Had it not been in a serious article I would have believed it had to a parody or a joke of some sort.
“We are just like Darth Maul, but we like salads and drink soy milk instead of regular milk… and then kill people while dressed in tactical black outfits”?
What is even going on? Real life now sounds like some kinda of a broken LLM hallucination.
Since it’s a group so wonder if a group mental illness would make sense. I guess it could work for the court “look how out of touch with reality my client is, sith vegans, clearly they didn’t know what they were doing!”
I’m sure the court juge will look further that the funny dichotomy in their brand name. Understanding their motivations for the murders, understanding their motivation to call themselves vegan (perhaps it’s a joke for them too, perhaps they’re really vegan) and their motivation to call themselves sith (I would bet for fun joke but it may be branding : and army of determined warriors, or mental illness if their really believe to be sith - yes human brain can to that).
It’s very easy to find apparent incoherences in humans behavior by selectively picking out and not searching the motivations. This is the base attack for teenagers bullying book.
> I’m sure the court judge will look further that the funny dichotomy in their brand name
Oh sure, and the jury. One can do both - mock murderers and their ridiculous ideology and study it seriously to, perhaps, prevent others from taking the same path. One doesn't preclude the other, though.
To a certain degree I think these group enjoy being taken seriously, being in the news, fawned over, their writings analyzed by people going over their "deep" and "insightful" ideas. So that direction could be playing into their hands to a certain extent. For now, I'll go the "ridicule" path, I think.
It was very cult like with Ziz cutting off members from their friends and the internet. And writing long complicated essays that didn’t make sense if you weren’t in the group.
> it doesn't absolve them from knowing right from wrong however
Certain mental conditions absolutely do, in a legal sense. Some conditions onset from brain injury and tumors, some to drug exposure, some are genetic, etc. For those unfortunate few who are afflicted, the most humane outcome is to intervene to keep them away from harming themselves and others, though often they are left unattended to by overstretched mental health services.
I totally agree with that, meanwhile I think mnky meant that illness doesn’t necessarily remove all your judgement. You can have totally coherent thinking on a field while being incapable to reason on another. Easy exemple : Math and Empathy, where schizophrenic may excel in the former while lacking the later. Someone affected by trisomy 21 have more chances to get the opposite. <- generalization for illustration purpose, those affections are complex and schizophrenia is a spectrum anyway.
Even for non-Ill-defined, PTS and other trauma or just learnings- can do that to anyone and age doesn’t help to escape the reasoning-habits. Wise are those that can stay free from mental cages.
Paranoid delusions related to obsessive compulsive disorders or personality disorders stemming from post traumatic stress rarely seem to qualify insanity pleas except in episodes of law and order even though they can motivate highly irrational and self destructive behaviour.
Does it really count if the difference is "be removed from society for a while by being sent to prison" vs "be removed from society indefinitely by being sent to inpatient lockup"?
We really need a phrase for "appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things". It's a very common component in mass shootings.
The things they believe are quite possibly internally consistent and not insane at all, just so far outside the overton window of an ordinary person so as to sound insane. Rather, they are the fringes of the fringes of political ideology and in my view the prime cause of falling prey to these is social alienation.
> "appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things"
I have met a lot of people in my life who fit this criteria. Not one of them has gone on to become a mass shooter.
Saying we need a phrase to label people like this in order to _stop mass killings_ sounds crazy to me.
If you really had the option to explore the psyche of everyone to the depth necessary to check for "believes insane things" if we could even agree on what that means, I wouldn't be surprised if the test came back positive on 40-70% of the population. A strict enough test and I think we could get that number to 100%.
Isn't it a meme at this point how people win the nobel prize in one field, and then say some nutty nonsense about a completely different field? The human species is rational, insane, brilliant, stupid, compassionate and vicious, ugly and beautiful all at once. All of us.
More compassion for self and others would be my preference.
> Not one of them has gone on to become a mass shooter.
No, but with a few friends getting together, cheering them along, and feeding into their collective insanity, they could very easily get together and do something serious. Most of the insurrectionists (the people who invaded Congress, not the people who went home after attending the rally) in Jan 6th can be described as such. That network of 'friends' is critical for actually motivating them to get off their ass and act on their beliefs.
> More compassion for self and others would be my preference.
The problem is that it's much easier to violently destroy, than it is to create, and the damage that a group of angry people who believe an utterly insane thing is disproportionate.
I think diagnosis is mostly made up jargon that doesn’t capture the complexity of the human experience. It is designed to itemize the human experience for bureaucratic consumption. Autism diagnosis gives access to school resources whereas weird child that prefers their own thoughts does not. Schizophrenia lets you lock up people with antisocial beliefs. ADHD lets you medicate away the natural hyperactivity of 7 year olds. Diagnosis is a form of societal control. This is different from modern schema therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy which focus on the individual experiences a person has such as their actions and thought patterns that allows them to disentangle themselves from patterns of behavior that harm them such as paranoid delusions, alcoholism, unhealthy sex, etc. but those things require lots of one on one work with a therapist.
“ Such ridicule typically will not occur after a religious conversion brings a previous non-conformist into the fold of the culture’s dominant religion.”
"None of you think the major religions teach some insane things? Okay then."
I was on the phone so couldn't type much, but my point is the concept of the collective cognitive imperative (much better explained in the book than in Wikipedia, to be fair) would answer your question by saying "it's not that nobody thinks that: it's that enough people accept those insane things to the point that 1) they don't think they're insane things, 2) you'd be an outsider (or even considered insane) if you point out the fact that they're insane things.
I'll try to give an example that would work in my cultural context (South America): someone making a rain dance during a drought would be considered by most to be something from harmlessly silly to crazy. Someone praying to the christian god for guidance or help would be seen as normal.
I was trying to understand what you meant by “insane”, but you already moved the goalposts to “implausible”, so it’s not clear to me that you even know what you’re claiming.
However, if I were to take a guess, it’s something like “people sometimes believe things without proof”. But obviously this is not true only of religious people, other people have their own creation stories – the sole difference is their’s don’t involve worship. And I agree they can’t all be right, but perhaps one of them is.
I didn't move the goal posts; I just used a slightly different word. No offense, but it's ridiculous (sorry, "insane") that I'm dealing with pushback on the point the point that religious believe things that would be considered insane if not labeled as "religion". "There's an all-powerful being that is behind everything... etc." If you're not willing to give any ground on that, then it's not a productive discussion in the first place.
What about the non-religious claim: “There’s not an all-powerful being that is behind everything”? Just as “indefensible”, just as “implausible”, just as “insane”. The sole difference is that it doesn’t involve worship, and therefore categorically isn’t “religious”.
These are axioms, you cannot derive them, you can only derive from them. Saying “my axioms are rational, yours are ‘insane’!” is frankly childish, and speaks to a deep lack of understanding of the essence of reason.
DSM 5 already has this, called "Delusional Disorder":
A. Nonbizarre delusions (i.e., involving situations that occur in real life, such as being followed, poisoned, infected, loved at a distance, or deceived by spouse or lover, or having a disease) of at least 1 month’s duration.
B. Criterion A for schizophrenia has never been met. Note: Hallucinations, if present, are not prominent and are related to the delusion theme (e.g., the sensation of being infested with insects associated with delusions of infestation.
C. Apart from the impact of the delusion(s) or its ramifications, functioning is not markedly impaired and behavior is not obviously odd or bizarre.
To the extent that your neighbors believe in false or unprovable things that don’t exist in our tangible reality, that should concern you. This can absolutely lead to horrifying violence, and has repeatedly done so in the past. The good thing about most major organized religions is that they’ve developed (some) guardrails against murdering the non-believers based on the theory that some intangible being requires this of them.
All first principles are unprovable. Theism does not have a monopoly on violence, so I don't see why I should be more concerned about it then anything else.
Because you can't reason with someone who doesn't employ reason. That doesn't mean they won't kill you - it just shuts down one avenue by which you might talk them out of it.
You can't reason about first principles. What first principles someone chooses as their "axioms" doesn't alter their ability to be reasonable. Materialism or empiricism are just as much a random choice for a base principle as deism or theism or many others.
A lot of the evils that the hardcore atheist crowd (Dawkins, Sam Harris, that crowd) ascribes to religion is oftentimes much better understood as imperialism and other purely political ambitions couched in what was the most common first principle of the time. The desire of European kings (including the Pope) to hold Jerusalem and later Constantinople were much better understood as a desire to control trade and expand their territory/influence rather than some deeply seated religious fervor, just for the example of the crusades. And for things like the inquisition, we can see today as well plenty of largely secular demonization and oppression of marginalized groups.
I don't think it's possible to act as a human without irrational belief, and everyone harbors them because there is no rational answer to the question "why?".
There is an immense difference between "Every human being believes things that are irrational, and is not rational" and "The very first step in nearly every major religion is insisting that WE have the answers as long as you `have faith` in us and follow what we tell you to do"
It was trivial for southern baptist sermons to convince white southerners that black people being slaves was "as god wants it", and therefore should be defended with their very lives, precisely because in Christianity at least, god asks you to do pretty awful things all the time.... At least if you listen to your preacher".
Look at the religious right insisting that jesus is "woke" and that Trump should deport an american citizen because she preached peace. There's only so many words said by jesus in most bibles, not a single one about trans people, so why do they insist so ferociously that trans people are evil?
This goes double for all those "great awakening" neo-"Christian" ~cults~ religions in the US that insist that the bible is not just inerrant, but trivially understandable by even the dumbest human beings, which is just fundamentally false.
30 million american adults explicitly say that the earth was created within the past 10k years by god exactly as it is now. They believe that evolution is not just wrong, but a hoax that most of science is in on. They believe that science is a conspiracy by Satan to keep them from god's light.
People on this very forum espouse these beliefs. Just the other day someone posted Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis as a resource, despite it being an organization that spreads outright lies, and is still trying to get evolution out of schools, and they are winning.
These are the same organizations, groups, families, etc that created the Scopes Monkey trial back in 1925. Understand that they considered it a success. 100 years later and we might very well see creationism back in US schools, despite overwhelming and conclusive evidence of evolution as the means of speciation.
My point is that bad ideas, values, and ideas are not exclusive to religion, but orthogonal. I see plenty of secular lies and misinformation posted every day as well.
The very first step in nearly every human group is insisting that WE have the answers as long as you `have faith` in us and follow what we tell you to do.
That goes for Republicans, communists, Nazis, or the DNC. Bullshit and unthinking conformance transgresses the boundary of secular and religious ideology.
Do you think the zizan rationalists are free from bullshit because they
Atheist? Meanwhile they claim that AI from the future will put people into torture simulations as punishment if they aren't vegan, and that the only rational thing to do is kill your landlord with a katana.
Look up Joshua Citarella’s coverage of the ideological milieus that Generation Z cultivated during COVID on platforms like Discord.
And then check out the term “metairony” or “postirony” and this story make more sense…at least as much sense as the absurdity of it all will allow you to make of it.
We seem to live in a post-ironic moment. Look no further than the Boogaloo Boys. They want to start a second American civil war and are named after the 1984 movie "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo".
It would be a joke except they've engaged in violent attacks up to and including murder in the service of trying to start that aforementioned civil war. Are they serious or a joke? I think their embrace of a ridiculous name makes them almost more frightening because it shows their contempt for reasonableness, for lack of a better term.
It's comparable to how the Nazi "goose step" march was terrifying precisely because it was so awkward and unnatural. It's like, if these guys are capable of doing this with a straight face, what else are they capable of?
Jokingly referring to something as "<subject_goes_here> 2: Electric Boogaloo" was a very common turn of phrase on certain parts of the internet in the early-mid 2010s. It sounds like a joke because it grew out of a joke.
>almost more frightening because it shows their contempt for reasonableness, for lack of a better term.
I think another way to look at it is willful nonconformance and rejection of mainstream values (and judgement). Not unlike gutter punks dressing the way they did.
I think counter culture has a long history of this, from men wearing their hair long to people dressing up as literal clowns.
For just one thing, when you have a broken education system and omnipresent media franchises, you have a significant percentage of the population who know more about the Star Wars backstory structure and theories of diet than about history, civics or conventional morality.
A far more likely possibility is that their ideology is actually centered around "Sith who happen to originate from Vega (a.k.a. α Lyrae)", not "Sith who abstain from animal products".
(A residual possibility is "Sith from Las Vegas, Nevada".)
I don't think so. The people specifically are vegan, and their leader believes that future AI overlords will punish people retroactively for their moral failings. This is reported in some of the other posts on this page.
It's wild, but a view that is is fairly widely discussed in the rationality community, but only taken seriously by Fringe groups.[1]
Apparently, being a Sith meant to Ziz that you should do whatever is in your power and desire to do, without other constraints. If you're "fundamentally good" (a thing she believes in), then what you end up doing will be a kind of maximization of good.
Of course, this is trite pulp nonsense, high-school nerd level philosophy at best.
I am not defending any of this fuckwits, but I don't know that it's much different than any organized religion. All of them are stories that get retold over and over until people accept them on faith. I can envision a world where our stories (movies, books) where history is lost of their creation, become facts. "Of course there was Jedi, we've just forgotten…"
Now, they're all fuckwits, but it's not outside the realm of thought.
What is going on: the internet is letting you know all this shit. Imagine you had a ticker feed of every story amongst the 8bn. That would be a crazy story per millisecond.
I think it’s worth discussing the fact that many folks in EA- and rationalist-adjacent circles are deeply panicked about developments in AI, because they believe these systems pose a threat to human existence. (Not all of them, obviously. But a large and extraordinarily well-funded contingent.) The fear I have with these organizations is that eventually panic - in the name of saving humans - leads to violent action. And while this is just a couple of isolated examples, it does illustrate the danger that violent action can become normalized in insular organizations.
I do hope people “on the inside” are aware of this and are working to make sure those organizations don’t have bad ideas that hurt real people.
I think this is a variant of Walter Russell Mead's abrahamic bomb [1].
when you remove the theology from
Psychology based on Judeo Christian
Morality, it recreates it's facsimile In this case, AI judgment Day precedes either eternal damnation or salvation. Ziz, like other "radical rationalists" even believe that the singularity AI will punish people retroactively for their moral failings, such as eating meat.
So my speculation from your comment is the data scientists in the group saw what they were doing up close as leading to something that was anathema to what they wanted the world to be, it seemed like a weird trivial connection in the news article, but in context of violent rejection of AI makes sense.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-death-cult-z...
Yeah! I devoured the entire series of posts in one go back then, I had no idea about all the people and their ties. Plus it was a super engaging read, I could imagine being there.
Holy shit, there are 7 chapters to that last one. Chapter 1 is fucking mind-blowing. I could never figure out why they were obsessed with Roko's basilisk but it makes total sense now considering how it all started.
This is such an epic unbelievable story. We live in this world?
Chapter 6 covers how StarSlateCodex comes into the picture, by the way. I always wondered that too.
I really loved the language describing the singularity as "an inescapable runaway feedback loop which leads to the ascension of an enemy god". Beautiful.
Sneer Club is one of the most nasty, uncharitable, and bad-faith subs out there these days. They generally hate HN, as well. I think any community which exists solely to make cheap shots at another community is poison at its core, SC’s parasocial relationship with LW is a perfect example.
N-gate was among the only things that made this website worth reading. They solely existed to make "cheap shots" at HN. If that's "poison", than I don't want an antidote!
A 2023 post on Rationalism forum LessWrong.com warned of coming violence in the Zizian community. “Over the past few years, Ziz has repeatedly called for the deaths of many different classes of people,” the anonymous post read. Jessica Taylor, a friend of Baukholt’s, told Open Vallejo she warned Baukholt about the Zizians, describing the group on X as a “death cult.”
Most of the news coverage I've seen of this story is omitting what some might consider a relevant detail: almost all the members of this group are trans.
