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Lumifer comments on The horrifying importance of domain knowledge - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (236)
Umm... how did you phrase it? Ah: "which I suggest is not an argument".
I find many things in life unpleasant but I do not consider it sufficient reason to demand that the world be rearranged according to my sensitivities.
If you want a more general rule: self-selection into a group should not generate any additional rights (at least without matching responsibilities).
That strikes me a bit too paranoid. A changing room in a gym is not the middle of a dark forest. Unisex bathrooms are pretty common by now and I haven't seen any data about them encouraging sexual predators. If you are that concerned about safety, maybe install additional street lighting? And cameras! Don't forget about cameras! Only beneath the watchful eyes can you be secure!!
So when I said that "ewww" isn't an argument I was taking it to mean "I find contemplating X unpleasant" rather than "if X happens, people Y who experience it will find it unpleasant". The former is a much much weaker argument than the latter.
(I should, of course, have considered the latter as well, and I'm not sure why I didn't. If women at a gym find it unpleasant when someone who identifies as female but has male-looking anatomy uses their changing room -- which they well might -- that is a bad thing, and that fact does constitute an argument for not allowing that. I happen to think that the arguments the other way are stronger, but as I said before I think both sides are defensible.)
In the case we're discussing here, the additional right comes with a perfectly matched additional responsibility. If access to a gym's changing rooms goes by expressed gender identity rather than anatomy, then identifying as female lets you into the women's rooms at exactly the same time as it bars you from the men's.
(One might argue that in fact someone with female identity but male anatomy should be allowed to use either to reduce the likelihood of their getting assaulted, or something. Members of unusually vulnerable groups sometimes get additional rights even if membership of the group is self-selected, and that's not obviously unreasonable. The additional rights are compensating for additional risks rather than additional responsibilities they people in question have taken on.)
Nice steelmanning of my position. No, wait, not steelmanning. The other thing.
But I'm a bit confused now about what your position is, because I think you've now said the following things:
and I'm not sure how to fill in that [...] at the end. "... because the (other) women may feel uncomfortable"? (But you just said that the fact that some people will feel uncomfortable shouldn't count for much in designing gym changing rooms.) "... because the (other) women may be at danger of assault"? (But you just said that we shouldn't worry about assaults in gym changing rooms.)
A nitpick: it is not male-looking anatomy, it is male anatomy.
Which responsibility? If I am of whatever gender I say I am, I can change genders at will. I am not "barred" from the other changing room any more than picking one door to walk through "bars" me from the other door.
That didn't involve transmuting your position into either steel or straw. That was just me amusing myself :-) I did not mean to imply anything about your views on widespread surveillance.
I don't have a well-developed position delineated by bright lines. Basically you have a conflict between two groups -- let's call them "trans" and "mainstream". Such a conflict is nothing unusual and, indeed, the entirely normal state of a human society. Typically such conflicts are resolved according the the balance of power between the groups -- the results vary from one side fully suppressing the other to an equally-unsatisfying compromise. Occasionally the stars align and it turns out that the conflict is easily fixable and can be "dissolved" in LW lingo.
In contemporary Western societies such conflicts are usually resolved politically which means that the sides wage a cultural war "for the hearts and minds". This kind of war uses propaganda as weapons. Accordingly, the war involves loud screaming about morals, justice, fairness, God's will, etc. etc. -- whatever is needed for the agitprop needs of the day. I tend to by very cynical about such agitprop.
Note, by the way, that a completely general answer to the there-is-a-tranny-in-my-shower problem does not exist. As you yourself observed, it all depends on the local culture. A good solution for the showers in San Francisco's Castro district is likely to be different from a solution for downtown Salt Lake City -- and that's even staying inside one country.
What's visible to, and possibly disturbing for, the people in the changing room is what it looks like. I don't know, e.g., whether you would consider a post-op female-to-male transsexual person's anatomy male or merely male-looking, but I take it it would be about as disturbing in that context as a straightforwardly cis man's. So the relevant question is what it looks like.
I am pretty sure no one is in fact proposing that people be able to change their gender at will simply by saying "I'm a woman now". (Yeah, you could read Fluttershy's comment upthread that way, but I'm quite confident it wasn't so intended.)
Good! But I can't help noticing that your cynicism has been deployed only in one direction in this discussion, even though (so it seems to me) there's plenty of moral-outrage agitprop coming from elsewhere.
