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nyan_sandwich comments on I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions - Less Wrong Discussion

26 Post author: Multiheaded 25 January 2012 05:43PM

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Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 25 January 2012 11:41:06PM *  38 points [-]

"Many (and probably most) animals also have gender in the sense that individuals with penises behave in certain ways, and individuals with ovaries behave in other ways, despite not having memes." It would be surprising if H. sapiens were very different.

(The obviousness-in-retrospect of this argument, stated so straightforwardly, combined with the fact that I almost never hear it stated so straightforwardly and never thought of it myself, makes me update towards culture being able to non-obviously derange debates like this to a really high degree. Far mode isn't naturally about truth.)

Comment author: [deleted] 25 January 2012 11:50:04PM 9 points [-]

Well that changes things.

And yes that is disturbing.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 26 January 2012 05:52:12AM *  9 points [-]

... though it's worth keeping in mind that "the details of how gender works are made up" is still true to a pretty large extent (≥ the extent to which cross-cultural variation in gender exists); it's just that, like all culture, they're made up in a way generated/constrained by primate behavior, which has a lot of sex-dependence.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 January 2012 07:01:09PM 2 points [-]

yes. I still think gender is a stupid idea and has large components of made-upness.

Comment author: thomblake 26 January 2012 07:38:05PM 1 point [-]

Ten times agreed.