This is a divisive topic, but failing to mention this makes me worry a story is pushing a particular agenda rather than trying to tell the facts. Here's what the story looks like if the trans activism is considered central to the story:
While Ngo's version is definitely biased, and while I don't know enough about the story to endorse or refute his view, I think it's important to realize that this part of the story is being suppressed in most of the coverage elsewhere.
I don't think it's so much pushing an agenda, as it is avoiding a thermonuclear hot potato of modern life. If you start talking about gender identity, everyone has STRONG opinions they feel they must share. Worse, a subset of those opinions will be fairly extreme, and you're potentially exposing yourself to harassment or worse. If you sound like you're attacking trans people, that's going to end badly. If you sound like you're supporting them, especially as this new US administration takes off... that's going to end badly.
So if you can tell the story without the possibly superfluous detail of the genders of the people involved, that's a pretty obvious angle to omit. Andy Ngo is obviously not doing this, but that's really only because he has a very clear agenda and in fact his entire interest in this story probably stems from that.
Yes, that's a reasonable possibility as well. It's not proof of an agenda, and might be prudent, but I do think it's a form of bias. There's a thin line between skipping "possibly superfluous" details and skipping core parts of a story that might provide evidence for viewpoints one disagrees with. The result is still that readers need to realize that they are being presented with a consciously edited narrative and not an unbiased set of facts.
It was quite easy to skim over some original source material from both sinceriously.fyi and zizians.info. By my quick reading, and taking a very high level view, the philosophy is responsible for the trans and also for the violence. But an article harping on the correlation as implied causation without focusing on the hidden variable behind them both is just trying to fuel the fire of the reactionary movement. In general, averaging two different flavors of extremist reporting is not a way for obtaining truth.
That seems like an argument for not ignoring the matter in media that wishes to avoid honing in on the sensitive issue. Now instead of reading an article that integrates but doesn't centre the trans issue, I have read one that doesn't mention it, which I now feel to be dishonest, and one which centres the trans issue above all else, which I view to be biased, but not dishonest. So well done to the authors of the OP, now I can't help but be convinced the trans factor is far more important than I might have otherwise.
Myopic focus is itself a lie of omission (of the larger context), so they're both dishonest. It seems like you're trying to obtain some agency by sorting through political trash, but the best you can get from that is trash. Never wrestle with a pig and all that.
Yeah, I agree. I think my perception of the second article was coloured by prior knowledge I had from the first, because on review, it is rather myopic too, it doesn't give useful context that was in the first. That said, I do find its myopia less sinister because I am inclined to believe that "rationalism", while I'm quite negative on it, and it probably contributes to these people's superiority complexes, is less likely the root cause than things which are.... I'm trying to be delicate here.... more sensical in light of the trans angle.
I disagree that you can't get anything useful out of trash though. Media literacy requires reading between the lines of what is written by multiple people with differing perspectives on a matter and sorting the wheat from the chaff. It's primarily trash, almost entirely trash, there is no choice but to go dumpster diving, or throw your hands up in despair and decide you're just not going to bother at all. The latter option is tenable in and of itself, but when I observe it in practice from people around me, it usually equates in practice to just lazily applying your prior biases to anything you hear about and being an obnoxious and uninteresting conversational partner.
> If you sound like you're attacking trans people, that's going to end badly. If you sound like you're supporting them, especially as this new US administration takes off... that's going to end badly.
That’s not true: 99% percent of news outlets have absolutely no fear supporting trans activism.
It’s trivial to find hundreds of such cases from sfgate with a google search.
No, that is omitting quite a significant detail. If apparently the majority of people have X characteristic that is a tiny percentage in the overall population there is some correlation or something newsworthy there,
It's fashionable to invoke the baddies of Germany but let's zoom out a bit and just live in reality. Virtually no group on this planet that is not primarily about sexual characteristics or fetishes or whatever is almost entirely made up of people from this particular group and this death cult that is, presumably about "rationalist" mumbo jumbo, is primarily made up of this group. That is certainly newsworthy.
The Zizians.info site (linked by one of the HN posts re: this story) mentions that the Zizians did target people who identified as transgender for indoctrination, so this is not really surprising. People who are undergoing this kind of stress and marginalization may well be more vulnerable to such tactics.
The Ziz method of indoctrination involves convincing his minions they are trapped inside a mental framework they need to break free of. Trans people already feel trapped in a body not aligned with who they are, and are naturally susceptible to this message (and therefore natural targets for recruitment).
Most people don't hate trans people, they just think they believe things that do not correspond to biological reality; ie. they have an illness that is negatively affecting their mind and they need compassion and help. Those same people want to minimize social exposure to provably contagious, harmful, and absurd ideas like gender fluidity.
People also rejected homosexuality because it was "unnatural". Indeed, gender dysphoria is an illness, and the only effective cure is transition, as shown by the countless meta-studies on the subject.
Do you really believe Trump and his goons want to show "compassion and help" to trans people, by taking away their passports, their medicine, barring them from the military, accusing them of grooming children, etc.? The list goes on.
Trans people have existed for as long as there are records afaik. So it’s the same as homosexuality - just something our particular society has decided is in the out group.
The thing being pathologized here - gender fluidity - is at its heart nothing more than willful insubordination. Hate doesn't require anger, and control isn't love.
I was wondering if it's relevant that so many of them are young people with "data science" degrees and they call themselves "rationalists". Sounds like they have some sort of superiority complex that might make them more susceptible to justifying acts of violence when it's "rational".
> "rationalists". Sounds like they have some sort of superiority complex
Oh yes, this is totally a thing. They're also weirdly obsessed with I.Q. comparisons. They're the kind of community where you might actually witness someone talking about "High I.Q." and "Low I.Q." individuals - and making a claim like "my I.Q. is one of the highest", way before someone else made that cool.
It happens, but in a more subtle way. Usually direct comparison's don't happen, but rather is expected to be inferred by the quality of arguments, whether they can prevail with their line of thinking and so on. In a sense, that variant of 'rationalist' is rather crude in comparison. I am trying to think of an appropriate example, but I am struggling a little.
Yeah well I've never seen violence happen in the rationalist community, but I'm sure if I keep looking I'll find instances of Hacker News posters committing murder too.
Perhaps. Rationalists are also known for updating[changing] their beliefs. They do this under the guise of "doing" Bayesian reasoning. It may be that susceptibility to cults is an edge case of this meta-congnitive position. Or in other words, stubbornness of beliefs may be a defense mechanism against cults.
At the same time, if psychological research proves there's a class of people who are only prevented from joining a murder cult by their unthinking devotion towards conformist beliefs, would you be surprised?
Pointing out a tradeoff isn’t the same as arguing for the other extreme. That’s splitting[1], a well-documented cognitive distortion. A bit of therapy can be great for catching these patterns—sharpening your reasoning toolkit, so to speak.
Trying to reason everything out from first principles can lead to some seriously bizarre conclusions if there's even a little bit you missed or got slightly wrong. It can be a fun exercise if you make sure to constantly look for predictions to check against observable reality, but if you're young and naive and take it too seriously without doing that...
Yes and no. Lots of people feel trapped. He/she (I’m not sure who this Ziz is) just sounds like someone who knew they could work their work into trans people.
Following on because the edit window elapsed, the specific method of indoctrination used by ziz (but invented by Gwen) involved in novel method of sleep deprivation to induce split personalities. It’s been called “installing demons.” I wouldn’t be surprised either if the causality is the other way around: Ziz reworked these people to be trans. Ziz certainly seems to have treated the minds of the people around him/her as malleable putty.
I actually met Gwen and spent a weekend with him sometime ago. They were a roommate of my friend for a while. The person I knew doesn’t resemble the lunatic in the news article articles at all, but I have no doubt is physically/legally them. Cult indoctrination is a hell of a thing.
Wow what a blast from the past. Sounds like /r/Tulpas. I've always thought it was a purely rhetorical trick + disassociation, and obvious what is happening and why. Sleep deprecation has always been part of it since that makes it harder to notice the errors at the edge of your perception. It goes back to at least the 2010s I think.
There is some precedent; the Twin Flame cult coerced transition in some members if I remember correctly. My guess is it was emotional manipulation used to make them do something that makes them more vulnerable to control. If you transition and you are not trans, you are going to have a hell of a lot of dysphoria, and shaming people and telling them it's because they are not trying hard enough/a good enough person/etc. would absolutely make it hard to break away.
The specific technique here is unihemispherical sleep. Stimulating one side of the body while resting the other (one eye closed) to get one hemisphere to fall asleep. I think Gwen originally developed this trick to probe the mind and see if behavior was altered when one hemisphere was asleep versus the other.
However, it turns out that when you do this, the brain as a whole does not get adequate sleep, even if you alternate hemispheres. People had symptoms of sleep deprivation while still being semi-functional. Ziz took if a step further and had some sort of secret initiation process where both hemispheres were trained differently to produce multiple personalities. At least that was the assumption from those of us on the outside gathering scraps of info being dropped.
Get you 8 hours of sleep everyone. Sleep is important.
I would guess he probably just convinced a roommate or friend they need to kill other people to accomplish their lofty goal, which would be a lot simpler (see: the Mangione fandom). Once he got a couple people to agree the rest came over from peer pressure.
Please note that there's no real evidence that single-hemisphere sleep is a thing in humans. Some sleep researchers suggest that a brain hemisphere can spontaneously be awake during ordinary sleep in "unfamiliar" places, and that this can be a cause of poor quality sleep - but that's a very different thing from what Ziz claims to be able to do.
Also, to the best of my knowledge, Gwern has never written anything on his site about this purported single-hemisphere sleep, see https://gwern.net/doc/zeo/index for the details of what he has written about.
Gwen, not Gwern. Gwen Danielson, if he is still alive, is wanted for his possible involvement in multiple homicides related to the Ziz cult. Not Gwern.
And unihemispheric sleep (Gwen’s word for what they do; they like to invent their own terms) is one of the techniques the Ziz cult uses.
Thanks for correcting that mixup! So there's no source whatsoever for this bizarre notion other than the Zizian death cult itself. That makes it even crazier that some people (whether here or in the news media) seem to be taking it at face value, though.
Generally I think it's good to take people's reports of their unusual mental experiences at face value, even when they're crazy. Not that they never lie, but that you learn more by assuming they're probably telling the truth.
I haven't attempted unihemispheric sleep, and it sounds like a phenomenon that isn't represented in the literature, but it also sounds like it wouldn't get past an IRB anytime in the last decades, so I assume it's probably real.
I am uninvolved (thankfully, not many people have been confused) but on the topic of the meditation practice: years ago when reading the zizian.info writeup, I found the unihemispheric sleep part to be the most alarming & interesting part.
There are many strange altered states of consciousness found by experimentation, and I can totally believe that some form of auto-hypnosis + sleep deprivation - which would parallel many well-attested mind-altering practices in many different cultures & religions - could have bizarre effects or induce psychosis and hallucinating demonic entities, and turn an activist vegan into a murderer. (Their specific interpretation of 'unihemispheric' sleep may or may not be true. I would say that it's worth checking... except I'm not sure how one could either prudently or ethically investigate it, given the apparent consequences.)
And it would answer the question many people have been asking about how these unlikely-seeming murderers were made, in a way that the rest of it all does not.
The technique might have 'merely' prevented deep sleep due to interruptions; similar to why uberman[1] doesn't work.
When I was younger I stayed up to see what happens. The worst experience of my life was when I lied down to sleep and felt 'too tired to go to sleep' and then started hallucinating sirens. I have no idea how long I was up; after a few days I lost track. I had to paced to stay awake, which I did the entire time. I got pronounced disassociative symptoms - which I'm prone to anyway - ("it's not me in control of my body; there is a mutiny", "my reflection is weird/scary/different; that is not me", "the lines that make up the walls and reality don't seem to lay correctly"), gaps in memory, broken pattern matching (everything looks like a spider, chasing down mundane sounds to figure out what they are), and mixing up memories and imagined thoughts (e.g., fill up a cup, go to drink from it, it is empty and I'm not sure if I filled it up and then drank from it or imagined filling it up or if my memories are out of order).
Given the loss of contact with reality, I could see it being easy to manipulate people if you are in the room with them. I was alone, but if someone told me another me talked to them and then drank from the cup, the mix up could easily seem like evidence that it had actually happened that way, especially if I was trusting, vulnerable and open-minded. And once someone has a model that suggests that, they would probably make up stories on their own to support it.
So, yeah, definitely agree on the importance of sleep.
This might be a different thing with the same name, but on 4chan's /x/ (paranormal) board there have always a lot of people trying really hard to summon a tulpa to be their ghost waifu. For a lot of them it's an ironic meme but I'm pretty sure some of them are serious and do it because they (perhaps correctly) believe it's more likely to work than talking to women that actually exist.
In what way is this supposed to be a relevant detail? Unless you think that they are killing people because they are trans, why should you report that they are part of a marginalized group? If they were mostly blondes or had freckles, should that be part of the story too?
It seems as if the group targeted trans member in their recruitment - and then used evidence of general marginalization to justify their crimes.
If you look up old reddit threads about the murder of the landlord, you can see many people defending the crime as the landlord was transphobic. It's not just a random detail like freckles, it seems like the identity shaped the way this group interacted with the world.
It's basically impossible that it's a random irrelevant detail, I'd say any such detail is fair to share.
For example, if every member of this group was Indian American I'd consider that a fair detail to note, the chances of that happening at random are minuscule, yet that's orders of magnitude more probable than all of them being trans for no reason.
> the chances of that happening at random are minuscule
No it's not, what? People tend to hang out with people similar to them. Most gangs are racially or ethnically homogenous. That's fairly normal.
In fact, there are commonly Indian-origin gangs in Canada (I haven't heard of it in the US, but the US has much higher-income immigrants from India overall)
Marginalized groups seem to be a target / susceptible to this kind of thing.
I had a weird encounter on reddit with some users who expressed that "only X people understand how this character in the movie feels". Interestingly, there was no indication that the movie intended this interpenetration. But the idea wasn't unusual or all that out there so I didn't think much of it. But that group showed up again and again and eventually someone asked and their theory all but seemed to imply that nobody else could possibly have ... feelings and that lack of understanding made those people lesser and them greater.
It seemed to come from some concept that their experience imparted some unique understanding that nobody else could have, and that just lead down a path that lead to zero empathy / understanding with anyone outside.
Reddit encounters are always hard to understand IMO so I don't want to read too much into it, but that isolation that some people / groups feel seem to potentially lead to dark places very easily / quickly.
Hard disagree. Plenty of antisocial (or worse) behaviour has been promulgated by those indisputably at the top of the social food chain -- almost every war of conquest, for example. Did the British Empire expand throughout the world because the British felt marginalised? No, the rest of the world considered them to be a great power and many other cultures voluntarily adopted their styles of dress and other customs as a mark of "modernity".
A sense of marginalisation (real or imagined) can certainly be a force that acts to reduce empathy and encourage violence, but it's by no means necessary.
Of course we should strive to make society just, and this will reduce the motive for violence -- the mistake is to believe that doing so will stop all violence. This might seem a small point, but it's not: Believing that it would stop all violence is a sign that you believe that (a) people are fundamentally good, and (b) have no agency -- that we just react inevitably and helplessly to conditions imposed on us by an external environment. Both of these beliefs are dangerously wrong.
> Plenty of antisocial (or worse) behaviour has been promulgated by those indisputably at the top of the social food chain.
This isn't a counterpoint to "fix the world," because those "at the top of the social food chain" are, of course, partners in an oppressor/oppressed dynamic that prevents both parties from realize their full human potential.
"As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized," Freire says. In a sense, both parties are mutilated by the dynamic.
So "the top of the social food chain" is not a clean sample of a fixed world.
> This isn't a counterpoint to "fix the world," because those "at the top of the social food chain" are, of course, partners in an oppressor/oppressed dynamic that prevents both parties from realize their full human potential.
You described the human condition. This is “the world” we all live in today. Isolating the people at the top as somehow not part of “the world” doesn’t work.