No, you're proposing that anyone can change genders at will by saying "I'm a woman now" and make an attempt to look like the other gender, dress like the other gender and insist on being referred to by opposite gender pronouns and name (that's how you defined "presenting as the other gender" here). While this is technically slightly more then saying "I'm a woman now", it's only barely so.
And frankly, I doubt you'd refuse to take the word of someone who insisted that he was always a "she" but didn't bother with changing name, clothing, or appearance.
I think it's very importantly different. It means, for instance, that
both of which greatly decrease its utility to people wanting to ogle or assault women in public restrooms, gym changing rooms, etc. (The fact that it requires you to make yourself appear less "manly" probably also has that effect.)
You may doubt whatever you please, I suppose.
(If someone declared themself female but made no sign of any attempt to "be" female beyond that declaration, I'd attempt to go along with their pronoun preferences but wouldn't, e.g., let them into any female-only premises I was responsible for. I don't think I would actually consider them female for any practical purposes, though further interactions might convince me that there was something more going on than a liking for feminine pronouns -- e.g., maybe the person is young, still living with and dependent on parents, and the parents are very strongly opposed. In such a case I still wouldn't let them into female-only premises but would be apologetic about it :-).)
How so? The only things in that list that take any effort at all are dressing and looking like a women. The former isn't that hard, it's easy to get a dress, heck these days many women wear jeans and a T-shirt, or suites, or other "male clothing", so anything a men would normally wear could count as "female clothing". The latter also isn't that hard, see the existence of drag queens, or any number of comedians.
It looks to me as if you are mixing up a number of different things (what makes someone male or female, versus what constitutes sufficient evidence to treat them so in a given case; what I think their gender is, versus what I would treat it as in a given difficult situtation; etc. I will try to disentangle these things.
The position I am defending here is as follows. (Individual points numbered for cross-reference.)
[EDITED to stop LW's comment formatting messing up my numbers and to complete something I carelessly left unfinished after editing other bits.]
0. There is no single fact-of-the-matter about a person's gender in general, because different notions of gender are appropriate in different circumstances. 1. Of course, for the great majority of people all reasonable such notions coincide; the questions here are about cases where they diverge. 2. For most purposes the best notion of gender is largely a matter of (a) internal mind-state and (b) social role occupancy. 3. The relevant internal mind-state doesn't change rapidly; social role occupancy can in a sense change quickly but evidence of it accumulates more slowly. And of course anatomy and chromosomes and whatnot are even harder to change.
4. In many cases, if someone claims that their gender is not as it superficially appears, the best policy is to believe them. (Note: this is not only about trans people. There are people who are anatomically, chromosomally and hormonally female but look very much like men unless you take their clothes off.) 5. In many others (typically distinguished from those in #3 by the consequences being worse if you take them at their word and they're lying) the best policy is to require stronger evidence of 2a and/or 2b (e.g., legal name change; evidence of having been consistently self-describing as female for some time; testimony of a psychologist who has examined them). 6. In some others (e.g., medicine, major sporting contests) 2a and 2b may be pretty much irrelevant and the only important thing may be genes or gross anatomy.
7. Every possible policy will make some mistakes, with the boring exception that if you define gender by easily visible external features then the policy of using those easily visible external features will not make mistakes. (But either you can't execute that policy without looking in people's pants, or else you will classify some people with female internal anatomy and chromosomes as male.)
So. Can someone's gender, in my view, change on a whim? No (see #3). Can something they do on a whim suffice to make me treat them, at least provisionally, as of one gender rather than another? Yes, but only in "low-stakes" cases (see #4). Does this mean that if everyone thought as I do then our nations' women's restrooms would be flooded with men claiming to be women in order to assault or harass? No, because in higher-stakes cases I would be more cautious (see #5), and in any case the available evidence strongly suggests that even laws that straightforwardly let anyone use any restroom do not cause any increase in such crimes.
So you agree that "gender" as distinct from "sex" doesn't correspond to anything, but for some reason you still want to use the term, presumably for some of the connotations it inherits from the latter. Generally, using a word that has no referent solely for its connotations is very bad reasoning.
Except you have no way to directly observe internal mind-state, and you are arguing against relying on anatomy and chromosomes, that means in practice your policy amounts to relying on "social role". Of course, if you do observe internal mind state, e.g., by using sufficiently good brain scans or personality tests, you'd like find that most of the people claiming to be "trans" are clustered with their birth gender.
I notice that this is the only item on your list that attempts to distinguish some notion of "innate gender" from all someone faking it out of whatever motive. Given the current state of the "science" of psychology, this doesn't strike me as particularly reliable.
