Even slavery?
lucidfox
Karma: 586
The Self-Reinforcing Binary
If a social custom is too old, I in fact consider it a more likely candidate for being discarded today. Our ancestors had access to less evidence and experience than we do, and all too often what seemed a good idea at that time, gets in the way now. Appeal to tradition is used as a curiosity-stopper—usually when the idea can’t defend itself against progress on its own accord.
I’d like to read it, if only to clear the confusion about the myriad contradicting definitions of that term.
Animals also have much more simply organized societies. Reproduce, feed and raise offspring, rinse and repeat. They have no analogue of the complex human culture with its multiple, non-obvious facets.
The seed of the human gender roles, as I mentioned, may well lie in the residual animal qualities retained in hunter-gatherer societies. The rest is memetic.
I didn’t claim that this particular division was memetic—quite the contrary.
But the point of my post is that most such divisions are completely arbitrary and have nothing to do with our animal ancestry. Perhaps I should have been clearer and given some examples in the post. Short versus long hair, pants versus skirts, and blue versus pink are among the first few that come to my mind.
On the subject of saving lives—while this is off topic, I feel it would be an interesting debate what to do with Heaven and Hell in a world where they demonstrably existed, and we had objective evidence for what would land people in either. I’m tempted to say that it would make sense for it to be left to personal choice to knowingly do things that would result in you going to Hell, but I haven’t really given that issue much thought before you mentioned it. Hmm.
Morality in Fantasy Worlds
If people knew about hell, why would anyone be evil?
For the same reason, I suspect, that people can be evil in the real world while genuinely believing in divine punishment. For example, they may think that surely, their actions must be justified and therefore good.
My theory is that the women in this case are committing a Typical Psyche Fallacy. The women I ask about this are not even remotely close to being a representative sample of all women. They’re the kind of women whom a shy and somewhat geeky guy knows and talks about psychology with. Likewise, the type of women who publish strong opinions about this on the Internet aren’t close to a representative sample. They’re well-educated women who have strong opinions about gender issues and post about them on blogs.
What statistical evidence do you have for this claim? It seems to me that this is a True Scotsman fallacy: either women behave the way the men in question ascribe to them, or they are “educated and opinionated” and thus don’t count.
There are valid reasons why the discussion between “jerks” and “nice guys” turns the way it usually does. For example, both camps tend to see womens as goals to be conquered, like, I don’t know, video game NPCs who respond to certain key phrases—as opposed to complex people like themselves. These so called “nice guys”, as opposed to genuinely nice guys, think that if they treat a woman nicely, she’s somehow obligated to fall in love with him. Reality, alas, does not work that way.
Well, to me, persuasion is usually annoying because it is so blunt. Prolonged exposure to media that proclaim a neutral point of view (such as Wikipedia, where it is enforced by consensus) has seemingly “programmed” me so that biased arguments feel like attempts to rewire my brain.
When I try to convince someone, instead of stating my beliefs outright, I try to poke logical gaps in the opponent’s, in the hope that it will get them to think critically.
I’m not 100% convinced—even after reading Eliezer’s articles—that one interpretation of quantum mechanics is necessarily better than the other (my gut reaction would be to say “a plague on both your houses”), but this article looks like an argument in favor of many-worlds over Copenhagen.
In Copenhagen, the extra configurations “magically” collapse out of existence at some ill-defined point when the system decoheres to the point that we can’t get to see them even in principle. In many-worlds, the macroscopic system decoheres instead. The existence of innumerable and undetectable “extra worlds” is not a violation of Occam’s Razor as defined in this article: as long as it follows from just taking the laws of quantum mechanics to their logical conclusion, there is no extra information needed to describe this law, and the extra worlds are irrelevant to our description in the same sense as extra galaxies are, as it’s only a question of extra RAM rather than extra meaningful information as long as they obey the same fundamental laws.
and the love of a man for a woman, and the love of a woman for a man
Eliezer, as much as I agree with 95% of what you say, the devil lies in the details. In this case, a heteronormative bias. (Lesbian here.)
“Essential” in what sense?
Are we arguing about some Platonic “essentials”, in that fictional characters “actually exist somewhere”? I believe that the fictional characters were formed in Eliezer’s brain as representations of certain archetypes (such as, as he noted, the “wise female council leader”) that he felt best represented the characterization he was intending to give them.
It doesn’t mean the story wouldn’t work if the characters were given different genders or other different characteristics. It means that the author would find it unfitting to his semi-conscious concept of the story and its fictional setting, which is unknown to us except for what’s revealed in the text, and is necessarily richer than the text. Or at least, I generously assume that this is what Eliezer was arguing—that “she had to be female” meant “I believe she worked best as female as the representation of my character role concept”, not a postulation of some fictional Platonism.
Gender Identity and Rationality
Those are really insightful and comforting!
I’m pretty much sure about 1, 3 and 4, but not so much about 2.
From my observations, if by “typical women” we mean a complete statistical average, then yes, I’m psychologically different if only by my tendencies towards introspection and rational thought, but the same can be said of virtually all Less Wrong residents. I feel a strong mental resonance with intelligent educated women, especially of my age range, and far more often than not find myself agreeing on beliefs (various aspects of feminism, for instance). I’m also statistically atypical in that I identify as a lesbian (I’m glad to have a girlfriend who regards me as, well, her girlfriend).
It probably wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to hypothesize that LGBT people are more introspective on average than the general population, if only because they somehow had to arrive at their conclusions.
I thought about these questions thoroughly before, and the answer to the first three is a resounding yes, otherwise I wouldn’t be presenting as a woman now in the first place.
As for the fourth one, that depends on what we mean by “stereotypically”. If I were to design myself a body closely reflecting my inner self (I don’t say ideal, because I don’t think there’s a single optimized appearance for me), it definitely wouldn’t be oversexualized, and maybe I’d downplay some stereotypically feminine characteristics—for example, settle on below-average breasts, and remain tall, although perhaps not as tall as I’m now.
I’m definitely an asker, and this—as I see now in retrospect thanks to this post—caused me a lot of grief with a friend with whom I was otherwise closely mentally aligned. She insisted on “reading” people and playing “guess my intent”, often accusing me of things that I never even thought of, and complaining that I was difficult to read. When I asked her why she couldn’t just ask me about my thoughts instead of trying to infer them, she said it was not culturally common in her country (Holland). I have no way of verifying that last assertion, though.
I never had any issues with being a woman who is attracted to women, except for the fear of rejection by a lesbian. (“What if she considers me a man and singles me out immediately before even getting a chance to know me?”)
But yes, I used to consider myself a straight man before. Reflecting back, it seems that I used to single out the entire LGBT umbrella as “weirdoes” (“thanks” in part to indoctrination by pop culture and conservative parents), and it was thus difficult for me to think of myself in any LGBT category. Perhaps it’s easier to switch to one “weird” category (a transgendered straight woman) from another “weird” category (if you thought of yourself as a gay man before), than it is from a “normal” category to a “doubly weird” category.
It was perhaps also difficult to take the first step: once I got the guts to do one small thing that I “wasn’t supposed to do” but could easily hide (in my case, shaving my legs), the rest of my restraint of actions and thought cascaded on its own, unstoppable from that point, like an avalanche.
While I hope it will be true at some point in the future, saying this now would be wishful thinking when people get abused and assaulted daily for not conforming to so-called gender norms.