If you consider the winners to also be "dehumanised" by their ongoing winning in cultural and financial terms, as this Freire apparently did, then sure. But they themselves -- the ongoing winners -- certainly did not, that being the reason for their actions in the first place.
The other relevant opinion would be that of the "losers" -- the people oppressed by the winners. Did they feel that the winners were oppressing themselves? I'm certain they did not!
I think Freire is either deluded, or deliberately conflating the notion of what a powerful party views as good for itself with some higher, ethically tinged notion of how we all ought to behave.
This group formed in the SF Bay Area, which is known for being one of the most accepting places in the world for LGBT people. If marginalization were the main cause, it seems to me that the group would have been located somewhere else. I think it's more likely that these people had an underlying mental disorder that made them likely to engage in both violent behavior and trans identity.
One big difference the Zizians have with the LessWrong community is that LW people believe that human minds cannot be rational enough to be absolute utilitarians, and therefore a certain kind of deontology is needed.[1] In contrast, the Zizians are absolutely convinced of the correctness of their views, which leads them to justify atrocities. In that way it seems similar to the psychology of jihadists.
Or more of them live there because it's one of the most accepting environments on the planet, but still not accepting enough to prevent them from being a marginalized outgroup that is quite easy to radicalize by those that would accept them?
"Even the most accepting environment on the planet is still not accepting enough" is not a very flattering description of trans-identifying folks. In fact, I'd call it rather sobering at the very least. It suggests that the ongoing perceived marginalization of trans folks is a nearly unsolvable problem, that can't be addressed simply by advocating for "doing the right thing".
That's probably true, but the larger issue is that we're unlikely to redefine society in the name of making less than 1% of the population feel better. The US has struggled for centuries with the question of how to better treat far more number minorities, such as black people... and women.
At some point the, "change society" approach is bound to create backlash that such a small movement can't sustain, and frankly we're seeing evidence of that now. There's also the reality that forget most of the US, most of the world isn't invested in this cause. This is not a universal cause, and while I personally think that's regrettable, it's also clearly just the way it is for now. Change, if it comes, will be far more gradual than some people are prepared to tolerate, and that assumes change continues in a sawtoothed manner in the right direction.
> we're unlikely to redefine society in the name of making less than 1% of the population feel better
Believe it or not, there are actually many popular, far-reaching political ideologies centered around helping "the least of us." It's not such a foreign concept.
Furthermore, the particular ways in which the transgender population is oppressed happen to coincide with many of the ways in which cis women are infamously burdened. It's not "special treatment" that will make this <1% population feel better but a dissolution of the bonds which torment us all. "Nothing to lose but our chains" type shit, yadada?
> Furthermore, the particular ways in which the transgender population is oppressed happen to coincide with many of the ways in which cis women are infamously burdened. It's not "special treatment" that will make this <1% population feel better
It's worth noting that a number of cis women who associate with the feminist movement would strongly disagree with your assessment.
Those ideologies certainly exist, but I can't say that I've ever heard of one staying in power for very long, at least not while genuinely pursuing that ideology. Far more often "for the least of us" is the pitch that gets you in the door, but no real attempt to deliver is ever made.
So again, I'm not debating the value of pursuing these rights, I'm pointing out that this is view opposed by billions. You can't just declare the rightness of your cause and hope it catches on.
> the SF Bay Area, which is known for being one of the most accepting places in the world for LGBT people
I live in the Bay. Maybe that is true, but in absolute terms the level of acceptance is still very low.
Like, if Denver is 10% accepting, the Bay might be 15%. Or something like that.
And Vallejo, while part of the Bay Area is a very different place than, say, the Castro. Culturally, it’s probably more like Detroit than San Francisco.
So I’m not sure if you can really draw any conclusions from your premise.
Most of the Zizians who lived in Vallejo moved there from the Berkeley area. The reason they moved was because Curtis Lind felt empathetic and offered them extremely cheap rent. After not paying rent for years (despite at least one of them being an engineer at Google), they ambushed Lind, then tried to behead him and dissolve his body in a vat. Fortunately he was carrying a concealed firearm, so he shot them in self-defense, killing one. Three years later, Lind was murdered by another member before he could testify at the trial for his other attackers.
If there's any sort of marginalization by Lind in that story, I'm having a hard time finding it.
"Invest in residential rental property!" they said. "It will provide a great income stream for your retirement."
We need to keep in mind that Lind was forced by law to give them free rent for two years. He was not allowed to evict them for virtually any reason AFAIK, including nonpayment. Yes, he was supportive and generous, but at some point we all reach our limits, especially when dealing with sociopaths who are bent on taking every possible advantage.
I think they're crazy first, trans second. They were marginalised for being crazy. Then they found each other because they're trans. Many cults have random attributes shared by the members, whether it be race or sexual preferences. Their race or sexual preference didn't cause them to join a cult, they had other things going on that drove that. But when it came time to join one, they gravitated towards the one that identified with them.
As rachofsunshine suggested, there are quite a few factions and splinter groups within the larger "rationalist" subculture, not just people who happen to be trans and were recruited because of it. My takeaway after spending a few hours down the rabbit hole is that they all seem to be composed of very smart people who have a screw or three loose.
I'm afraid that at some point, some of these people are likely to talk themselves into doing something seriously fucked up. If I worked on AI at OpenAI or Google or Meta, I think I'd prefer to work from home... and if I occupied a visible position on the org chart, I'd hire a damned good private security company to keep an eye on my family.
>I had a weird encounter on reddit with some users who expressed that "only X people understand how this character in the movie feels". Interestingly, there was no indication that the movie intended this interpenetration.
The death of the author is a reasonable approach to reading a work. But what you said reminded me of the more delusional view in which a) the watcher/reader's approach is the only "correct" one, and b) anyone who disagrees is *EVIL*. An instance of this happened among Tumblrinas obsessed with the supposed homosexual relationship between Holmes and Watson on BBC's Sherlock, and who were certain that the next episode of the show would reveal this to the world. Welp. <https://np.reddit.com/r/the_meltdown/comments/5oc59t/tumblr_...>
You can find all kinds of ridiculous people online, and they're all mostly harmless.
I mean, every LLM post on HN gets people writing fanfic about how AI is developing human intelligence and other silly things.
There's frankly no difference between the two groups -- they are equally silly -- except one is coded female and people like to shit on those hobbies more than male-coded AI fanfic.
I think the relevance of their transness is not very significant.
The lesswrong apocalypse cult has been feeding people's mental illness for years. Their transness likely made them more outsiders to the cult proper, so e.g. they didn't get diverted off into becoming Big Yud's BSDM "math pets" like other women in the cult.
I doubt they are significantly more mentally ill than other members of the cult they just had less support to channel their vulnerability into forms more beneficial to the cult leaders.
Yudkowsky wrote an editorial in Time advocating for the use of nuclear weapons against civilians to prevent his imagined AI doomsday... and people are surprised that some of his followers didn't get the memo that think-pieces are for only for navel gazing. If not for the fact that the goal of cult leaders is generally to freeze their victims into inaction and compliance we probably would have seen more widespread murder as a result of Yud cult's violent rhetoric.
I was unacquainted with the term but after searching it seems that Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote several posts on a BDSM website where he fantasized about recruiting a harem of highly educated women to service him which he called "math pets".
>I doubt they are significantly more mentally ill than other members.
Why would this certain group defy the US trend of being 4-7x more likely afflicted by depressive dissorder? We are talking about a demographic with a 46% rate of suicidal ideation and you doubt that's significant why?
Suicidal ideation, for example, is common in the lesswrong community, even with people pledging to end their own lives before the machine overlord is able to scan their brains and simulate an infinitude of copies of them in a state of perpetual torture.
Essentially the community in discussion is already selected for and generates mental illness, so the ordinary comorbidities of transgendered persons are likely less relevant.
I am not a doctor but I don't think that's how comorbidities work. You can't just say "yea he had diarrhea so it isn't relevant that he never drinks water. Clearly the diarrhea is the issue"
There is a well-documented correlation between gender dysphoria, mental health conditions, and autism spectrum disorder. These overlapping factors may contribute to increased vulnerability to manipulative groups, such as cults.
The fact that many are transgender seems to be relevant because it’s a recruiting and manipulation tactic, not because of a connection to “trans activism.” I haven’t seen any evidence of that connection besides people involved being transgender.
Thanks the pronouns were confusing me and making it hard for me to follow the complex story. I assumed I made a mistake when the article mentions a Jack and refers to them as Jack the whole way through but uses she at the end.
Unfortunately the gendered language we use is also the mechanism to provide clues and content as you read the story. So if I can rely on that they need to call it out to help the reader.
It goes unmentioned because there is an unwritten rule in progressive media that marginalized groups must never be perceived as doing wrong, because that will deepen their marginalization.
In practice it creates a moral blind spot where the worst extremists get a pass, in the name of protecting the rest. Non-progressive media are all too happy to fill in the gap. Cue resentment, cue backlash, cue Trump. Way to go, guys!
Why Trump won is an interesting topic. There is a mixture of reasons but I think high up there was Biden pulling out last minute and Kamala being unpopular with little time to do a campaign. She also had the backfoot of having been in power while there was inflation and support for the Gaza genocide. Therefore Trump won less then Kamala lost.
There is a subreddit dedicate to people both democrats who refused to vote, as well as Trump voters whose policies as promised would severely harm them and their family's interesf (severe as in life/death). Why did they vote against their interests.
For example anyone on any kind of benefits, or whose mum and dad are, vets or if your cousin or uncle is one, Latino, even if you are from a long line of american citizens you may have friends who are 1st gen. More generally anyone not white, male and in the top 5-10% of wealth. Because tariffs won't be good for poor people. And poor is
probably: under $1m assets.
Google trends for tariffs surged after the election. People voted on feelings. Anger, despair or some sense of "Trump means them not me" or maybe "He is successful in business so he must be good".
Unfortunately the rational thing to do often sucks eggs!
Is that your way of acknowledging you don't know anything about this?
Because trust me, this is not simple at all, and since you think it is, it just means you don't know anything about it.
This is understandable, a lot of people don't. But you should avoid posting about it, there are some VERY motivated people who post about this in every thread, and downvote, and flag. Don't be one of them, they are motivated by hate, and that's not a good place to be.
Why should I trust you? Nothing you've written here has inspired confidence in your ability to accurately report information or even understand why the people you interact with act the way they do.
I follow the thread and can agree in large parts. But given multiple news anchors, news programs, both traditional and online, in combination with social media, content creators and late night TV, I am wholly exhausted by Trump somehow being a magical monster responsible for (just as you’ve demonstrated) in some way every ill in modern society.
If he is a narcissist and we are aware narcissists feed on attention and drama and starve in the absence of those things, shouldn’t the best version of activism against him be to deny him mention or attribution? Regardless of how cathartic it might be to openly complain? Imagine getting to the end of this next 4 years and despite what he does, nothing of note can be said about the man. Despite all the EOs, nothing interesting could be discussed. His presidency could be a footnote in history, except for the “activists” going emotionally boneless and apoplectic at every word he says.
TBF, it’s not Trump that exhausts me, it’s this. The maniacal blaming for every problem. The incessant injection of Trump and secondarily politics into every conversation and every facet of life. This…neo-activism is as caustic of a solution as the disease it attempts to inoculate. It’s as if everyone has forgetten how to problem solve in the face of adversity. A social fragility whose only method of communication is abject outrage.
The guy is passing budgetary laws without congress, has been made untouchable by the supreme court, pardoned the violent Jan 6 rioters (despite claiming to be "pro-order"), constantly scape-goats minorites and leftists, threatens war with allies, colludes with foreign fascists, is doing a thousand illegal sh*t a minute, but somehow this is no big deal and we should just ignore it.
Scrutiny and accountability for this systematic dismantling of our democracy is the only sane thing to do. You're either very blind to the gravity of the situation or extremely dishonest.
You'll note the parent didn't cite any examples of the criminality of the Biden family, despite demanding examples of things on the front page of news today.
- pardoned the violent Jan 6 rioters (despite claiming to be "pro-order")
- constantly scape-goats minorities
- colludes with foreign fascists
Im unaware of those happening and would like to see a source.
> Bringing up the "criminality of the Biden family" is a legitimately insane thing to do when defending Trump.
Most Americans preferred Trump to the previous regime, just look at the approval ratings. You’re using “insane” as a way to dismiss what most people believe without critically engaging — that they prefer Trump, for all his faults, to Biden and his influence pedaling and special treatment of his criminal son.
Now give me a source on Biden's. And it's only been two weeks, Trump's approval is bound to plumet once the tariffs kick in and stat destroying the economy, we're still supposed to be in the honey moon.
Can't you fathom me dismissing what the relative majority was led to believe about the guy, in the light of the massive evidence of his corruption, incompetency and bigotry?
You're beyond reason. Any critic of Trump is immediately "woke" and "virtue signaling".
Don't you care when he threatens war with our allies? When he praises foreign fascists? When he pardoned all Jan 6 rioters, that he previously claimed were all antifa? When he is made above the law by an obviously partisan supreme court? When he passes budgetary laws without congress with no repercussions whatsoever? When he promised that "we won't have to vote ever again"?
I was responding directly to something the person said, continuing their discussion:
> The maniacal blaming for every problem. The incessant injection of Trump and secondarily politics into every conversation and every facet of life. This…neo-activism is as caustic of a solution as the disease it attempts to inoculate.
The explanation for that is that Trump is selected to provoke that response precisely because those activists are themselves toxic people.
The last thing to do when confronted with a would-be autocrat is to shut up. That's how they consolidate their powers past the point of no returns. Clearly, with him winning the popular vote despite Jan 6, promising we'd never have to vote again, and gaining total immunity before the law, there was a big problem of communication.
Wanting to preserve democracy is not toxic, however way you want to spin it.
The other shoe has been on the verge of dropping for years. The pendulum has swung the other way, it was always going to happen. I read a comment on this forum today asking why it was relevant that the group of people in SF associated with a string of murders consisted of a majority trans people. Asked why this was a relevant point.
It’s relevant because for years and years the mainstream left has been pushing and pushing to normalize behavior that has been historically been considered deviant. I have no opinion on the matter, I don’t care at all if someone wants to make their genitalia look different than it did when they were born. Do it up.
Most males have a really fucking hard time contemplating rearranging their penis into a vagina. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t seem right. It isn’t something that can register for most people.
Which of course lead to the situation we have now. “They don’t feel like a man/woman, they feel the opposite! They are depressed and discouraged and you MUST accept them for who they are!”
That doesn’t work. And instead of pivoting, the messaging just got louder and louder. Now we see the repercussions.
Trump was given power by people who didn’t realize they gave it to him, and they’re shellshocked.
I don’t like trump or approve of his moves. I did not vote for him. Ironically, he’s doing what he said he would do, which isn’t common amongst politicians, and he’s doing it quickly.
conservative media has the opposite rule: make every story about a trans person into a narrative about trans ideology.
this should be a story about an ideological cult with trans members, but instead it's a story about the cult of trans ideology. it's called "nut picking" - use the worst examples of a group to tarnish the group as a whole.
a good example of this is attacks against Muslim Americans after 9/11.
It is much the same thing, yes. The reality that I have experienced is that most Trump voters are decent people who simply disagree with me on the best way to solve the issues facing our country. Not at all a pack of hate-filled Nazis. But humans love to pick on their outgroup, so people simply round "Trump supporter" off to "Nazi bigot" and never bother to reflect that they are simply giving into tribalism.
Andy Ngo is not a credible source of news about trans people. Media Matters describes him as a “right wing troll” who spread misinformation about this issue [1] and The Advocate points out that right wing media have repeatedly ignored the facts around supposed trans shooters and continued to spread misinformation on the subject. [2]
Media matters is just as biased as Andy Ngo. They are the definition of a hit piece mill, and will find any reason possible to criticize popular figures with right wing beliefs.
it's been an exhausting couple of weeks for me, as a trans person. one executive order after another, explicitly attacking us. scrambling to update all my documents, navigating a Kafkaesque bureaucracy with constantly shifting rules.
now this.
there are like six Zizians. there are millions of trans people. I'm sure that many of the Zizians being trans says something about the Ziz cult, but Ziz doesn't say anything about "trans activism."
any evil one trans person does, is used to stain all trans people. recognize this tendency; don't let this become like blood libel.
