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Is EY saying that if something doesn't feel right, it isn't? I've been working on this rationalist koan for weeks and can't figure out something more believable! I feel like a doofus!
In response to
Your Strength as a Rationalist
No. Two possibilities, not just one:
"EITHER YOUR MODEL IS FALSE OR THIS STORY IS WRONG."
I'm pretty sure that ID cards and human interaction are territory, not map.
So a man getting an ID card with a typo in the gender field makes him female?
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.
How about not "every five minutes", but whenever he feels like going to the women's bathroom to ogle/be generally creepy?
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.
Well, this fact itself seems like to should falsify gjm's model. Let's see what he says about it.
So a man getting an ID card with a typo in the gender field makes him female?
Legally, maybe so, at least until the error is corrected. You'd have to ask a lawyer to be sure.
ID cards are a physical object, which is not determined by biological sex, since as a question of legal fact one can get an ID card of one's self-identified gender if one jumps through the appropriate hoops, even without sex reassignment surgery. (At least that's how it works here in California. I have no idea how it works in other states or countries.)
This seems to me a counterexample to the claim that gender, as distinct from sex, doesn't correspond to anything. Social interaction is another: for example, women are much more likely to ask each other if they want old clothes before giving/throwing them away, and much less likely to get asked to be someone's Best Man at a wedding.
How about not "every five minutes", but whenever he feels like going to the women's bathroom to ogle/be generally creepy?
By far the dominant hypothesis here would be "you're lying", but failing that probably yes, gender identities aren't supposed to be able to work that way.
"Your gender is whatever you say it is" is a social norm, not a factual claim. Saying you're a woman doesn't make you a woman. People just don't generally assert it unless they actually want to be treated as a woman. Creeps, or other people lying for personal gain, seem exceptionally rare - probably because it's a giant hassle, and the institutions they'd want to take advantage of don't obey that norm anyway.
If transition ever became socially easy and stigma-free, we probably would need a different anti-creep mechanism.
I agree that genderfluid people might break gjm's model, although he seems to have some wiggle room as written. Of course, I don't know if this is a deliberate result of accounting for their existence, or a lucky accident.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
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.
testimony of a psychologist who has examined them
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.
So. Can someone's gender, in my view, change on a whim? No (see #3).
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.
So you agree that "gender" as distinct from "sex" doesn't correspond to anything,
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.
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.
Hey, an empirical disagreement! I think this research has in fact been done, I'll go digging for it later this evening.
The second civ would still avoid building them too close to each other. This is all clear if you do the analysis.
So instead of every civ fillings its galaxy, we get every civ building one in every galaxy. For this to not result in an Engine on every star, you still have to fine-tune the argument such that new civs are somehow very rare.
There are some hypotheticals where the details are largely irrelevant, and you can back up and say "there are many possibilities of this form, so the unlikeliness of my easy-to-present example isn't the point". "Alien civs exist, but prefer to spread out a lot" does not appear to be such a solution. As such, the requirement for fine-tuning and multiple kinds of exotic physics seem to me like sufficiently burdensome details that this makes a bad candidate.
The second civilization would just go ahead and build them anyways, since doing so maximizes their own utility function. Of course, there is an additional question of whether and how the first civilization will try to stop this from happening, since the second civ's Catastrophe Engines reduce their own utility. If the first civ ignores them, the second civ builds Catastrophe Engines the same way as before. If the first civ enforces a ban on Catastrophe Engines, then the second civ colonizes space using conventional methods. But most likely the first civ would eliminate the second civ (the "Berserker" scenario.)
The second civilization would just go ahead and build them anyways, since doing so maximizes their own utility function.
Then why isn't there an Engine on every star?
Implausible premises aside, I'm not convinced this actually resolves the paradox.
The first spacefaring civilization fills the galaxy/universe with Catastrophe Engines at the maximum usable density.
But now the second spacefaring civilization doesn't have any room to build Catastrophe Engines, so they colonize space the regular way. And we're right back at the original problem: either life has to be rare enough that everybody has room to build Engines, or there's lots of life out there that had to expand the non-Engine way but we somehow can't see them.
In response to
Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
There is two problems with making stores that can sell banned things-hurting the public and people that are uneducated. I could go into one of these stores and buy poison and fill my brother's glass with it. That would be a drawback because it would affect my brother who did not go into a store and ignore a safety warning and pick up a bottle of poison and drink it. This would be a problem. An uneducated mother of five children that drinks poison doesn't deserve to die, her children don't deserve to be orphans, and that is asumming that she drinks it herself and doesn't give it to her children. Libertarians that say that making stores that can sell illegal goods is completely good and not bad at all is completely wrong. Very little if anything is gained by illegal goods being available to the public while the reasons I wrote above show that there is a drawback- someone who buys and drinks a can of poison does not deserve to die- the person could have been bullied, been driven insane buy a disease or by a drug that someone else tricked him into drinking or forced down his throat. In fact, such a drug might only be able to be purchased at such store.
But... you can already buy many items that are lethal if forcefully shoved down someone's throat. Knives, for example. It's not obvious to me that a lack of lethal drugs is currently preventing anyone from hurting people, especially since many already-legal substances are very dangerous to pour down someone's throat.
From the Overcoming Bias link, "risky buildings" seem to me the clearest example of endangering people other than the buyer.
In response to
Crazy Ideas Thread
What if doing housework is actually bad for people? It's certainly something that people have to be trained into, and that a lot of people resist doing. No one does it for the fun of it.
No one does it for the fun of it.
A friend of mine does. Not "fun" per se, but she derives enjoyment and satisfaction from it.
I can see in the Recent Comments sidebar that your comment starts with "[There is no such thing as ", but the actual text of your comment appears blank. Something might be screwy with your link syntax?
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Ok, now I officially have no reason to care about Wes_W!gender.
So you agree this social norm has no factual basis to it.
Good I'm glad we agree on this. Now, why are you trying to defend positions that rely on denying this claim?
Yes, and creeps, or example, want to be treated as a woman with respect to which bathroom they enter.
I'm not. I entered this discussion mostly to point out that you were equating "corresponds to social behavior" with "does not correspond to anything", which is silly.
It's worse than gender not corresponding to anything. Like in the standard example, it corresponds to multiple things, which don't necessarily agree.
ETA:
Do they? I mean, as a theoretical problem, sure. But to my knowledge this is a vanishingly rare event.