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How could such a thesis be viable, when so much of the historical data has been lost?
There's more historical data than you might think-- for example, the way the Catholic Church defined sexual sin in terms of actions rather certain sins being associated with types of people who were especially tempted to engage in them.
There's also some history of how sexual normality became more and more narrowly defined (Freud has a lot to answer for), and then the definitions shifted.
A good bit of the book is available for free at amazon, and I think that would be the best way for you to see whether Blank's approach is reasonable.
The introduction is a catalog of ambiguities about sex, gender, and sexual orientation:
All of these are fair enough, and I've only read the introduction, but I don't have a lot of confidence that she goes on to resolve these contradictions in Less Wrong tree-falls-in-a-forest style. Instead of trying to clarify what people mean when they something like "most people are heterosexual," I get the feeling she only wants to muddy the waters enough to say "no they aren't."
I think her point is closer to "people make things up, and keep repeating those things until they seem like laws of the universe".
A possible conclusion is that once people make a theory about how something ought to be, it's very hard to go back to the state of mind of not having an opinion about that thing.
The amazon preview includes the last couple of chapters of the book.
The book could be viewed as a large expansion of two Heinlein quotes: "Everybody lies about sex" and "Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to fly a kite".
I don't recognize the quotes.
If so, then her point is more specific: "people made heterosexuality up." But I don't see how this can be supported. Every human being who has ever lived came from a male-female sex act. That has to serve as a lower bound for how unusual and made-up heterosexuality is.
I'll check it out.
Edit: By the way what I can see of the amazon preview is pretty heavily redacted, and doesn't include any complete chapter.
The abstract property that people we categorize as heterosexual have in common has existed, as you imply, for as long a members of bisexual species have been preferentially seeking out opposite-sex sex partners.
The explicit category in people's brains is more recent than that.
I mean, every human being who has ever lived came from a sex act between two people who were in close physical proximity, but that doesn't mean that the category of "people who prefer to have sex in close physical proximity to one another, rather than at a distance" has been explicitly represented. Indeed, I may have just made it up.
What do you mean by this? It's incorrect to say that people haven't noticed until recently that it's very common for men to seek out women for sex and vice versa. It's also incorrect to say that people haven't noticed until recently the exceptions to this practice.
Neither is it correct to say that people haven't noticed that it's very common for people to have sex with people who are physically adjacent to them. But that's not to say that people often think "I'm the sort of person who has sex with people physically adjacent to me."
There's a difference between eating meat from time to time, being aware that I eat meat from time to time, and explicitly thinking of myself as a "meat eater," or as an "omnivore," or as a "carnivore". There's a difference between being really smart, being aware of how well I do at various cognitive tasks, and thinking of myself as "a really smart person".
More generally, there's a difference between having the property X, being aware of evidence of X and acting accordingly, and having formed a mental structure in my mind that represents me as having X.
There's also a difference between all of those and being part of a culture that has "people who have X" as a social construct.
In most cases, someone who thinks of themselves as "a meat eater" really does eat meat. On the other hand, there are very many people who think of themselves as "a really smart person" but who are not really smart.
Which case is more similar to heterosexuality, in your view?
The categories get really fuzzy, really fast, which causes a lot of confusion.
For the sake of concreteness, I'll define my terms as follows (1):
* A meat eater is someone who reliably experiences the desire to eat meat, and would sometimes be willing to eat meat if offered, and would not necessarily feel that eating that meat was problematic.
* A heterosexual is someone who reliably experiences the desire to have sex with opposite-gendered people, and would sometimes be willing to do so if offered, and would not necessarily feel that having that sex was problematic.
* A really smart person is someone who would reliably perform well on certain kinds of real-world problems that I don't know how to define in a noncircular way but I can point to examples of.
Given those definitions, I agree that someone who identifies themselves as a meat eater typically is a meat eater and that someone who identifies themselves as a really smart person frequently is not a really smart person, and I would say that someone who identifies themselves as heterosexual typically is heterosexual.