Given how you've explained your world view this doesn't appear to be the case. Rather, I suspect someone could easily change his "gender" on a whim and keep convincing you that the current gender is the real one provided you didn't remember your previous meeting.
Nope. I think it corresponds to different things in different contexts. (So the rest of your paragraph is addressing an irrelevant strawman.)
To a great extent, yes. (Not entirely; we can often draw inferences about internal mind-state from externally observable behaviour, including things like what answers we get to questions about a person's gender.) You say that as if it's obviously a bad thing, but it's not obvious why.
I think it's very far from clear that we should expect that.
That's quite a proviso. Take note also of point 5 and note its consequences for ability to change on a whim in cases where there's more at stake than what pronouns I use to refer to someone.
I'm pretty sure that ID cards and human interaction are territory, not map. Please don't do the "social constructs basically don't exist" thing, it's very silly.
The discussion of a hypothetical person who wants to change gender (but nothing else) every five minutes is giving me a vibe similar to when someone asks "how does evolution explain a monkey giving birth to a human?" It doesn't. That would falsify the model, much like our hypothetical person would falsify the "gender identity" model.
There exists a group of people who explicitly claim to have gender identities that are not stable over time, but this usually includes behaviors beyond requested pronouns.
Hey, an empirical disagreement! I think this research has in fact been done, I'll go digging for it later this evening.
I don't know about that. You don't interpret common statements along the lines of "Only you have the right to decide your gender identity" or, in the negative form, "No one can tell you which gender you are" this way?
The other direction, which I assume would have been represented by "God will burn you in hell forever, your freaks!" and/or "You need to be fixed and re-educated, this is for your own benefit" is strangely absent on LW :-) I doubt even VoiceOfRa would express the desire to go back to the ways of dealing with "sexual deviants" popular in the early and mid XX century.
More importantly, in my social circles (both meatspace and online) the left is the aggressor and tends to take the "If you're not with us you're against us. KILL!!!!" approach. If I were stuck in a small town in America's Bible Belt, for example, I would expect my emphasis to be different.
That's a separate question that touches on a whole bunch of other issues. It's related to the question of what the proper way of dealing with the guy who insists he's Jesus is.
No, I don't interpret "only you have the right..." etc. that way. I would guess that people saying it usually mean something like this: your gender is whatever it is, it's reasonably stable over time, and it's not something other people can know by looking at you or doing medical tests; so people should beyond what you say. But if you change your professed gender every five minutes no one is going to believe you are sincere and take you seriously.
Well, he seems to me to be quite far in "the other direction".
Here on LW, it seems to me the nearest thing to aggression on this topic has been VoR ranting about delusions, hallucinations, "trannies", etc., etc. There's some very aggressive "social justice" out there, for sure, but it's pretty much completely unrepresented on LW, whereas neoreaction is alive and well here even though there aren't very many neoreactionaries.
[EDITED to fix the typo mentioned two comments downthread.]
Rants are not aggression but free speech :-) Confusing the two is a common mistake/tactic :-P
I think that used to be true, but is no longer true. As far as I can see, VoiceOfRa is the lone neoreactionary actively posting.
He isn't. Neoreactionaries are normal people.
Ouch! No need to be mean :-P
So is "God will burn you in hell for ever". So is "You are a bigot and I hope no one buys anything from your bakery". So is "If you're not with us you're against us". Or (I think more accurately) all of these are both aggression and free speech.
If mere ranting doesn't count as aggression, what is it that "the left" has been doing in your social circles lately? Issuing death threats?
Maybe no one else here explicitly identifies as nrx. (For that matter, I don't know whether VoR actually does.) But when topics come up of the sort where neoreactionaries and social-justice enthusiasts tend to disagree dramatically, I see none of the characteristic tropes of the SJ movement (anything a member of an Oppressed Group says about their situation must be accepted unquestioningly; anything that talks about "men" and "women" is perpetuating the gender binary and therefore bad; mumble mumble patriarchy burble; etc.) and plenty of those of neoreaction (take for granted that black people are less intelligent than white people and women less intelligent than men; treat homosexuality, transgender, etc., as instances of deviance that we should be working against, etc.). Comments that (explicitly) even contemplate the possibility that the social conservatives might be wrong on this stuff get lots of disagreement and usually (on balance) negative karma. Comments that agree with the nrx position on this stuff get less disagreement and usually (on balance) positive karma.