I don't think that you need to be a Christian to empathise with anyone. The big geezer's (JC) teachings imply to me that keeping quiet about your faith and simply doing good (for a given value of good) is the Way.
Declaring a religion might rile someone, before you have even engaged. I suggest that you simply proffer a hand. Empathise as best you can. Be careful.
At best, with mentioning religion, you have declared your rightful intentions and at worst you have added yet another layer of tribalism to a ... debate.
I'm pretty sure that at least the synoptic gospels and probably John too (for the full set) tell you to keep it quiet. There is no need to put your religious heart on your sleeve - that's between you and God.
> At best, with mentioning religion, you have declared your rightful intentions and at worst you have added yet another layer of tribalism to a ... debate.
I don't think you understood what they were saying. They were saying that as a Christian, they've experienced being blamed for the misdeeds of other Christians which they personally had nothing to do with.
The most important part of that statement isn't the word "Christian": you could replace "Christian" with Muslim or atheist or whatever and there'd be someone else who could truthfully say it.
If you have any unusual identity (e.g. a person inhabited by a fox spirit) you have a responsibility to be the person you can because you could be the first person in that category they meet.
I grew up in Manchester, NH which was almost 100% white until 1990 or so. [1] My family was out for a bike ride and got a flat. A black couple (the man had just been transferred to the Raytheon factory where they make the radar for Patriot missile) came by and helped us fix the flat and shared lemonade with us in the kitchen. If you have an experience like this you think "I want more black people to move into my town."
One branch of my wife's family comes from southern Italy and is pretty conservative, one of her cousins is dating a black guy who is an EE and works on robots at Amazon. The family is pretty old school but he's won everyone over by making a point to be really awesome. He talks about every prominent thinker about what blacks in America should do from Marcus Garvey to Malcom X. He thinks it's a terrible act of racism that 'Black Wall Street' was bombed but also thinks people who are still stuck in the pathologies of the projects he escaped from need to take responsibility: he thinks it's unfair but he knows black people have to work twice as hard to get ahead and accepts the burden. He's really won the family over.
To link it to transgender issues, this poll [2] from 2022 says that 57% of Americans don't know personally know anybody transgender, and this 2024 poll of Asian-Pacific Islanders in the US [3] gives the same number.
People are getting their ideas about transgender people from the media where stories like this [4] are pretty widespread; whatever you do you don't want to live up to those stereotypes.
[1] I think because the bottom fell out of the economy at the end of the 1920s and never came back until the 1990s; you had no reason to go there unless you had family, black people leaving the south were going to Detroit because (a) there were already blacks there, and (b) the car industry was expanding despite the Great Depression.
> Are your utterances here helping the cause of trans liberation, or hurting it?
I get that it's been a rough couple of weeks for trans people, and immigrants, and people who due import and export, and grant-writers--but perhaps you should take a moment to reflect on how comments like this reflect on you and trans people to the general populace (which is adjacent to the point made by the comment you were replying to).
All you had to write was "Do you think this state of affairs works for or against trans people?", or even "I'm not sure I understand which direction you're going with this, could you elaborate?"
Instead, you picked an us-vs-them phrasing and were shitty.
Let me give some blunt feedback:
Trans people (the ones that are clockable) are a relative novelty outside of urban areas, and most of the voting public (much as the gays faced before) don't have any familiarity with them outside of either: scaremongering from the conservatives and tabloids, excessively fawning presentation in movies and shows and liberal/progressive media, or spicy tweets and posts on Twitter and Facebook.
Normies don't really know about the boring, relatable parts of being trans--finding clothes that fit correctly, struggling to feel that your body is right, dealing with stupid bureaucracy that doesn't match your needs, being unable to get competent or affordable healthcare, looking for a partner that loves you for being you and not because of how you look or what they think you are. (You'll note: these are, modulo some biological issues, exactly the same things that they face too.)
The trans people aren't doing themselves any favors (especially the ones in tech, who are incredibly privileged and until recently inhabited a rarified atmosphere of good pay and performative catering) when interacting with normies, though. When people like you act like assholes it confirms every negative stereotype.
Honestly? It's exhausting. It's tiring. It's enough to drive away the allies and friendlies that aren't already getting driven away by those of you with personality disorders.
The trans friends and partners I've had that are decent and capable of relating on a normal level are vastly outnumbered by the catty, annoying, neurotic transgendered men and women I've encountered in my career and schooling.
Go on Mastodon, go onto the Fediverse, and tell me with a straight face that your average trans poster isn't at least as likely to be as toxic as somebody on Twitter. Go look at the self-congratulatory bullshit to own the MAGA folks...all the way up until the election that has so many of you freaking out. Go look at the immediate closing of ranks and decrying "transphobe! transphobe!" when one of your group does something shitty and gets called out for it--even when they deserve it.
If you want to know why the popular support for trans people isn't great, look in the mirror and consider if you want to double down on a losing strategy for behavior.
The current swing of the pendulum is not good, it is not kind, it is not entirely fair--but it sure as hell isn't inexplicable. Good luck to you in the coming years.
> I get that it's been a rough couple of weeks for trans people
Trans people are the most hated subgroup and were for years. Literal physical attack against them were going up for years now. It was not rough couple of weeks, it is systematic campaign of hate again and again and again.
> Trans people (the ones that are clockable) are a relative novelty outside of urban areas, and most of the voting public
The reason for that is violence they are and were targets of in those areas. It is also that if a kid outs itself as trans, they will likely be kicked off out of house. If not kicked, they will be mocked in those areas all the time.
> The trans friends and partners I've had that are decent and capable of relating on a normal level are vastly outnumbered by the catty, annoying, neurotic transgendered men and women I've encountered in my career and schooling.
And it did not helped those people at all. The hate is preexisting and has nothing to do with how trans actually act.
> If you want to know why the popular support for trans people isn't great, look in the mirror and consider if you want to double down on a losing strategy for behavior.
Hate for trans has nothing to do with what trans to. Conservative people feel massive disgust over crossing gender lines. It is that bad feeling they have when they hear the idea itself. And literal campaign of hate they themselves feed.
I used to go out in drag in Halloween before things got so polarized. Many people thought I had a great costume but I'd always seem some microexpressions of disgust enough to know I was doing something that wasn't completely safe.
I was very inclined to think positively of transgender people ten years ago but my own experience with them on Mastodon and in other places has led me to agree with the person you're replying to. It was when I started reading their words as opposed to reading about them in the media that I became more negative. People were sharing so many hateful memes on Mastodon that I had to put in a large number of filtering rules so that I can't see anything they post except for the hateful image memes that can't be filtered because the only text is in the filter.
It's almost as if some of these people have a fascination with assholes like Kiwi Farms and see it as a template for activism, like they build their whole lives and find all their meaning out of hating and being hated. See that "Witch Hunt of J.K. Rowling" podcast -- yes, there are jerks online who say horrible stuff like that to them, but that doesn't make it a righteous cause to that to other people; by fighting for territory that they couldn't defend they may have turned people against them and lost rights that they could have kept. They mirror the hatred and intolerance of the people they hate.
So I don't agree that "Hate for trans has nothing to do with what trans to (sic)" -- they do have to overcome some hate which is intrinsic but there is a lot which is a mirror of the hateful view that many of them have about the world.
Hate toward trans predates mastodon tho. Where I live, it is very normal to make fun of trans and gays. It is simply accepted that they are disgusting. People who talked to me about trans being disgusting were definitely not reading mastodon nor any other trans bubble. Trans being killed for being trans and then local politician using the situation to push anti-gay legal agenda is a very real thing.
I do not think it goes both ways symmetrically, really. What I think is that any misconduct by any trans person is used as excuse to mistreat all of them. And when they do not do misconduct, well, it wont help them either.
The attacks toward trans last years were not about ugly memes on mastodon. It was literally about beer can having minor ad with trans person. It is about making gender affirming care illegal, full stop. It is about transsexuality itself being disgusting. It is about pushing polite respectful trans people out of any visible situation.
Like, OP complains about people not knowing relatable things about trans. But, if they are visible, say on beer can, the hate campaign is very very real. You cant harass someone for being visibly trans and then complain you do not know about day to day trans people.
I can say personally my feeling thermometer went from maybe 75 to 15 as a result of being on Mastodon and other online forums in the last tow years. I like trans people as individuals but I hate the movement. It's not the only place where that kind of negativity leaks out.
For instance the men's rooms in my building are stuffed with menstrual products for "men who menstruate" with a preachy card that talks about it in a reductive, narrow minded frame the same as the worst conservative Christians. This is for the benefit of 0.6% of the population at best, maybe 3 or 4 people benefit from it, out of 8 men's rooms in that building it is probably less than one person per bathroom.
It seems to me that this sucks all the air out of the room to discuss anything else. Young men are struggling. Maybe you only see the survivors in higher ed, but the K12 system is not built with boys in mind, particularly if you are in a racial minority, see
Instead of messaging aimed at, say, 20% of people who are struggling we get this stridently minoritiarian discourse that leaves many people feeling unheard, erased, and resentful.
> It seems to me that this sucks all the air out of the room to discuss anything else.
You understand that this state of affairs has been created by the bigoted side? I just want to live in peace and build stuff that makes the world better, not worry about the federal government coming after me and pretending I don't exist. Please try not to get so fooled next time.
No. This is the black and white thinking that I'm talking about. Yes, the federal government has deteriorated, but some of that is that progressives haven't had a message that reconciles the rights of 0.6% of people with many concerns that the 99.4% have
Start taking responsibility. Bigotry is a real thing but you can have a large impact on how other people treat you based on how you behave.
Organized transgenderists in my view have a reducivist, moralist, my-way-or-the-highway approach that initially exploited 'progressive' people who were inclined to think they were acting in good faith but are in the process of driving those people away. (I was really inclined to think of transsexual people positively because my best friend in college was a really awesome person who happened to be transsexual)
J.K. Rowling picked an issue where public opinion was far away from what transgenderists wish it was. (Where do violent sex offenders in prison get housed?) She thought the vast majority of transgender prisoners were safest in prisons that corresponded to their identity but that authorities had to have some latitude for people acting in bad faith.
She got jumped on because she agreed with them in most cases but not all.
Normal people will call you an ally if you agree on 7 out of 10 issues but organized transgenderists come across as people who will treat you as an enemy if you disagree about anything.
On some issues (workplace discrimination) public opinion is on the side of trans people. On other issues (sports participation) public opinion is the other ways. A year ago questions involving access to health care tended to split down the middle, the one recent poll I looked at seems to have moved far to the right in the last year on the issue of transgender care for minors.
A healthy political movement accepts that it's won on certain issues, that it can't win on other issues, and that there are some issues in the middle where you can persuade people and win.
On top of that there is the whole "egg hatcher" thing where you find there are people who are looking for people who "march to the beat of a different drummer" and sell transgenderism as an answer to their problems, almost certainly a false answer. If somebody knew their gender identity of a child I'm inclined to believe them (e.g. they certainly aren't going to change their mind based on whether people 'affirm' them or not) but if somebody discovered a variant identity as a teen I'm skeptical. As a schizotype
I am already frustrated with the bandwagoning of 'neurodivergence' by an autism industrial complex and an ADHD industry that pushes addictive medicine. Neurodivergent people are already 'bully magnets' and the last thing they need is to take on an identity which will get them further targeted and be surrounded by people who will reinforce their feelings of victimhood. (see 'impulsive nonconformity' in the article I link above)
I see the current movement as something that centers the activism of its enemies as a template for its own activism [1] [2] and that thrives on bigotry. It looks like a pernicious cult that is all about 'othering' other people and sees any and all pushback they get from people whether it is primary preexisting feelings of disgust, fear and hatred or the learned feelings of exasperation you might see on the face of a otherwise bleeding heart socially progressive HR manager who has just dealt with too many people who see a fascist under every bush and wants the whole cake yesterday.
[1] see anti-fascism
[2] transgenderists say it was OK to treat J. K. Rowling the same way Kiwi Farms treats them
> progressives haven't had a message that reconciles the rights of 0.6% of people with many concerns that the 99.4% have
It is an objectively true moral statement that minority rights ought not depend on majority opinion (that is the whole point of constitutionalism). To the extent that minority rights depend on majority opinion in reality, that is a deficiency of political systems. All of us exist in deficient political systems.
> if somebody discovered a variant identity as a teen I'm skeptical
What is your expertise in this matter? Why do you think your opinion is worth anything? People figure things out on their own pace.
If you think your opinion carries any weight here, you've been fooled.
> She got jumped on because she agreed with them in most cases but not all.
JK Rowling signed the so-called "Women's Declaration International" which has the exact same policy proposals as what Trump is doing. Again, you've been fooled.
> A year ago questions involving access to health care tended to split down the middle, the one recent poll I looked at seems to have moved far to the right in the last year on the issue of transgender care for minors.
Yes, because people's brains have been cooked through immersion in social media.
If you surround yourself with virtue, you will become virtuous. If you surround yourself with vice, you will become vicious. Social media rewards vice, so people have become more vicious.
> I am already frustrated with the bandwagoning of 'neurodivergence' by an autism industrial complex and an ADHD industry that pushes addictive medicine. Neurodivergent people are already 'bully magnets' and the last thing they need is to take on an identity
I have ADHD (according to my psychiatrist one of the most obvious cases they've ever seen), and autism, and I'm trans (both -sexual and gender). So I guess in your eyes I'm a bully magnet (??) who has taken on an identity (???????). In reality, despite the horrible discrimination, my neurodivergence gives me a pretty nonstandard insight into things, and an ability to explain concepts, that I've been able to turn into something valuable to others. (The last 4 technical blog posts I wrote were all front page on HN, with 100-300+ upvotes.)
This has nothing to do with paranoia or delusions. My work is valued for its correctness and attention to detail.
I should have said "interests" rather than rights, although one thing I know is that when this civilization collapses people will turn their back on everything it stood for and the idea of individualism and rights will be gone ("my carbon my choice"), the next culture will have a bill of responsibilities.
Sports is a clear example. Nobody has a 'right' to be on a sports team. Women have been working for years to build the opportunity to have a pro career. Until tests were developed (1970 or so) it was a chronic problem that men would crash women's events in the Olympics to steal gold medals.
On the other hand, there are many benefits to participation in sports. I don't want the state to decide who can play in what league. I want leagues to decide that. My school is part of club leagues where teams have a mix of men and women in them and I think there's a lot of room for innovation. Different leagues want different things: I want trans people to be able to participate in some sports, it's important.
J. K. Rowling didn't start out in the place where she ended up.
As for social media, I deleted my Twitter account in 2016, I don't hang out in places with right wing nuts, rather I am on Mastodon and Bluesky with the left wing nuts. I need lots of filters to keep out hateful content posted by trans people on both of those platforms.
'Virtue' and 'Vice' are a frame that makes all problems impossible to solve and leaves people talking past each other. See [1]
It took me 40 years to get my diagnosis; I've had numerous psych evals and today I can get enough signs and symptoms to get a diagnosis looking at the first paragraph of any of them, even if that paragraph stated it was inconclusive.
I have a small amount of the thought disorder of schizophrenia, enough that I can't win at chess because I'll screw up. I max any test of verbal intelligence I take, I write long posts like this that have bizarre typos, the harder I try to fix them the more my keyboard turns into a Ouija board. On a bad morning I have a paranoia towards objects that seem to jump out and grab me. At one point of my life I was wrapped up in a system of delusions.
