is completely useless when you’re trying to know your own mind. Some people regret transitioning and go back.
Transitioning is always a risk—the best that can be done is minimizing the likelihood of such an event by carefully evaluating the pros and cons beforehand.
And while it is a therapist making the final decision, it is ultimately based on self-diagnosis. If you don’t realize you have gender identity problems, nobody else will do it for you.
The Wikipedia articles “Gender” and “Gender identity”, as well as their external links, would be a good start—as well as my previous post on LW, “Gender Identity and Rationality”, and its discussion area.
As for religion, despite being an atheist myself, I’m not going to assume the hardline “atheism or bust” stance and instead I’ll politely decline to derail the thread.
The most important difference is that religion involves people making conclusions about nonexistent (from an atheist’s point of view) external entities, while gender identity involves people making conclusions about their own minds—and who can know your mind better than yourself?
It means taking averages over such an extremely diverse sample that the results end up having no real meaning—like literal average temperature per hospital, which includes sampling over corpses in the morgue and severe fever sufferers. So if the average temperature hospital 1 turns out to be 0.1 degrees higher than in hospital 2, it tells us nothing about the relative distribution of patient traits in each hospital.
So transsexualism is a “delusion” now? I honestly suggest you do some research before posting arrogant statements like that.
And if you have any way ready to “cure” it other than transition, I’ll be interested in hearing it—and so will be psychiatrists all over the world, I’d imagine.
There is an expression in Russian net folklore: “average temperature per hospital”. This is, in effect, what you’d be measuring here.
Ignoring for a minute that such a test would be infeasible to realistically implement (good luck getting so many trans volunteers), it is loaded with cultural assumptions, a vague definition of “typical”, and it ignores such issues as experience in the target gender role, skill in the language of the test, and culture-specific stereotypes and presuppositions.
Choosing to be treated the way society should treat women, if it puts sexist prejudices aside, or the way women have traditionally been treated?
(And going in the other direction, FTMs might be interpreted by conservative men as an attack on their male privilege.)
Comparing furries/otherkin etc. with transsexualism is normally something you will hear as an attack from people that do not accept transsexualism.
I’ve heard the argument from both sides, including from otherkin who seek social acceptance based on that comparison.
I personally have no doubt the society has to accept and help transsexuals, but I’m ambivalent in case of otherkin—primarily because I find it difficult to empathize with their patterns of thought.
This seems to agree with your intuitions: In a Turing test you can probably distinguish females and males in which case most transsexuals hopefully come out as the gender they consider themselves do be
Distinguish based on what attributes, exactly? Can you suggest contents for such a test?
SI units aren’t “units I prefer”, it’s an international standard. What if I claimed that same defense when making a post with measurements given in pre-revolution Russian units? “Come on, arshins and sazhens are totally on Wikipedia!”
Systems of measurements != language. This is an English-language site and so a reader would expect all discussions to occur in English. However, if you’re giving measurements, use an international standard. Sticking to US units out of an assumption that international readers can be bothered to patiently convert them all is at the very least impolite.
However, if the post is meant for an international audience, it should already be in units used in most of the world, instead of forcing people from everywhere but one country to convert.
The real problem with making predictions even for the nearest future is that technological breakthroughs are often unpredictable. 1950s science fictions authors promised us colonies on Mars by 2000, but who anticipated the Internet?
Should Rationalists Tip at Restaurants?
It’s a loaded question that presents the word “rationalist” as some kind of straightjacket regulating minutae of your daily life.
Tipping is voluntary. If you want to do it, do it. If you don’t, don’t. There isn’t anything inherently altruistic or jerkish about either scenario, and it’s certainly not something an ideology can dictate.
social norms like tipping, waiting in line, making small talk with strangers, and paying taxes
You’re lumping apples and oranges here. Tipping and small talk are unenforceable, culture-specific social expectations. Waiting in line is a general “do unto others...” guideline, but I’m sure you’d face sanctions from guards if you tried to break it in anything remotely official. Tax evasion is a legally punishable crime.
Converting these measurements to the metric system would be helpful. Not everyone here is from America.
“Less generically fortunate”?
That’s, like, not arrogant at all.
Well, where I come from, being uncompromisingly “iconoclastic and contrarian” doesn’t convince people, it makes them look at you like at a teenager with a grudge. Paying your words the same amount of attention this image implies.
And until LW authors learn the skills of persuasion, learn how to be the kind of person that people will occasionally listen to, LW is going to remain, at best, a fringe community.
I’m not sure if this is supposed to be sarcasm. At least, I hope it is.
It is desire, more or less—if someone believes they already have body parts they actually don’t, now that’s a delusion. However, calling it “desire” implicitly implies that fulfilling it is optional for their well-being, and that it’s somehow okay to treat them the way they don’t want to be treated until then.