Maybe it's mostly plain ol' social conservatism, with only a tiny fraction of nrx. But whatever it is, there's more of it than there is of the "social justice" that lies at the other end of one political spectrum. I certainly don't see any possible way that "the left is the aggressor" here on LW; am I missing something?
(Of course "above and well" was a typo -- I was posting from a mobile device and not paying enough attention to its autocompletion. I'll fix it.)
Your arguments are getting... sloppy. Keep in mind that we are taking a stroll through a mindkill minefield, so a modicum of care is advised :-) Look:
You countered the statement that "rants are not aggression but free speech" by pointing out that the Venn intersection of aggression and free speech is not null. That is true, but not a counterargument.
You said that "neoreaction is alive and well here" and when I pointed out that no, it is not, you countered by saying that SJWs do not thrive on LW. Again, true, but not a counterargument.
You put in the same list things like "take for granted that black people are less intelligent than white people and women less intelligent than men". One of these two is a very well-supported position with lots of research behind it, a position that a great many people tried to knock down for decades, and yet they did not succeed. The other position I never heard anyone express on LW (are you sure you not confusing means and variances, by any chance?).
So. Back to the topic. I have a very low opinion of the somewhat fashionable approach that the exposition of views you don't agree with constitutes aggression (or a "microaggression"). Rants are rarely aggression, but ad hominem attacks often are. It's a good thing that LW has strict community norms about ad hominem.
Note, by the way, that I did not say that the left is aggressive on LW -- I consider LW to be reasonably balanced and it is not really a political battleground anyway. I disagree that LW has a "conservative" tilt, I think it has an "against the stupid" tilt and if you think this makes LW more conservative, well... X-)
Of course, the whole discussion of LW being less or more something critically depends on the coordinate system in which you are looking at the issue.
I do agree. I am not sure I agree about which of us is being sloppier :-).
I think you misunderstood my point, but maybe what happened is that I misunderstood yours and so my comments weren't such as to make sense to you. So let me be slower and more explicit and see if that helps.
Of course rants are (in the relevant sense) speech, and if we value free speech then we should want not to forbid rants. However, that doesn't stop them being aggression too; you offered no grounds other than rants' being speech for thinking they shouldn't be classified as aggression, and my best guess -- perhaps wrong? -- was that you were suggesting that if they are free speech then they can't also be aggression. Hence the counterexamples.
Perhaps in fact you hold that something else stops rants from being aggression. If so, what and how? (It seems clear to me that some of the comments VoiceOfRa has made are aggression, but maybe we have different criteria for aggression or something.)
Again, I think you misunderstood my point. I think the fault is mine; I wasn't as clear and explicit as I could have been. So, again, let me try again more slowly and clearly and see if that helps.
First of all, the context is relevant. I'd taken your statement that "the left is the aggressor" (for what I think were good reasons but apparently wrongly given your other comments since) to be describing LW as well as your other social circles. So it went like this: "The left is the aggressor." "For sure there's aggressive leftism out there, but here on LW there's basically none of that but there is aggressive rightism." "Nah, there are hardly any neoreactionaries on LW these days." To which I replied by comparing how near LW gets to SJ and NRx and what the reactions tend to be.
So (1) I wasn't only saying that SJWs don't thrive on LW, I was comparing SJ and NRx; and (2) that wasn't meant to be a response to your "hardly any neoreactionaries any more" statement in isolation, but in the context of what I thought was a discussion of whether "the left is the aggressor" on LW.
(Which, again, may in fact not have been the discussion you thought we were having, but I hope that on reflection it's obvious how I came to take it that way.)
Elsewhere in this thread I posted a link to one recent discussion in which the topic came up. Someone else made much the same mean-versus-variance comment, but the discussion in question was about a specific role that isn't very tail-y and for which I'm pretty sure a difference in variance alone clearly couldn't have the required effect.
Is anyone here saying or implying that? I certainly don't intend anything of the kind, and I gravely doubt that anyone seriously thinks what you say they do. I think some people do think that (1) the exposition of the opinion that such-and-such a group's members are inferior, evil, crazy, etc., constitutes aggression, and (2) exposition of such opinions using needlessly pejorative terms constitutes aggression. Of these, I'm ambivalent about #1 and agree with #2.
So, e.g., when VoiceOfRa characterizes transgender people as suffering "delusions or hallucinations", that's certainly #1 and probably #2. It seems pretty aggressive to me. When he suggests that it's unreasonable to treat those "delusions or hallucinations" any more generously than those of someone who thinks he's simultaneously Jesus and John Lennon, that seems pretty aggressive to me. When he calls them "trannies" (er, actually "trannys" but never mind) that's certainly #2 rather than #1 and it's hard to see how it's not being deliberately rude; again, in my book that's aggression. Etc.