I also can do detail oriented work and systems thinking. (I've compensated for my condition very well) Sometimes my work is highly valued. Yet I graduated from elementary school the same way Ender Wiggin did. The child post of this one (where I tell the story of my son's incel and trans friends) [4] got upwards of 37 votes so "my opinion does hold some weight here" (But so does yours, and one difference between me and you is that I'm not going to tell you that your opinion has no weight)
Sometimes I feel angry that I wasn't served by the mental health community and that about 5-10% of the population is similarly underserved. On the other hand I was lucky that I was only under the spell of a charlatan for about 9 months of my life and I'm glad I didn't get drugged the way they wanted to drug me in school because a friend of mine who's the same age as me and did get drugged got all his teeth pulled at the age of 40 and might suffer from osteoporosis soon [2] [3] if he lives that long.
> when this civilization collapses people will turn their back on everything it stood for and the idea of individualism and rights will be gone ("my carbon my choice"), the next culture will have a bill of responsibilities.
I agree that Americans don't think enough about their responsibilities. I fully support a bill of responsibilities paired with rights. Several countries have that kind of list already. They're not mutually exclusive.
> Nobody has a 'right' to be on a sports team. Women have been working for years to build the opportunity to have a pro career. Until tests were developed (1970 or so) it was a chronic problem that men would crash women's events in the Olympics to steal gold medals.
Yet women's sports are still second-class, outside of exceptions like tennis. Is it trans people who have caused women's sports to be second-class, or the patriarchy enforced by cisgender men?
FWIW, I think it's reasonable to require that trans women be on HRT for a while before playing professional women's sports. But categorical bans are horribly unjust—making a class of women inherently lesser. So yes, as a kind of woman, trans women ought to have the right to be on women's sports teams.
> J. K. Rowling didn't start out in the place where she ended up.
True. Her brain was cooked by constant exposure to right-wing bigotry on social media, like many others'.
I am a very firm believer that there is no free will. We are entirely the products of our genetics and our environments. Social media creates extraordinarily bad environments.
> 'Virtue' and 'Vice' are a frame that makes all problems impossible to solve and leaves people talking past each other.
Well, no, it just makes it clear that (a) morality is objective and (b) societies are better when people are more virtuous. The solution is to not make people talk to or past each other, the solution is to effect environmental changes such that people are less exposed to vice and more exposed to virtue.
Women's sports just took time. I do sports photography for a lot of events which gives me some input for an opinion.
When it comes to soccer at Ithaca College the men play a very physical but kinda stupid game which has a lot of hard running and kicking and headers but very little sense of space. The women play much smarter soccer that looks more like good pro soccer, where, ideally everybody knows where their team mates are supposed to be and what to do to confound the opposition. More people turn up for a women's game in the rain than turn up for a men's game in the shine. They're both entertaining in their own way.
At Cornell I think the men play better than the women categorically but that's not about men or women, it's about the coaching staff, the recruiting, the priorities of the schools, etc.
Last Friday I went to a double header of women's and men's basketball at IC. The women's game was unequal but I was focused on getting good shots of the players and not thinking about the quality of the play. One of the men from the away team promised me that if I stuck around I'd see a much more entertaining game, I said I wouldn't miss it. It was 12-0 for Ithaca at the beginning so I was getting worried they wouldn't come but Hobart did and it was like 63-60 at the end. Side by side the men were so much bigger, so much faster, so much more intense. Still I like the competition and teamwork of women's ball and would rather show up in person at any college game of either gender and watch the NBA on TV.
I think time will tell what's right about fair competition, in the meantime women's soccer and basketball at the pro level is becoming a big business in the US.
In my mind 'patriarchy' is a thought stopping word. We picture the Hebrew god as an old man on a throne with a beard. One take on it is that it's got nothing to do with woman at all except as tokens, it's really a game of status where young men and poor men are dominated by rich men and old men. It's particularly harmful when it comes to discussing the 'incel' phenomenon which mainly affects straight men (slightly more likely to be black or asian!) but also affects women and gay men.
People like J K Rowling don't have a choice but to get cooked by right wing social media because there isn't a sensible discourse from the left.
I do believe in free will. If you think moral agency matters, you have to believe we have a choice. I think genes and epigenetics matter more than people want to admit and hell yeah there are bad environments. But in the end you've got a choice. The 'bad' thing I see is not so much virtue or vice but more like inflammation, as in the medical condition.
> Is it trans people who have caused women's sports to be second-class, or the patriarchy enforced by cisgender men?
Is there any possible other reason than these two things, do you think, for this state of affairs?
> making a class of women inherently lesser.
A sort of Morton's fork here would be that transwomen are lesser women because they have to assume that identity instead of starting there (to say nothing of the intuitive biological differences), or that women (and thus trans women) are lesser because they are a subset of the functionality offered by men (because they can be emulated by men choosing to do so). I don't particularly agree with either point, mind you, but both could be made. The trivial solution to avoid this is to simply acknowledge that trans women are neither men nor women (nor trans men) and are a category unto themselves worth valuing on their own merits and characteristics.
> True. Her brain was cooked by constant exposure to right-wing bigotry on social media, like many others'.
If it is reasonable to believe--as everybody seems told to--that constant exposure to right-wing media and bigotry can turn somebody into a bigot, is it really a stretch to believe that for some chunk of the trans population the same has taken place? Further, do you see why such doublethink would make the trans folks who preach it suspect to normies who see the obvious?
> We are entirely the products of our genetics and our environments.
If that's the case, it suggests something odious: there is no virtue in being trans--you're a medical and social anomaly, and if we can remove the factors that cause trans folks to occur all that suffering goes away in a generation or two and the system does better (on the metric of suffering).
And before you go off on how this is unethical or not virtuous or whatever, by your own assertion...
> I am a very firm believer that there is no free will.
...such a solution is admissible and without blame, because no moral agents would be involved in its occurrence.
(You don't get to claim there is no free will and then hold anybody accountable in any moral way. Morality does not exist unless free will does; otherwise, it's just the dull observation of iterated cost-benefit analysis and reactions to an environment.)
> The trivial solution to avoid this is to simply acknowledge that trans women are neither men nor women (nor trans men) and are a category unto themselves worth valuing on their own merits and characteristics.
The forcible third-gendering of trans women is one of the greatest crimes of the culture I grew up in, so I'd rather we move past all traditionalism entirely.
> If it is reasonable to believe--as everybody seems told to--that constant exposure to right-wing media and bigotry can turn somebody into a bigot, is it really a stretch to believe that for some chunk of the trans population the same has taken place?
Constant exposure to virtue makes you more likely to be virtuous.
> Further, do you see why such doublethink would make the trans folks who preach it suspect to normies who see the obvious?
See the obvious what? The normies are simply wrong about a lot of this.
> Morality does not exist unless free will does
This is simply false. Free will is linked to moral responsibility, not the existence of morals. How moral we are is out of our control (Thomas Nagle called this moral luck).
> The forcible third-gendering of trans women is one of the greatest crimes of the culture I grew up in, so I'd rather we move past all traditionalism entirely.
I think one issue is – do "man" and "woman" have some objective essence? I think most progressives would say "no" – that kind of essentialism is more associated with conservatives and traditionalists. But if "man" and "woman" don't have an objective essence, their definition is ultimately conventional – which means if different people want to define those terms differently, how can we say one definition is ultimately more right than the other?
That has a benefit for transgender people – if transgender people and their allies want to adopt trans-inclusive definitions of "man" and "woman", nobody can say they are objectively wrong to do so, if we accept these concepts are ultimately cultural constructs.
But then comes the downside – if conservatives and traditionalists (and various others, such as a significant number of radical feminists) want to adopt trans-exclusive definitions of those terms, how can we say they are wrong to do so? If these are cultural constructs and conventional definitions, as opposed to naming objective realities which exist independently of culture and language, how can one say their definition is objectively incorrect? It's just different.
Maybe the answer is a form of "live and let live": let progressive people have their spaces governed by their definitions, let conservative/traditionalist people have their spaces governed by theirs, and where the two have to overlap or intersect or coexist, try to find a way to be neutral between the competing definitions.
Of course, if you are growing up in one of those conservative/traditionalist spaces, and end up identifying as LGBT, that solution isn't exactly pleasant, at least until you become old enough to cross over to a space more welcoming to your identity. But I don't know what the alternative is. Progressives like to imagine that conservative/traditionalist viewpoints will eventually wither away and disappear, but looking at trends in the real world, it seems unlikely that dream will be fulfilled, certainly not in the lifetime of anyone currently alive. Finding a way to peacefully coexist seems preferable to interminable cultural and political conflict over the issue.
> I think one issue is – do "man" and "woman" have some objective essence? I think most progressives would say "no" – that kind of essentialism is more associated with conservatives and traditionalists. But if "man" and "woman" don't have an objective essence, their definition is ultimately conventional – which means if different people want to define those terms differently, how can we say one definition is ultimately more right than the other?
So "essence" isn't the right word, but there absolutely are affinities and anti-affinities towards gender in brain wiring, as reflected in people's internal psychology. There is no better explanation for the vast majority of people being cisgender, and having gender dysphoria when misgendered. The traditionalists are somewhat correct about this!
A lot of traditionalist freaking out about gender is extrapolating their own internal experiences onto everyone. Many cis people feel quite bad when they are misgendered! This is a commonality with trans people, not a difference.
> That has a benefit for transgender people – if transgender people and their allies want to adopt trans-inclusive definitions of "man" and "woman", nobody can say they are objectively wrong to do so, if we accept these concepts are ultimately cultural constructs.
But I am saying that the traditional model of gender is objectively wrong! Gender is not just a cultural construct, there is clearly an inherent aspect to it.
"Gender is binary and immutably assigned at birth" and "gender is entirely social" are two positions that are both incorrect in their own ways. The truth, as expressed in the modern scientific model of gender, is more complex. Gender is not binary, but there is quite clearly an inherent (likely biological) component to it -- otherwise HRT wouldn't have the psychological effects it does on trans people. There is also a social component: we are a social species, and our biologies and sociologies are intertwined.
> But then comes the downside – if conservatives and traditionalists (and various others, such as a significant number of radical feminists) want to adopt trans-exclusive definitions of those terms, how can we say they are wrong to do so? If these are cultural constructs and conventional definitions, as opposed to naming objective realities which exist independently of culture and language, how can one say their definition is objectively incorrect? It's just different.
Right. This is the downside of the kind of "model relativism" that you're describing. This is very explicitly not my position, and I think the progressives who have promoted this position have done a bad job. I'm saying that the traditional definition is objectively incorrect, in the sense that the traditional model doesn't describe reality nearly as well as the modern scientific model of gender. It's as incorrect as a belief that the sun revolves around the earth.
> Maybe the answer is a form of "live and let live": let progressive people have their spaces governed by their definitions, let conservative/traditionalist people have their spaces governed by theirs, and where the two have to overlap or intersect or coexist, try to find a way to be neutral between the competing definitions.
That is fine when the two definitions are equally correct. They're not! One is more correct than the other.
> Of course, if you are growing up in one of those conservative/traditionalist spaces, and end up identifying as LGBT, that solution isn't exactly pleasant, at least until you become old enough to cross over to a space more welcoming to your identity. But I don't know what the alternative is.
The alternative is to use objective reality, as determined by evidence and study using modern methods, to determine public policy. Traditional and religious beliefs should have no role here.
> So "essence" isn't the right word, but there absolutely are affinities and anti-affinities towards gender in brain wiring, as reflected in people's internal psychology.
I have some scepticism about all this. There is evidence for some group differences in neurobiology between men and women, but they are group differences, they don’t operate at the individual level-meaning, for some brain features, there is a statistically significant difference in the male average and the female average, but the distributions are overlapping, so there are some males with brains at or near the female average, and vice versa.
There’s also some evidence that LGBT people are more likely to belong to those “overlapping” groups (males with brains closer to the female average in certain respects, and vice versa). But, again, it is a group rather than individual difference: not every person who has such an “overlapping” brain is LGBT, and not every LGBT person has such an “overlapping” brain-and we still can’t explain why. Plus, I don’t believe we have found any reliable biological difference between different LGBT subgroups (e.g. some gay cismen have rather ‘female’ neuroanatomy, as do some transwomen, but I’m not aware of any high quality evidence for distinguishing those two groups at a neurobiological level)
For most transgender people, we can’t point to any specific neurobiological factor as an explanation for why they are transgender. And even for the minority for whom there is something specific to point to, there will be other people who share that factor yet aren’t transgender, so that factor can’t be a complete explanation-and the rest of the explanation we just don’t know. All I think we can confidently say is that biological factors are in the mix, but we can’t rule out the possibility that psychosocial/sociocultural/etc factors also have some role to play-plus, the respective contributions of the biological vs the non-biological may differ from person to person.
Also, I don’t know if everyone actually has a “gender identity”. I mean, I don’t think I do. Yes, I have XY chromosomes with a typical male phenotype, a male-coded given name, my legal documents all say M, I’m married to a woman and father of two children with her, and I suppose “male” describes a social role I play. But, I don’t have some internal “identity” as “male”. Maybe this is an autistic trait, but deep down inside I don’t identify as anything at all. Well, maybe as pure consciousness, and everything else about me (including my sex/gender) is just a contingent chance accident of what that consciousness happens to experience.
> There is no better explanation for the vast majority of people being cisgender, and having gender dysphoria when misgendered.
Do non-trans people have gender dysphoria when they are misgendered? Some of them don’t really care. And even if a person reacts negatively, is that due to gender dysphoria? Or could it be they feel upset because you’ve got a fact about them wrong, and they might be just as upset if you’d got any other fact wrong instead? And even if they experience some special upset at being misgendered, how do we know that isn’t just due to cultural conditioning, as opposed to an innate psychological factor?
I’ve personally experienced being misgendered more than once, and my reactions have varied from amusement to irritation to equanimity, depending on how I was feeling at the time. But I don’t think those varied reactions convey any deep fact about “who I am”, and I’m not convinced any of those reactions had anything to do with gender dysphoria
> I think a much more robust response is "your intuitions aren't completely incorrect, but reality is more complicated -- our views are more correct than yours, because we have modern methods of learning on our side which are better than traditional ones." But this response really implies a scientific, evide...
> For most transgender people, we can’t point to any specific neurobiological factor as an explanation for why they are transgender. And even for the minority for whom there is something specific to point to, there will be other people who share that factor yet aren’t transgender, so that factor can’t be a complete explanation-and the rest of the explanation we just don’t know. All I think we can confidently say is that biological factors are in the mix, but we can’t rule out the possibility that psychosocial/sociocultural/etc factors also have some role to play-plus, the respective contributions of the biological vs the non-biological may differ from person to person.
I was careful to word that as "as reflected in internal psychology". I don't think we're going to pinpoint any specific pieces of brain wiring any time soon, but there are quite clearly profound internal psychological differences -- since supernatural phenomena don't exist, they must be either due to internal brain wiring or another property of the internal body, or due to social factors, or a mix of both.
A survey I've done of trans people near me is whether they'd still want to transition on a desert island. Some say no, but the vast majority say yes. To me, this demonstrates that there's at least some inherent characteristic at play.
> Also, I don’t know if everyone actually has a “gender identity”. I mean, I don’t think I do. Yes, I have XY chromosomes with a typical male phenotype, a male-coded given name, my legal documents all say M, I’m married to a woman and father of two children with her, and I suppose “male” describes a social role I play. But, I don’t have some internal “identity” as “male”. Maybe this is an autistic trait, but deep down inside I don’t identify as anything at all. Well, maybe as pure consciousness, and everything else about me (including my sex/gender) is just a contingent chance accident of what that consciousness happens to experience.
Strength of internal gender identity does vary -- agender people demonstrate that. But would you be able to transition (especially medically) and live day in and day out as a woman?
Dr Will Powers, a cis male, has a description of how taking an excessive dose of estrogen gave him gender dysphoria for days [1].