So, to answer your question: if I look at just those cases, the meat-eater case is more like the heterosexual case than the smart-person case is
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(1) I have no particular fondness for those definitions, I picked them as my best approximations to what I thought you probably had in mind. If you would prefer different definitions let me know. Different definitions might change my answer.
Leaving terms like these in their normally fuzzy state causes lots of confusion when trying to have precise discussions of them ... is a prepubescent child who has never been sexually attracted to anyone heterosexual? Is a man who is sexually attracted to other men, has never had sex with one, would refuse to have sex with one if offered (assuming etc.), and regularly has sex with women despite not really being sexually attracted to them heterosexual? Etc. Etc. Etc.
There's nothing especially interesting about these questions, they're just labeling questions... but if we don't agree on the labels, it's easy to confuse labeling questions with actual questions about the underlying states of the world, including states of people's minds.
I don't know what TheOtherDave means, but I have heard it said before that the notion of treating sexual preference as identity is relatively recent. In the past -- or so the claim goes -- people did of course recognize that some people prefer to have intercourse with members the opposite sex, whereas others did not. But this was seen as merely a preference, similar to disliking broccoli or liking the color red or whatever. A person wouldn't identify as "a heterosexual" or "a homosexual", no more than one would identify as "an anti-broccolist" or a "red-ist" or whatever.
That brings up some interesting questions about the way people thought about identity. An awful lot of identity groups got launched around the same time, including some of the first ones I can think of that're based around behavior -- the temperance movement originated in the mid-1830s, for example. I wonder if some shift in the political climate in the early-to-mid 1800s suddenly made it practical to advocate for some behavior or lack thereof by adopting it into a group identity and then using that to argue for a protected category?
Insofar as there's a point to such distinctions, I expect the frontlines of that shift to have been cultural and scientific rather than political. "Advocating a behavior by adopting it into a group identity and using that to argue for a protected category" sounds awfully meta; I expect the crucial changes were simpler, more fundamental and centered around what enabled people to argue for a protected category in the first place. I'm thinking along lines like this:
A number of technological advances were made around that time that made setting up movements far easier. The proliferation of various movements coincides nicely with such stuff as improved methods of agriculture (leading to population growth and urbanization), the invention of the telegraph (bridging distances), better transportation in the form of railways and ever faster ships (mobilization, etc.) and probably others that escape me at the moment. A bit later on Darwin and the theory of evolution paved the way for eugenics-style thinking and concepts of inherent superiority between races and nations, and around the turn of the century the rise of scientific (or semi-scientific) psychology opened the doors for minting all kinds of novel ingroup-outgroup divisions. I expect identity-builders had a field day with the concept of the subconscious mind in particular. "You can't help it, those people are just made that way. Fortunately not us, though, haw haw."
On the non-scientific side, there are a number of converging cultural trends and phenomena to take into account.
These aren't exhaustive lists, but I hope the gist is clear.
Technically, given our modern technology, this is no longer true; though throughout most of human history this was indeed the case.
OK, but I think to say "almost every human being who has ever lived..." would be a misleading understatement.
Yeah I suppose you're right. I wasn't really trying to nitpick your statement, but instead to express my admiration of modern technology. We've come pretty far since the days of Ancient Greece.
Even before modern IVF, I'm pretty sure it's medically possible for a woman to become pregnant with sperm donated by a man she's never been within arm's reach of, kept on e.g. a damp cloth. I wouldn't be so quick to rule out the possibility of such a thing having happened in Ancient Greece at some point.
When giraffes mate in such a manner as to produce viable offspring, is that "heterosexuality?"
If yes, why do male giraffes frequently engage in same-sex behavior when nearby females are not in oestrus and receptive to their advances?
To clarify: the term "heterosexuality" doesn't necessarily mean simply "male/female sexual contact." Humans have been doing that for as long as there have been humans. Humans have also been doing same-sex sexual contact for as long as there have been humans (this is not a controversial idea given the huge number of animal species that do, inclusive of our near relatives), but the phenomenon of people being defined as, or identifying with the terms "heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual" is quite recent and cultural-contextual.