Of course this is all much milder aggression than, say, beating the people in question up with a baseball bat. But it's pretty aggressive, and it seems to me much more aggressive than anything I've seen from "the left" on LW lately, and I think all those comments are currently sitting with positive karma. Which is one reason why I think that LW currently leans right (to which I don't object, for the avoidance of doubt, even though that happens not to be my own leaning) and that here it's much nearer the truth to say "the right is the aggressor" than "the left is the aggressor".
(Note 1: Again, I do appreciate that you've indicated that your comment about leftist aggression wasn't in fact intended to apply to LW. I'm just explaining where my comments were coming from. Note 2: I am not claiming that LW's participants lean right; past surveys have suggested not, and I would guess not. But if we weight by actual participation in politically loaded discussions, I think that's the way it goes. I have the impression that one or more right-leaning LWers have a very deliberate policy of trying to make things unpleasant for left-leaning LWers; if so, that may be a partial explanation.)
I think it has both. As someone who has been heavily downvoted (I think by exactly two people, one much more than the other) in recent politically-fraught discussions, I am curious: Do you think my comments in this thread are stupid? Do you think they are stupider than comments with a different sociopolitical leaning that have been upvoted?
(I take it you have sufficient brain to distinguish "stupid" from "in disagreement with my politics", but I will explicitly remind you of your own caution about mindkill minefields.)
You don't need to be neoreactionary to not agree with that claim. I would guess >75% of the public don't agree with that claim.
I don't think anybody here argued lately that the average woman is less intelligent than the average man. I also doubt that's standard nrx.
It's quite easy to get lots of disagreement on LW by saying things about IQ that are not in line with the academic research about the subject. Quite a few people on LW actually read relevant research papers. Don't confuse pro-science with nrx.
On the other hand I haven't seen strong disagreement with people who question whether "homosexuality is a deviance that should be worked against".
Opinion that are by the admission of the author not well thought out deserve to be challenged. If you don't challenge badly thought out opinions on charged topics you don't get high quality discourse.
Given how different the distributions are, it's hard to say (and not very meaningful) which has the higher average. It might even depend on which average you use.
Of course! I wasn't saying that everyone on LW is neoreactionary. I was saying (1) I don't see SJ-isms and (2) I do see NRx-isms.
In the lengthy discussion that started from this comment, there were a number of people (who were not all VoiceOfRa, though one of them was with a different username) arguing that it's credible that rating a prospective employee's likely competence much higher if the name on the application is John rather than Jennifer (with no other differences) is not evidence of prejudice, because being named John rather than Jennifer could be good evidence of a substantial difference in competence (even given the other information in the application indicating equal ability).
I don't know how to interpret that other than as men being more competent than women. (Not quite the same thing as intelligence but closely related. The job in question was as a lab manager in a university science department.)
And, guess what?, VoiceOfRa (operating at that time under the name of Azathoth123) was in fact saying in so many words that women are less intelligent than men. (Not, however, simply taking it for granted that everyone knows they are, so my description above isn't perfectly accurate. Sorry.)
Don't worry; I'm not.
I agree (with the caveat that if the author admits they're not well thought out, then "challenge" isn't exactly what's called for -- the author already knows they might be wrong -- but something more like analysis and critique) but I think you may be misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying "waaaah, leftist comments get challenged". I'm saying "moderately leftist comments get sharp disagreement and downvotes; immoderately rightist comments get less disagreement and fewer downvotes; therefore it doesn't seem right to categorize LW as a place where 'the left is the aggressor'".
So, in particular, I was not and am not saying (1) that it's bad that "progressive" comments get challenged, nor (2) that it's bad that they get downvoted, nor (3) that it's bad that "conservative" ones get a more positive reception. (As it happens I think 1 is good, 2 is bad in that the downvoting seems rather indiscriminate, and 3 is more or less neutral.) I just think 1,2,3 are clearly true and hard to reconcile with Lumifer's explanation of his own choice of what to take issue with, as being because "the left is the aggressor" in his circles.
Well, Jiro is posting from similar political position too (but I'm not sure either of them identifies as neoreactionary).
Read it as "is probably going to make them (and possibly their friends) less willing to spend money in my gym".
That translation applies just as well to gjm's original statement.