David Reimer, another cis male, was forcibly transitioned by his doctor after a botched surgery as an infant [2]. He suffered lifelong dysphoria as a result, and tragically took his own life at a young age.
What trans people go through is quite similar to what these people went through, just in reverse. Reimer was lied to about his gender for years, which led to tremendous distress. Trans people are falsely informed (though not as a lie since this isn't intentional at first) about their gender for years, which also leads to tremendous distress. A lot of people want to openly and proudly lie about it, in a way that is documented to cause distress.
> Do non-trans people have gender dysphoria when they are misgendered? Some of them don’t really care. And even if a person reacts negatively, is that due to gender dysphoria? Or could it be they feel upset because you’ve got a fact about them wrong, and they might be just as upset if you’d got any other fact wrong instead? And even if they experience some special upset at being misgendered, how do we know that isn’t just due to cultural conditioning, as opposed to an innate psychological factor?
Gender culture is created primarily by cis/het people, so it's hard to separate the two out. Being upset at misgendering is a cross-cultural phenomenon -- I've asked cis people across American, European and a couple different Asian cultures about this.
> The problem I see: I think there’s often a substantial gap between what the science actually says, and what people claim the science says (including even many scientists themselves, especially when addressing a lay audience.) I think when you look at...
> It is an objectively true moral statement that minority rights ought not depend on majority opinion (that is the whole point of constitutionalism). To the extent that minority rights depend on majority opinion in reality, that is a deficiency of political systems. All of us exist in deficient political systems.
No constitution is an absolute guarantee of the rights of any minority. Constitutions contain roadblocks to slow down the majority when its desires conflict with the rights and interests of minorities, but a sufficiently determined supermajority retains the ability to overcome all those roadblocks. At the end of the day, almost all constitutions can be amended, even if with some difficulty – no matter how many constitutional provisions you have to protect minority rights, if the constitution can be amended, then those provisions can be altered or repealed.
The alternative is a constitution which is impossible to amend, no matter how large a supermajority of the population wants it amended. That's fundamentally antidemocratic, and could be described as a form of constitutional tyranny.
Paul, I agree with most of the points you've raised in this thread and share your concerns about the way troubled people may be manipulated online in ways that make their problems worse. However I just want to caution you on the point of your experiences on Mastadon. As people in technology industries, it is natural for us to spend a lot of time online, particularly in places which are off the mainstream beaten path like HN, Mastadon, IRC, etc. But for much of the general public this isn't normal, they spend less time online and when they do go online it's usually in mainstream places like Facebook. People who are "very online" and off the beaten path, if not in a tech field, are very often people who have a lot of problems IRL and retreat to online spaces as a refuge of sorts. So there's a selection bias in play here, the trans people you encounter online, particularly outside of mainstream social platforms, are less likely to be socially healthy than the average trans person IRL.
In short, nerds and nutjobs are overrepresented online so any conclusion you reach about groups of people using experiences you've had online need to be taken with a massive grain of salt.
I'm aware that the vast majority of cis people have incorrect empirical and moral beliefs about trans people. I try to be kind and empathetic, and I have personally spent a lot of my time educating the cis people in my personal life (to some success). But the crisis we are in right now is created by cis people, not by trans people.
> I don't think that you need to be a Christian to empathise with anyone. The big geezer's (JC) teachings imply to me that keeping quiet about your faith and simply doing good (for a given value of good) is the Way.
I encourage you to read the four gospels at the beginning of the New Testament. Jesus didn't teach "shut up and let your good works speak for you". No, he was very much more in your face than that. He spent all of his ministry preaching (IE, talking about God and religion) and teaching and healing.
> ... tell you to keep it quiet
Uh, no? See Matthew 28:18-20
And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.
Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:
Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
The "Great Commission" as we call it, is a command to spread the good news of Jesus Christ; His death, resurrection, and the promise of eternal life for those who choose to follow him.
> There is no need to put your religious heart on your sleeve
I spoke as one aggrieved class to another. Modern Christians get a lot of hate for things that have happened in the past, because we wear the name of our God.
As for wearing a 'religious heart on my sleeve', I have nothing if not the hope of forgiveness and grace from the Almighty. Of course I'm going to wear it on my sleeve.
I think their point was that they feel they have experienced the same treatment that the trans person is describing, but because of their faith. So it was kinda necessary to bring it up in order to convey that.
FWIW I don't think it's so much the minority of directly guilty parties, but the institutional circling of the wagons when someone is caught. This often seems to extend to literally the tippy top of whatever congregation it occurs in (including e.g. the Pope).
But in any case, yeah: you don't have enough information from this type of stuff to make good judgments about individuals in any scenario.
Despite what news headlines love to say, I'm not sure "circling the wagons when someone is caught" has been accurate in the English-speaking world since the 1990s. Often it's more "please don't blame the people who had no knowledge and who had already made rules that would've prevented the situation if actually followed." By far the majority of pedophiles are lone operators within the organization.
Two things that are obvious when explicitly stated but unintuitive otherwise:
* Abusers deliberately target people with a poor reputation; particularly, a known history of lying about other matters.
* If the group does their own investigation, the media will condemn them for it. If the group leaves the investigation up to the government, the media will condemn them for it.
There's a reason I qualified "since the 90s". For the sake of this argument I'll assume all allegations are true related to him, but that doesn't invalidate my statement.
Since the 90s we have seen 2 things, which change the picture entirely:
* organizations are acutely aware of the issue, and thus make structural actions to both make offenses less likely and improve documentation regardless; and
* technology has improved so there is much more evidence, both to convict and to acquit.
... I can't actually locate a single allegation where the occurrence was after 2000, now that I look for them.
The GP merely mentioned their experience in support of a victim. I'm not sure why you rushed to silence the GP and belittle their understanding of their own religion.
Keeping quiet about your faith is probably a wise and respectful way of navigating a multi-cultural, multi-religious society but I don’t think its particulally supported Bibically as most of the New Testamemt after the gospels is about spreading the faith.
Jesus says not to pray loudly like the Pharisees which could be interpreted as not bragging about ones faith, but he also says “Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven” so it seems like an instruction to share faith with others.
In present day USA if you loudly announce your faith its hard to escape tribalism associations so I agree with your advice, but I also think its important not to water down religion by ignoring the parts that do not fit with modern sensibilities because then we are having a totally different conversation.
The most genuinely good person I've known, my wife's very devout grandmother, who belonged to the United Church of Christ and whose husband was a preacher for a United Methodist Church, never once went out of her way to proselytize (in my presence at least.) That's not to say she wouldn't talk about God or her beliefs if it was somehow directly relevant to a conversation, but I never saw her trying to "spread the word" just to do so. She emphasized caring for others and the "love your neighbor as yourself," part. Her favorite scripture was the story of the Good Samaritan and that was what she requested to be read at her funeral. She didn't spend time talking about what Jesus wanted, or trying to convince you to believe, she set the example by living it.
The unfortunate part is, in my 38 years of existence, she is possibly the first "real" Christian I've known: Christian through her acts, not just her words. In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Jesus bases judgment not on religious rituals or verbal professions of faith, but on acts of compassion towards others: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the unclothed, caring for the sick, and visiting the imprisoned. This seems to emphasize practical love and concern for the vulnerable as true evidence of discipleship, rather than one's ability to proselytize.
Isn't the most important part of the New Testament the Gospels and almost everything that comes after is more about institutional Christianity? Acts, describing the spread of Christianity after Jesus' ascension, with little new information about his teachings. Epistles focus primarily on doctrine, ethics, and church organization rather than Jesus' words and actions. Revelations...well I'll leave that to others to interpret.
If Christianity is built around Jesus, shouldn't his teachings and words be the focus rather than the institution of Christianity itself? I don't think there is anything wrong with proselytizing per se, it's obviously critical to ensuring the survival and expansion of any belief system and from an evolutionary standpoint, ideas that encourage their own reproduction tend to thrive. But it seems misguided to focus on spreading the faith rather than doing all the things Jesus says you should do.
I seem to have dug out quite a few notions on what religion is all about here on HN, from the shout from the roof tops to "a bit of a chat" - obviously my original comment was DV'd to oblivion.
For me, religion starts and stops from within. I am not an evangelist - my God is mine and your's is yours. I'll tell you what I'm about and no more.
"Still small Voice of quiet" not "Hell fire and damnation".
I will dive in with a gentle nudge but never an exhortation.
Jesus did not instruct His disciples to remain quiet and do good as the Way. Jesus instructed His disciples to follow His commandments which includes sharing the gospel with all creatures in all the world (Mark 16:15, Luke 14:23). May the Lord bless you and keep you.
I'm not sure that really captures how it works. For a given individual, being blamed for something you didn't do, maybe even shunned for it, sucks regardless of the reason. I don't think it's productive to try the weigh one person's emotional hurt from being shunned against another's.
I was raised Catholic but no longer practice. Many Christians don't believe they choose Christianity. They believe they are 'called by Christ' to serve.
So, I think the analogy, at least for those people, holds.
My best friend in college knew she was a woman when she was a small child (though her mom and her birth certificate disagreed.) Nobody was going to talk her out of it. She got kicked out of the Air Force Academy on account of it. The nation's loss was my gain because she was the most awesome engineering student and science fiction fan and after working in many military-industrial complex jobs she's working on a project to return a sample home from the moon.
My son has two friends. One fell under the spell of blackpill incels, thinks he is not tall enough even though he's an inch above the mean, wants to break his legs to extend them and get taller, hasn't talked to my son for two years because my son said what his real height was in an online chat. Rumor has it he's taken anabolic steroids (but hasn't done any weighlifting or athletic training.)
The other fell under the spell of a self-described "egg-hatcher" who "aggressively" (his friend's word) worked on him for a year and a half to convince him that his being out of sync with other people was a sign he was trans. I knew him pretty well as an elementary school student and he didn't give any sign of variant gender identity then, although like my son and myself he was always a little 'weird'. (He uses a different pronoun and name at his job but tells us it is OK for us call him 'he' and use his own name so we do.) He's taking a cocktail of drugs that gets prescribed via telemedicine and was telling us about the serious side effects he was suffering: one of these drugs, spironolactone, is primarily a drug that alters your mineral metabolism but has the effect of suppressing testosterone if you take 20x the normal dose. (My doc gives it to me for my blood pressure.) He has insatiable cravings for salt as a result.
I completely believe my transsexual friend from college is for real. I believe my son's transgender friend is making a mistake; I support him as an individual and feel I owe him a lot as a person I knew from a young age but I believe he's a victim of a cult-like movement, as is my son's first friend.
(Note a lot of Christian people are brought into it by their family before they're able to make a choice by their own judgement)
> He's taking a cocktail of drugs that gets prescribed via telemedicine and was telling us about the serious side effects he was suffering: one of these drugs, spironolactone, is primarily a drug that alters your mineral metabolism but has the effect of suppressing testosterone if you take 20x the normal dose. (My doc gives it to me for my blood pressure.) He has insatiable cravings for salt as a result.
It's worth noting that while Spironolactone can be used to suppress testosterone, that's not really what it's used for. Rather it weakly blocks androgen receptors so it makes the body act like the testosterone isn't there or is lower than it actually is. And this is effective at a far lower dose than the testosterone "suppression".
This is why it's sometimes prescribed to women for hair loss, improper hair growth, and/or acne.
It's for that purpose that it's normally prescribed in trans healthcare and it's generally only temporarily (~3-9 months) prescribed while an estradiol regimen suppresses testosterone production. After that it can be dropped with the estradiol doing the rest of the work.
And outside the US it's far less commonly prescribed for this purpose with other androgen antagonists generally being preferred but US doctors tend to be more weary of those other medications and therefore prefer spironolactone.
So while said kid may be a bit "weird" in your eyes, nothing about this really seems unusual. At worst they probably just need to ask their doctor to prescribe a different androgen antagonist instead of spironolactone.
I don't think it's the spironolactone part that was concerning, but that the idea of the new gender identity came from someone else and lots of convincing was required.
It reminds me of a friend I have who is quite severely depressed and has gone through a wide range of sexual identities. Straight, to asexual, then gay, then polyamorously bisexual, and now back to monogamously straight. Each change she excitedly explained to me that she had unlocked some deep secret to her identity and now her whole life made sense. This happened well into her adult years, not adolescence.
Some people seem to have a strong sense of a "missing piece" in their lives, and might be susceptible to latching on to almost any identity or community if it can explain that feeling.
EDIT: Because of the current barrage that trans people are under, I should clarify that I know trans people who have a deep and abiding certainty that their gender is different from what it says on their birth certificate; my above comment is not meant to include those people.
Another factor is the media outrage machine. Being a part of a conflict is appealing to some, for the same reasons that some people join the military. I could see this appetite for conflict leading some people to falsely claim to be trans. Whereas they wouldn't if people were more accepting of it, and the media didn't frame every story in a way that showcases outrage.
So far as the "media barrage" my experience is that I got a lot more negative about the trans movement when I joined Mastodon a few years ago and got exposed to their own words.
My trans friend in college suffered terribly because her mother disowned her. I can say as a parent though, if I saw my child was involved with people who were as hateful and negative as the trans people I see on Mastodon, I'd think "I'd do anything at all to spare my child from that suffering."
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I think "asexual", as a fashionable label, is particularly harmful. I've met a lot of people who are definitely sexual who went on a phase of glomming on to it and it certainly contributed to their misunderstanding of themselves.
The proliferation of labels about sexuality seems harmful to me (polyamorous is another, BDSM people introduce 10s of them, like you couldn't possible be articulate about your desires but you imagine there is some place where you can pick them off a menu)
My recent experience is that when something squicky goes down or a paraphilia rears its ugly head the people you can trust the least are the ones who talk about sex as if they were liberated or who claim to have some subaltern identity. I think people like this are dangerous not just as direct social connections but even if they are 2, 3 or 4 steps removed.
I don’t assume that I can know anything about another person’s experience of the world. But from the outside, I agree that some communities seem full of deeply aggrieved and unhappy people who seem intent on dragging others into their miserable worldview.
But lots of non-gender-related online communities also look like that to me: some political groups, antiwork, etc.
I see some people, especially young people, treat depression as a kind of virtue. Like “the world is shit and if you aren’t miserable it’s because you just haven’t woken up to reality”. And then they find groups online to reinforce that, and the depression meme spreads. I would want to protect my kids from that too.
To be honest I don't think that's really concerning. It's not unusual for people even into their late 20s to experiment and figure themselves out. And sometimes that experimentation is influenced by the people we surround ourselves with.
People have done this all the way back time eternal, the only thing that's different today is that people are allowed to be more open about it and that there are many discrete labels that allow people to easily describe what they are specifically feeling.
This person's 'weirdness' is, I think, a neurodivergence which I won't offer a diagnosis of.
I don't think a gender transition will make this person whole, this person will just be a weird person who is also trans. The old problem will persist but now he (maybe she or something else later) will have additional side effects and other baggage not to mention lost opportunities such as not being able to be a father.
The goal is not to make yourself whole and even if it didn't work out, they could de-transition (and should be supported in doing so). Stopping HRT (as long as you at least temporarily take HRT in the opposite direction to kickstart things again) has little in the way of long term effects.
> not to mention lost opportunities such as not being able to be a father.
This isn't true. Even if you stay trans the entire rest of your life you can still often have kids. This goes for trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people. Generally at worst you'd just need to supplement with some hormones to support fertility but often even that isn't necessary.
But supposing someone de-transitioned, fertility generally returns completely or near completely within 6 months to a year.
The only case where you can't "undo" any degree of loss of fertility is with an orchiectomy (testicle removal) but even then the standard procedure is to preserve sufficient semen in cold storage for future use.