Mating such that offspring may be viably produced is a piece of the territory. "Heterosexuality" is a label on one particular map of that territory, and its boundaries and name don't necessarily represent the reality accurately.
The map itself is part of a larger territory. Handshakes only occur in certain cultures; that does not mean there is no such thing as a handshake.
It does imply that assigning handshakes to the reference class of "things made up by humans," is reasonable though.
Money is made up, but you can still starve to death without it. "Made up" doesn't mean "fake and with no lasting impact."
One more question: Why do people find it so interesting that some animals form same-sex pairings?
It normally comes up when claims are made of the form "homosexuality is unnatural!" with the implied or explicit "therefore it is wrong/sinful/evil/yucky". Pointing to same-sex pairings in animals is intended as a response to this. The people making the response either don't understand the naturalistic fallacy or consider it to be sufficiently abstract or harder to explain that they don't bother with that line of response.
It is also interesting from a biological standpoint in that it isn't that easy to explain from an ev bio perspective, so studying it makes sense.
It has to do with the fact that it was essentially ignored throughout most of the history of biology as a discipline. It's not like this behavior is new; it's been there the whole time, and so have the observations of the behavior, but the reaction within scientific culture has changed dramatically.
Stuff like interpreting active vs passive animals in a copulatory act as male and female respectively, assuming the animals had simply misidentified the sex of the other party, or assuming that the observing party was necessarily mistaken, publication and citation biases, and the frequently-opaque titles, abstracts and contents of those published studies that did manage to make it into the journals ("A Note on the Apparent Lowering of Moral Standards in the Lepidoptera", W.J. Tenant, 1987, Entemologists Record and Journal of Variation).
It's news to a whole lot of people, in other words.
Wild mass guessing: animals are incapable of sin?
Your second question is very interesting! I don't know why asking it is contingent on a "yes" answer to your first question, which is tiresome.
If you like, I'd be interested to hear what you mean by these phrases in more detail:
In the United States, dog meat is defined as "not food." In other cultures, the definition of "food" includes dog meat. The meaning of "food" depends on context, specifically, the cultural context.
Just to be clear, I think the brouhaha about whether it is acceptable to eat dog is strong proof that "food" is more narrowly defined than "material capable of being consumed for sustenance by humans."
The assertion is that "homosexuality" is a word whose meaning is as culturally dependent as the word "food."
I don't agree. I think "food" has a broad definition that is context dependent, not culturally dependent.
Every human culture has language for food. Yes sometimes people say "that's not food" when they mean "there's a taboo against eating that" and sometimes they say "that's not food" when they mean "that's not edible." Perhaps sometimes they mean something else. But to tell what they mean depends on context, not culture.
Of course taboos vary across cultures, as does knowledge about what is and isn't edible.
I'm not trying to play games with definitions - if taboo is a more intuitive label for you, then that's the word I'll use. The modern usage of the label "homosexual" invokes a substantial number of social taboos.
Those taboos vary from culture to culture. Because cultures change over time, that statement implies that the relevant taboos have changed over time. In short, the concepts intended to be invoked by the word "homosexuality" depend on the cultural context.
Further, the historical record isn't clear that any cluster of taboos related to the current homosexuality cluster existed until fairly recently in history.
This exactly.
(Tangentially: food is a great example of how culture impacts...well, so many things, but perception among them.)
The quotes are from Heinlein's "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long" which were sections in Time Enough for Love. In theory, they're the wisdom of a man who's thousands of years old. If you pay attention to the details, it turns out that they're selections by a computer (admittedly, a sentient computer) from hours of talk in which Lazarus Long was encouraged to say whatever he wanted. He could be mistaken or lying. He's none too pleased to be kept alive for his wisdom when he'd intended to commit suicide.
He may or may not be a mouthpiece for Heinlein.
Oh, so her thesis is that in the west, orientation-as-identity dates back to 1860-ish. I can imagine that being defensible. That's way different from what you originally wrote, though.
You see, the first thing that came to mind was Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium, which explicitly recognizes orientation-as-identity and predates the Catholic Church by a couple centuries.
Thanks for the cite.