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VAuroch comments on 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Call For Critiques/Questions - Less Wrong Discussion

18 Post author: Yvain 11 October 2014 06:39AM

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Comment author: VAuroch 18 October 2014 10:15:53PM 0 points [-]

I find this sentence, and the whole tone of this comment, rather amusing because of how vividly it illustrates the contradictions of their claims. Namely, that people have an "inherent gender" that is independent of their biological sex and not subject to change by any means even as, they hope, all other sex-related traits are changeable.

There is no contradiction there, and I never addressed your ridiculous claim to the contrary. Here's a short, basic developmental human biology excerpt: Secondary and tertiary sexual characteristics are shaped during devlopment by simple hormone balance and reshaped during puberty by hormone floods, which are simple to change at the correct time. A person's gender, along with many other idiosyncratic features like their preferences about sex, food, etc., are properties of their mind and brain, and brain structure is both vastly more complex, and much slower to change.

Comment author: Azathoth123 19 October 2014 06:07:51PM 3 points [-]

Secondary and tertiary sexual characteristics are shaped during devlopment by simple hormone balance and reshaped during puberty by hormone floods, which are simple to change at the correct time.

And your claim is that there are significant numbers of people where nearly all those secondary characteristics associated with the brain and only those are one way whereas all the other ones are the other. Given the type of code evolution tends to write this is highly improbable.

Comment author: VAuroch 19 October 2014 06:38:22PM *  0 points [-]

Given the type of code evolution tends to write this is highly improbable.

Citation needed; evolution writes shitty spaghetti code that's highly vulnerable to minor changes in the runtime environment during the build process, and has no error-checking or error-correcting short of a crash.

And your claim is that there are significant numbers of people where nearly all those secondary characteristics associated with the brain and only those are one way whereas all the other ones are the other.

Since the brain structure develops at a totally different stage from the secondary sexual characteristics (continuously from birth through childhood vs. puberty), this is totally plausible and there's not much reason to think they should happen in the same direction in all cases. Also, calling anything about the brain a "secondary sexual characteristic" is highly specious.

Comment author: Azathoth123 19 October 2014 10:12:35PM 3 points [-]

evolution writes shitty spaghetti code that's highly vulnerable to minor changes in the runtime environment during the build process, and has no error-checking or error-correcting short of a crash.

Precisely, it also has no reason to neatly compartment mental from physical.

Since the brain structure develops at a totally different stage from the secondary sexual characteristics (continuously from birth through childhood vs. puberty)

However, most aspects of brain structure do in fact develop either pre-birth or during puberty, same as the other secondary sexual characteristics, and the primary sexual characteristics for that matter.

Comment author: ChristianKl 19 October 2014 11:03:02PM 1 point [-]

Citation needed; evolution writes shitty spaghetti code that's highly vulnerable to minor changes in the runtime environment during the build process, and has no error-checking or error-correcting short of a crash.

What do you mean with that statement? There are various DNA repair mechanisms that do error checking.

Evolution frequently copies genes and then changes one of those copies. You could see that as a way to produce redundancy against errors.

We have two copies of every chromosome to provide for some error correction and survive one of the two being broken.

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