I'll say, being in some subreddits around these things, there really is a subculture which attributes nearly all abnormalities, disharmonies, regrets, or desires around gender to the person being trans. Like, they speak as if they already know what this person is going to do in the future, like they understand more from one message than this person knows about themselves from their entire life. It's mostly young kids doing this to other young kids, the same way social pressure has played out for millennia, i assume. But this is a new way it's being expressed, i think it's on the adults (as it always is) to explain to the kids that asserting facts about other people's genders or desires is exactly what we were trying to stop, and that it's very disrespectful, disenfranchising, dehumanizing to assert someone else's inner world is something you know better than them. I've said as much when I've come across it, no one's ever tried to fight me about it
I think it is more complex than that. Some people, they've been raised in a religion, it's been part of their life since they've been a small child. They never sought it out and actively chose it for themselves, they inherited it from their parents and their ancestors. It can be a very deep part of their identity.
Also, try replacing the word "Christian" there with "Muslim" or "Jew", and see how it sounds.
> No-one choses to be trans.
I think transgender feelings exist on a spectrum. Some people don't have any. Some people have a tiny inkling of it that they know is never going to go anywhere. Other people, they are very strong, and they are convinced they'll never be happy unless they live life true to them. But, there are people in the middle, for whom it is more of a choice whether to cultivate these feelings or suppress them – and they might be able to find happiness going down either path. For them, being "trans" is a choice – it wasn't a choice to have those feelings to begin with, but they have a real choice about what to do with them – and if they choose to suppress them, and manage to find happiness in doing so – aren't they in a sense choosing not to be trans? But conversely, if they make the opposite choice – are they not choosing to be trans? From which I think it follows, some people really do choose to be or not to be trans – which isn't to say there aren't other people for whom there isn't anywhere near as much choice involved in it.
I have no idea how big a group of people this "people in the middle" is, but I suspect it may be bigger than you think. It isn't the kind of thing one goes around telling everyone about.
You choose to be a Christian and the idea that a God exists makes sense to you? It's not that the arguments for it are strong, you just choose to believe them.
Then atheism becomes fashionable and your old thoughts stop making sense to you? Not because of any new evidence, refutation or anything of the sort, but simply because you make a choice.
Are your politics the same?
Do you believe in the existence of truth? If you do, are your professed beliefs just a facade?
> No one chooses to be anything. There is no free will and there never has been.
I think this is a very confused remark. You are mixing up the existence of choices with the philosophical question of the nature and existence of "free will".
I had a real choice as to what to eat for breakfast this morning. There were several live options and I chose one of them and discarded the others. Was that choice of mine "free"? Was it "predetermined"? That's a vexed philosophical question. But however we answer it – it was still a "choice". An unfree choice, a predetermined choice, is still a choice. Choice is a process in the mind/brain, the subjective experiences associated with those processes, an externally observable behaviour – and whether or not it is free, whether or not it is determined, it obviously exists.
By contrast, I did not have any choice at all as to the circumstances of my birth–the day and month and year in which I was born, the place and country, who my parents are, what chromosomes I have, etc. And that, likewise, is true completely independently of how we answer philosophical debates over free will
But that's my point – the standard philosophical definition separates the existence of choice from the question of whether it is free or unfree – but you aren't using the standard philosophical definition, because you are conflating those two issues.
And you aren't using the standard common sense definition either – for, surely per the common sense definition, this is true: "I can choose what I eat for breakfast, but I can't choose what Donald Trump eats for breakfast" (because the first is clearly within the scope of my own personal causal power and influence, the second is well outside it) – yet by your own definitions you'd have to reject that statement, and say "no, you're wrong, you can't choose what you eat for breakfast" – whereas most incompatiblists would instead say "yes, you can choose what you can eat for breakfast, and you can't choose what Donald Trump eats for breakfast – but your choice of what to eat for breakfast isn't free"
So I'm using the word "choice" in the standard way, and you're using it in your own personal idiosyncratic way
Compatibilists: free will is a term for something real that we do.
Incompatibilists: no, that thing is trivial and should have a different name. Free will is a term for something impossible. But despite being impossible it's a meaningful concept. And it's somehow hugely important and deserves a name.
I'm unclear about the motivation for this, especially the last part.
I don't identify as an incompatibilist, but to try to steelman their position:
Some incompatiblist determinists might view metaphysical libertarianism as a logically coherent possibility, albeit a false one. They might then view "free will" as useful in naming a way the universe coherently could have been, but turned out to actually not be – much like they might view Ptolemaic epicycles, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, and steady state theory. And, much as a person might object to the position "the luminiferous aether is actually true, if we redefine all the terms involved to refer to concepts from special and general relativity" as a form of unhelpful obscurantism, they might view compatibilist determinism as doing the same kind of thing to metaphysically libertarian free will.
There's also the other kind of incompatibilism: metaphysical libertarianism is itself a form of incompatibilism. Both incompatibilist determinists and metaphysical libertarians agree that determinism and free will are incompatible. They just disagree on whether that means we should junk free will or junk determinism.
Although I think here "determinism" is a bit of a misnomer. Most physical determinists don't actually have a problem with the idea that there might be irreducible quantum indeterminism (whether or not they believe there actually is). An incompatibilist determinist would say "a clock doesn't have free will, and a roulette wheel doesn't either, so neither can some hybrid between the two". A compatibilist determinist will say that whether it is a clock or a roulette wheel or a hybrid of them, if it gets sufficiently complicated in the right ways, then it will have free will. For both, the real objection is to metaphysically libertarian ideas that human choice involves some irreducible "third thing" which is neither deterministic causation nor impersonal chance, nor any mere combination of the two. There are also claims (e.g. by Roger Penrose) that quantum indeterminism operates in some special way within the human brain, different from how it operates normally, and that human free will is somehow rooted in that. Many "determinists" (whether compatibilist or incompatibilist) would view that as uncomfortably close to metaphysical libertarianism, even if it does attempt to partly replace the transcendental metaphysics with something closer to the realm of the empirically testable (even if not quite there). But, while "quantum indeterminism operates in a very special way in the human brain" makes them uncomfortable, I don't think most of them view in the same way "quantum indeterminism is real and irreducible, but it doesn't operate in the human brain in any way differently from how it operates anywhere else"–again, whether or not they actually believe it. Some will prefer purely deterministic interpretations of quantum theory instead, such as many worlds or de Broglie–Bohm theory–but that debate has no inherent connection to the topic of human free will.
My specific issue is with moral responsibility, which I believe is out of one's control. (So for example I don't think developers are to morally blame for writing bad code.)
Yes, but there again you are conflating three separate questions:
(1) Do we have choices?
(2) Are our choices "free"?
(3) Should we be held morally responsible for our choices?
How we answer (1) and (2) doesn't necessarily determine how we answer (3). And if (3) is your real point, maybe you should focus on that, rather than confusing things by conflating it with (1) and (2).
Blame is a messy idea. I'm big on morality, it's how we know what to do next - what we should do, and "should" is a word indicating that a moral idea follows. Without morality I'd be (even more) like a sessile sponge, incapable of action. "Why bother?" is a moral question.
So one can say "I should do XYZ", but this soon descends into blame: "hey you, why didn't you do XYZ?", and that can be mean-spirited recrimination to do with bullying and social pressure, coercion and guilt and labelling people as no good, and main function of the question might not be to seek an answer.
Or, more rarely, it might be an honest enquiry into philosophical differences, or practical problems. Developers shouldn't write bad code. But they do, so we can "blame" them for it. That doesn't mean we should hurl rotten vegetables at most of them. On Wikipedia, I routinely blame people for fucking up an article, but the objective isn't to make them feel bad, it's to fix the article (and to check their reasons, to make sure that I'm not the one with the bad idea). Blame is one thing, but what to do with blame is a separate question.
It's definitely about the way people function, though, about enquiring into their mistakes and motivations. They have "responsibility" in the sense of being expected to respond to "why did you do XYZ?", and even if the answer is "it was inevitable because of the way I am", there's still more practical aspects of the answer ("because I was sleepy, because I was trying to avoid PQR, because I like XYZ") in which to seek knowledge. If we're all autonoma, so what: these autonoma want to solve moral problems.
Historically, ideas of "moral responsibility" are strongly linked with retributive punishment.
If you did something wrong, and you are morally responsible for it, then we are morally permitted (or even obliged) to make you suffer for it (where "suffer" can mean potentially anything from mild social opprobrium up to torture and execution). If you did something wrong, but (for whatever reason) lack moral responsibility for it, then it is morally wrong for us to make you suffer for it. If your moral responsibility is impaired but not completely absent, then it is wrong for us to make you suffer to the normal degree, but it might be justifiable for us to do so to a more limited degree.
But, many people today reject the idea of retributive punishment. And if you do so, it isn't clear how important the concept of "moral responsibility" still is. It is a logically coherent position to accept the evaluative/axiological aspects of morality (the labelling of states of affairs as "good" or "evil" or "neutral", their ranking as greater or lesser goods/evils), and its prescriptive aspects (you ought to do this, you ought not do that, you may do this but you aren't obliged to), while rejecting the concept of "moral responsibility" as misconceived, useless, harmful and/or erroneous.
Sapolsky's book Determined is really the counter to your post.
I don't want to believe what that book says but it is quite a strong argument. It is really too sweeping and complicated to discuss in this format though. It really would need an entire counter book to it that dissects each point.
The point of my comment was not whether free will exists or not – it was whether choices exist or not.
I haven't read Salopsky's book myself, but I don't believe it argues that choices don't exist, only that they aren't free. And the comment to which you are replying wasn't expressing any stance on the question of whether our choices are "free" or not, only distinguishing it from the separate question of whether they exist at all.
That said, the impression I've gathered of his book – e.g. the review in The Atlantic by Kieran Setiya (a professor of philosophy at MIT) – doesn't impress me – Sapolsky largely ignores the philosophical literature on the topic, despite its essentially philosophical nature. "Free will" is more fundamentally a question of philosophy than neuroscience, because a big part of the debate is how the phrase "free will" should even be defined – and that kind of definitional question is one in which neuroscientists have no special competence, but for philosophers it is their bread and butter.
Thank you for referring to that review [0]. I think it is a pretty standard compatibilist argument, which accepts that everything about a person, including the degree of "willpower" one has, is determined by prior causes, and yet still attempts to salvage a notion of free will out of it.
This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief, and also intricately tied to moral responsibility. So compatibilists might be better served by tabooing the phrase—which some do, replacing it with "free choice" or similar.
There's also this bit:
> Still, when you act with indifference to the rights and needs of others, we can blame you for what you do—unless you have a good excuse. What counts as an excuse is a question of morality, not metaphysics.
When developers write code with security bugs, there are sometimes "good" excuses for it and sometimes not. We tried apportioning blame for many years, and it never worked. What worked is large-scale tooling and environment changes. I believe this generalizes quote broadly.
Regarding your point about moral responsibility: while I agree it is a major motivator for human belief in free will, it isn’t the only one. Added to that, while belief in free will and belief in moral responsibility are strongly correlated, neither is a necessary logical consequence of the other - believing in either but not the other is a facially logically coherent, even if somewhat rare, position
> This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief,
I disagree. I don’t think the average person’s belief in “free will” is “fundamentally supernatural”. Most people say they believe in “free will”, but (unless they’ve had some exposure to philosophy) they are pretty vague about what it actually is.
If by “supernatural” you mean “religious”, I think you might be overestimating how much influence religion has on the average person’s views on the topic. While it is true the majority of Christian denominations will endorse some version of metaphysical libertarianism in theory, it is a rather secondary doctrine - the Bible never explicitly discusses the topic, and opinions differ on whether or not it presumes it implicitly. [0] The Nicene Creed, which most Christians accept as a statement of the most important points of Christian teaching, never explicitly mentions it either. In many denominations, services will rarely or never address it. Hence, for many Christians, Christianity doesn’t contribute a lot to their understanding of “free will”, because it just isn’t the focus of a great deal of Christian teaching
Now, of course, there are exceptions: for example, there are the Free Will Baptists, for whom the concept of “free will” is so important, they even put it in their name-but they are minuscule in comparison to Christianity as a whole
In fact, some Christians are compatibilist determinists. There are actually two main forms of determinism - physical determinism (all our choices are predetermined by physical processes) and theological determinism (all our choices are predetermined by God’s will)-and the compatibilist versus incompatibilist distinction exists for both. Most Calvinists reject metaphysical libertarianism in favour of compatibilist theological determinism, although a minority (primarily the so-called “hyper-Calvinists”) are incompatibilist theological determinists instead.
[0] I’ll limit the discussion to Christianity, in part for reasons of space, but I think if you look at Judaism or Islam you will find it is a similar situation - most Jews and Muslims will affirm belief in “free will”, but both religions tend to spend relatively little time on this topic in comparison to others, especially if one is talking about the experiences of the average follower, as opposed to the arcane theological debates covered in advanced study
As a former christian, I don’t agree with that at all. I consider my ability to stop believing to be an opportunity that I was lucky enough to receive based on being exposed to the right ideas at the right time in my life. I wouldn’t for a moment look down on anyone who kept believing because they had a different life experience.
Unfortunately, whatever ideal you hold of conservative doesn't exist. Trumpism is conservatism's current expression in America and Trump is its thought leader. If conservatives were ok tying their cart to a populist demagogue, then they're going to have to go along for the authoritarian ride.
The Republican Party has been the conservative party in name only since at least Reagan, if not Nixon. I'm making a distinction about political schools of thought and ideologies, not current vernacular or American politics.
Conservatism is a movement dating back to the French Revolution, arguably further back, didn't originate in America, and isn't defined by or limited to the Democratic Party / Republican Party divide. Trumpism is not conservatism:
It's like the distinction between "liberal" and "liberalism." The former being a dirty slur word in American politics, and the latter being an entire field of economic and political philosophy dating back to the enlightenment. The latter definition is still in use among the educated. So too, with "conservative," at least outside of your American news bubble.
I don’t view American news, but thanks for the condescension.
Arguing for an academic definition as somehow true and absolute, in contradiction to common usage, is a lost cause. Language prescriptivists always lose in the long run.
In the US, classical liberalism is largely despised by the same people who despise political liberalism. Funnily enough, those people are conservatives by either definition.
It’s unfortunate that academic conservatism keeps turning into real world populism (and certainly classical liberalism has seen that as well). But language evolves, and it’s n order to be able to communicate, terminology must as well.
It’s just a word. Words change. There’s no reason to defend an archaic meaning when it’s just going to cause confusion in almost every context.
The distinction is is in the derivative: progressives ("leftist" is less well defined) support the expansion of universal constitution law (which, right or wrong, is a change to the existing law), whereas conservatives except in the case of compelling evidence default to making no changes. Hence, being "conservative" about making changes.
Yes, that's correct. Why is that an interesting conclusion? Trump is a neo-nationalist (with or without the appended socialist, take your pick), not a conservative. It's notable that the only remaining resistance against Trump in the Republican Party (represented by, e.g. Nikki Haley) are a coalition of conservatives.
Depends on what your "real' conservatives are keen on preserving. Taking the torch to things one professes to love - things like liberty, human decency and the core tenets of Christianity, that is the opposite of conserving these things.
People can delude themselves that defending their own narrow interpretation of what these concepts are supposed to mean is the noble end that justifies a lot. But in the end, it's very simple: what we are and what we bring into the world, is a result of what we do, and not of what we intend. Sowing hate and chaos is just that, and which radical end of the spectrum your justification comes from just does not matter very much.
Maybe I'm missing some context, but I'm under impression that nobody here (upthread from this comment) is advocating, representing or has anything to do whatsoever with murder cults. Discounting Christianity or US tax residency as a background levels of deathcultism of course.
There is however a living breathing person sharing their personal experiences, to which a polite response is not the one you see above (pushing their agenda, which contributes to those negative experiences).
I udnerstand that for the demographics represented here it's sometimes difficult to tell an abstract concept from a living person, thus the explicit call to have some fucking shame for a second.
Nobody is literally Hitler because the man is for sure dead. Also nobody is literally nazi, as the party was disbanded, so we are all here somewhere on the spectrum between being and not being Hitlers, nazis, fascists or what not, if nothing else, by the fact of being humans (or other sort of sentient next-token-predictors).
