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ChristianKl comments on Open thread for December 17-23, 2013 - Less Wrong
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The invention of the car wasn't that big a deal. At the beginning it wasn't clear that cars are all that great. It took time for people to figure out that cars are much more awesome than horse carts.
I think you underrate the effects of legalizing LSD. If you say you legalize all drugs, you have to ask yourself questions such as why pharma company pay a lot of money for clinical trials when all substances can be legally sold. As a society you have to answer those questions.
As far as the establishment that homoesexuality is relatively innate, I think you have to keep in mind how vague the term homosexuality happens to be. At the moment homosexuality seems to be an identity label. To me it's not clear that this will be the case in 200 years.
A lot of men who fuck other men in prisons don't see themselves as homosexual. Plenty of people who report that they had pleasureable sex with a person of the same sex don't label themselves as homosexual.
There are also a lot of norms about avoiding physical contact with other people. A therapist is supposed to work on the mind and that doesn't mean just hugging a person for a minute. I can imagine a society in which casual touches between people are a lot more intimate than they are nowadays and behavior between males that a conversative American would label as homosexual would be default social behavior between friends.
If you run twin studies you find that being overweight has a strong genetic factor. The same goes for height. Yet the average of both changed a lot during the last two hundred years. The notion of something being innate might even be some rest of what Nietzsche called the God in the grammar. It might not be around in 100 years anymore as it exists nowadays.
This futuristic society of casual male intimacy was known as the 19th century.
In it, the Russia of the 1950s and the modern Middle East you could observe men dancing together, holding hands, cuddling, sleeping together and kissing.
If I look at that description it seems to me that the current way of seeing homosexuality won't be permanent.
It seems being homesexual became a separate identity to the extend that people focused in not engaging in certain kinds of intimacy to signal that they aren't gay.
If the stigma against homosexuality disappears, homosexuality as identity might disappear the same way.
The word homosexuality is even in decline in google ngrams.
There's a distinction occasionally drawn between homosexual and gay; homosexual is the sexual preference, gay is the cultural lump/stereotype populated mainly by homosexuals. So the 'metrosexual' thing in the early 00s was a kind of fad for heterosexual men adopting gay culture.
This distinction is mainly drawn to point out that the political right's objection is largely to 'gay' rather than to 'homosexual'.
No the political right's objection is to people engaging in homosexual sex and to popular culture telling people this is a normal and healthy thing to do. The subtler objection is to it telling people that if they find 19th century style male bonding appealing it means that they're "gay" and should thus engage in homosexual sex.
I see no reason to believe that is the case; gay culture, by its nature of growing out of highly-liberal communties during the 60s and 70s, is highly hedonistic and permissive, both things the political right objects to already. That they strongly dislike (perceived) core attributes of this culture and the associated homosexuality looks like a strictly simpler hypothesis than that they dislike (perceived) core attributes of this culture, and also homosexuality.
In short: Occam appears to be on my side, so you'll need some evidence for that.
Read what traditionalists actually write for one thing. They're against hedonistic behaviors and that includes homosexual sex (this is not the only reason they're against it). Notice that this was true long before the current cultural concept of what it means to "act gay".
Taboo that word. Is being left-handed normal?
ISTM the point of that word is often to sneak connotations in.
What? ISTM it's right-wingers who say things like that. EDIT: I guess I had misread that (I had read “should” as ‘are likely to’ rather than ‘had better’), in which case... what??? I can't remember anyone ever suggesting anything remotely like that with a straight face, and I know plenty of left-wingers; are you sure you aren't attacking a straw man?
They tend to phrase it as encouraging people to "find out if they're gay", i.e., encourage people to declare themselves "gay" if what amounts to 19th century style male bonding appeals to them. Furthermore, once someone has been declared "gay" it's considered a horrendous hate crime to discourage him from engaging in homosexual sex.
Never heard that either.
And once someone has been declared "straight" it's considered a horrendous hate crime to discourage him from engaging in heterosexual sex (except by fundamentalist Christians and the like, but that also applies to gay sex), so what's your point?
What does "sexual preference" mean exactly?
Do you mean that the criminals in prisons who rape other criminals are gay but not homosexual?
Are you implying that neither or the terms is actually about whether a man has sexs with another man?
Under this distinction: Men who prefer to have sex with men rather than women are homosexual. Men who prefer to have sex with women rather than men are heterosexual.
Prison sex may be homosexual (that's a matter of fuzzy definitions), but (under this distinction) definitely isn't gay.
More generally, ISTM that displays of affection between heterosexual men correlate negatively with homophobia within each society but positively across societies. (That's because the higher your prior probability for X is, the more evidence I need to provide to convince you that not-X.)