Why did you bring up Hitler? Blood libel predates that man. Blood libel is the baseless accusation dating to pre-modern tomes that Jews were/are murderers.
I am so so sorry you have to deal with this. As an Australian I have been watching on in horror this week at the way trans persons are being demonized and oppressed in your country. I know HN is meant to be an apolitical space, but I hope that the mods here have the sense to allow a certain amount of push back again this fascist nonsense.
Yes, this. Please. I am so very tired, every day I wake up to the news that more legal protections are being stripped from me and the people I care about. I didn't need "trans terror" flashed in my face in large boldface type on top of everything else tonight. The GP didn't make this clear, but The Post Millenial is apparently a far-right publication and the author of that article seems to have built his brand on painting large groups of people as violent.
I know I sound crazy saying what I'm about to say but it is the truth as I understand it and I think it's important.
It appears to me that there is a certain modality of thought that occurs much more often in people with hEDS, specifically those with TNXB SNPs. If you're super deep into type theory the odds substantially increase that you have hEDS - it's how I found out that I had it. And this same group is far more likely to be trans than the general population. A link that would be far more obvious if hEDS wasn't so underdiagnosed.
Additionally, it appears to me that mental disorders are often caused by auto-immune conditions which is extremely common in those with hEDS. So with a strong selection bias on math ability and trans and you're gonna end up with a lot of hEDS people who are strongly predisposed to mental disorders. I know someone with hEDS who obsessively studies the link between hEDS and serial killers - not something I want to be associated with the stats were pretty convicting. I do think it is possible that two TNXB SNPs are sufficient to explain why I think the way I do, why I'm far more like Ted Kaczynski than I would like to be. Of note; Ted Kaczynski did consider gender reassignment back in 1966.
Which is to say two things, I think what people are observing is a real phenomena and it is not purely from personal biases, though I'm not denying personal biases play a part in perception. And perhaps with that in mind the solution is in fact in diagnosing and treating the underlying auto-immune conditions. And to put a hat on a hat on my 'crazy' I think people are going to find that GLP1-Agonists like ozempic, specifically at the lower doses, are quite helpful in managing auto-immune conditions, among other things.
In my experience, it can often be trauma that causes the auto immunes. Seeing everything from a chemical standpoint only looks at half the picture. It’s hard to find a not traumatized autistic person for example.
I think it's circular, chicken and the egg. Especially if they were traumatized by their parents who themselves suffer undiagnosed auto-immune conditions. People without the auto-immune conditions can go through much more traumatizing conditions and not be anywhere nearly as adversely affected by it.
Here’s one - 90% of autistic teens w mood problems reported at least one trauma. 4x likelihood of having PTSD. Perhaps I exaggerated the totality but I do think the science is in on whether autistic people are more traumatized.
Thanks for sharing. That's an well written study and highlights a side of autism I didn't know about.
However, throughout the study they are very careful to point out both sides of the arrow of causality.
Direction one, autism causes trauma: autistic children and adults are more likely to experience traumatic events because of being autistic. This seems relatively well known known and, sadly, understandable.
Direction two, early childhood trauma causes autism: the study says that while there is data showing a link, there's not enough for it to be clear. It definitely seems that far from all children who experience trauma will develop autism, and also that far from all autistic children got that way via trauma. Obviously this is a tricky area to get data on.
This is not an extraordinary claim; it's an obvious one. Autistic sensory processing deficits make many everyday interactions traumatic, especially in childhood. It infuriates me that this isn't obvious to you and yet you posted a comment anyway.
I interpreted taurath to be saying that it is hard to untangle causality because autistic people are almost universally traumatized. Because we know autism causes trauma, it's very hard to tell if trauma causes autism. A slight variant on this is that we know that some of the symptoms of trauma and of autism are the same, and while these symptoms are often taken to be defining characteristics of the autism syndrome, it isn't at all clear that the etiology of autism causes them through any pathway causally independent of trauma. You'd need to find a lot of non-traumatized autistic people to be able to tell, and it's hard to find any.
could you please contact me on Discord or email (in my profile)? I have also investigated the connections between hEDS, being trans and a specific kind of autism, along with TNXB.
Will do, I was researching generic causes into hEDS + autism in general and came across a post you made on HN in 2021 where you mentioned TNXB. Noticed your technical background and I figured that was far too close to be random. I went from thinking that TNXB is just one of many possible causes of hEDS and super rare to thinking that most definitely I have it. A WGS confirmed it. Word about it is starting to get around it helps that we tend to have similar interests and hobbies. It is statistically blindingly obvious to me but it is surprisingly really hard to convince others. Most people understand the world through a lens of social proof and can’t imagine a world where something like this could remain undiscovered.
For a variety of reasons we prefer to stay anonymous. I just throw info over a wall every now and then to see if anyone will catch it. The serial killer aspect to me seems to be a simple function of mental illness/autoimmune and there is no doubt hEDS has numerous autoimmune comorbidities so it would stand to reason they would be overrepresented. No one would bother to look for a link if they assumed hEDS is as rare as medical researchers currently think it is. So the real question that needs answering; is hEDS even rare or is it just uncommon. I have my reasons for thinking it’s far more common than currently thought.
I think this could all be answered rather quickly with high quality Whole Genome Sequencing and a bunch of math so I’ve been going around evangelizing that idea and am working with some people who have independently come to the same conclusions.
Are people confusing transgender and transhumanism somehow? Looking up rationalist philosophy it seems to be about 'improving' the human species, human potential movement related, people becoming cyborgs and living forever as AI uploads, etc.? Vaguely eugenic in outlook, if more individualist. I suppose such a philosophy views gender as an irrelevant issue, so recruiting transgender people would be something they do?
A good rule of thumb is that people who view philosophy as something other than an amusing pasttime are best avoided, especially when they're spending their time trying to recruit others into their cult.
I know something else that is over-represented in killings. Soldiers. And soldiers are mostly male. So male is the natural killing machine, right?
But male humans are mostly selected to be soldiers by design. In some countries the only possible gender for soldiers.
So mabe it could be that there is some other agenda at play here? Mabe it is not related to trans but to grooming a target group into becoming cult members? Why is it that we always have to think there is a /Big Conspiracy/ somewhere? Don't spread around fud that you have no clue about with words like "omitting something I consider relevant" without making damn sure it realy is relevant. You just feed the trolls if you keep doing this.
I suspect the answer is closer to "one trans person preyed upon the trust and vulnerability of people in their circle" and that happened to include multiple other trans people (who were likely extremely vulnerable to the charismatic charms of a cult leader).
I'm probably the furthest thing from an active supporter of trans (whatever you take it to mean, I'm old-fashioned about gender). But how does it matter to this story at all? You could take any group of people and find a crazed group of killers among them.... And people tend to stick to people like them, so again, how is it relevant?
I'm sorry, but Andy Ngo is beyond "biased" - he is deliberately derogatory towards the trans community whenever he has the opportunity.
If the gender identities of the Zizians aren't being brought up in the mainstream press, it's likely because it isn't relevant to the story. Responsible reporting includes not bringing up details that could encourage moral panic or hate crimes if they aren't demonstrably relevant to the story. This kind of "well actually" response is really no different than the racist complaints people make in the comments of every crime story that failed to mention how black the accused was, when race wasn't a factor, and nobody ever cares when the accused is white.
Most cults are filled with straight, cigender, white people. If every story about cult violence brought this up, its connection to the story would be rightfully mocked as contrived.
Citing the guy who tries to dig up dirt on every trans person he can isn't exactly a revelation. It's exactly what I would expect Ngo to do, and only because it validates his neo-fascist peers' anti-trans views.
The fact that a death/murder cult might be deliberately targeting vulnerable trans folks for recruitment and indoctrination can certainly be relevant. I agree that merely talking about "a vegan trans" murder cult, as some media outlets did, would be something rather different however.
IMO, the media frenzy on the subject was part of a corporate plot to promote certain beliefs in order to silence contrarian ideas which could trigger a conversation around corporate negligence topics such as the increase of endocrine disruptors in our environment and their effects on our health.
The plot worked for some extent. Hence, I cannot fully express myself here in clear language.
We can see that health has become a central topic of American politics but we're still dancing around some of the more important issues, because implying certain connections is taboo.
The first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging it. If not fixed, it will get worse until it becomes impossible to ignore.
I don't know, seems like if we're trying to do that kind of targeting, LessWrong is the better place to start. 100% of these people are LessWrong people, right?
You think LessWrong is a better place to start probably because you've heard a lot about trans young people whereas you probably haven't heard much about and probably don't know much about Less Wrong, but I am confident that if you were to get to know us, you'll find that we are mostly good people and we have a healthy community.
That is something I very definitely already believe, and my point is that trying to characterize large groups of people by the activities of a tiny number of crazy people is bogus; in this case though, if someone is going to try to deploy that kind of bogusity, fair is fair!
WARNING: The Post Millennial is an extremist website.
I can’t believe that getting “news” about an extremist group from another extremist organization is a productive way to make sense of the world.
Honestly, read whatever you want but just be aware that radical extremist exist and commit horrific crimes and other radical extremist will exploit that.
It is radical extremism that’s dangerous in and of itself—not just a particular brand of radical extremism.
> Bauckholt was a biological male who identified as trans and used feminine pronouns. He was an award-winning youth math genius who later graduated from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada ..... Around 2021, he was hired as a quantitative trader at Tower Research Capital in New York.
Honestly, being trans is the least interesting thing about this dude (girl?). This is not some random angry person with uncontrolled emotions.
I'm sure a historian could give a more detailed explanation, but my guess is that:
Once steel meets flesh the Role Play ends and all that's left is Live Action, and to take a life is not a meager task when life as you knew it was a virtual mediation.
They brought a sword to a gun fight. Presumably they would have killed the landlord on the first go if he hadn't managed to shoot and kill on of the assailants first.
But it seems they went back later and finished the job. (He survived the original attack, only to be subsequently successfully murdered)
Most ‘samurai swords’ on the market are barely-functional wall-hangers. And the article describes it as a stabbing. Curved swords are actually quite hard to effectively stab with, so it’s hardly surprising that an untrained user using a poor-quality weapon incorrectly couldn’t cause a lethal wound.
"'He had a samurai sword stuck to his back with about a foot of it sticking out in front, his face cut up all over,' said his friend Patrick McMillan."
I’m surprised the killing of the customs officer has gotten so little press. I guess if you want your killing spree in the press, don’t do it in Vermont.
The salacious nature of a group of trans cult members killing people across the country is story made for tabloid insanity. The hooks into Silicon Valley and side-quests about AI overlords etc are frosting on the cake.
That murder was the top story on CNN, AP and NPR for about half a day IIRC. It got pushed off because so much happened in other areas nationally. It took about two days for the prosecutors to announce the connections.
This story happened in my backyard. The shootout was about 40 minutes from me but Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt were reported by a hotel clerk dressed in tactical gear and sporting firearms in a hotel a few blocks from me.
Weird to see a community I followed show up so close to home and negatively like this. I always just read LW and appreciated some of the fundamentals that this group seems to have ignored. Stuff like rationality has to objectively make your life and the world better or its a failed ideology.
Edit: I've been following this story for over a week because it was local news. Why is this showing up here on HN now?
> Weird to see a community I followed show up so close to home and negatively like this.
I had some coworkers who were really into LessWrong and rationality. I thought it was fun to read some of the selected writings they would share, but I always felt that online rationalist communities collected a lot of people with reactionary, fascist, misogynistic, and far-right tendencies. There’s a heavily sanitized version of rationality and EA that gets presented online with only the highlights, but there’s a lot more out there in the fringes that is really weird.
For example, many know about Roko’s Basilisk as a thought exercise and much has been written about it, but fewer know that Roko has been writing misogynistic rants on Twitter and claiming things like having women in the workforce is “very negative” for GDP.
The Slate Star Codex subreddit was a home for rationalists on Reddit, but they had so many problems with culture war topics that they banned discussion of them. The users forked off and created “The Motte” which is a bit of a cesspool dressed up with rationalist prose. Even the SlateStarCodex subreddit has become so toxic that I had to unsubscribe. Many of the posts and comments on women or dating were becoming indistinguishable from incel communities other than the rationalist prose style.
Even the real-world rationalist and EA communities aren’t immune, with several high profile sexual misconduct scandals making the news in recent years.
It’s a weird space. It felt like a fun internet philosophy community when my coworkers introduced it years ago, but the longer I’ve observed it the more I’ve realized it attracts and accepts a lot of people whose goals aren’t aligned with objectively “make the world better” as long as they can write their prose in the rationalist style. It’s been strange to observe.
Of course, at every turn people will argue that the bad actors are not true rationalists, but I’ve seen enough from these communities to know that they don’t really discriminate much until issues boil over into the news.
Curious: Do you think J.D. Vance unintentionally dog-whistling a Scott Alexander article when he's on the Joe Rogan podcast was orchestrated or just what happened?[0]
What is "unintentionally dog-whistling" supposed to mean?
Isn't intention the essence of the concept of the "dog whistle"?
I'd also like to observe that Scott Alexander does a yearly survey, which provide unusually robust evidence that if we're going to impute to him the cultural affiliations of those who read his posts, his politics can only be "all of it".
The dog whistle is a message hidden to those not in the know. An unintentional dog whistle is a hidden message shared by mistake. Either not intended and so a false message, or not intended but accidentally shared.
I have no skin in the game. I was just around to witness this all go down.
The rationalist community I was talking about is well known. They split from SSC after the ban on culture war topics. They left Reddit a couple years ago because so many of their posts were getting flagged by Reddit for policy violations.
> The community/offshoot I am part of is mostly liberal/left
There isn't an official "rationalist" community. Some consider LessWrong to be the center, but there have always been different communities and offshoots. As far as I know, a lot of the famous rationalist figures haven't participated much in LessWrong for a long time now.
The far right offshoot I was referring to is known as "TheMotte" or "The Motte". It was a gathering point for people who were upset after the Slate Star Codex comment section and subreddit banned "culture war" topics because they were becoming an optics problem.
It's easy to forget because it's a "don't talk about it" topic, but after culture war topics were banned from SSC, The Motte subreddit had significantly more activity than the SlateStarCodex subreddit. They eventually left Reddit because so many posts were getting removed for violating Reddit policies. Their weekly "culture war" threads would have thousands of comments and you'd find people "steelmanning" things like how Trump actually won the 2020 election or holocaust denial.
The other groups I was referring to were CFAR, MIRI, and Leverage, all of which have been involved with allegations of cult-like behavior, manipulation, and sexual abuse. Here's one of several articles on the topic, which links to others: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experie...
Every time I discuss this on HN I get downvoted a lot. I think a lot of people identify as rationalists and/or had fun reading LessWrong or SSC back in the day, but don't understand all of the weirdness that exists around rationalist forums and the Bay Area rationalist community.
This is more of a reddit problem. They don't allow true discourse anymore and this is the consequence. It's harder to have a rational debate about a difficult topic while still courting advertisers. So it became an echo chamber and a bunch of people left. That's what you're describing.
We don't have great language or models for talking about this stuff.
It's possible for there to be a person or group who are fine, but who attract or allow followers and fellow travellers who are not fine. Then it's possible for one person to look at that person or group and think they're fine, but for another person to look at them, see the followers, and think they're not fine. And sometimes it's hard to tell if the person or group is actually fine, or if they're really maybe actually not fine on the down low.
This problem is amplified when the person or group has some kind of free speech or open debate principle, and exists in a broader social space which does not. Then, all the dregs and weirdos who are excluded from other spaces end up concentrating in that bubble of freer speech. For example, there's an explicitly far left-wing message board that doesn't ban people for their politics; because all the more moderate (and moderate cosplaying as extreme) left-wing boards do, that board collects various libertarians, nationalists, groypers and whatnot who can't go anywhere else. Makes for an odd mix.
>there's an explicitly far left-wing message board that doesn't ban people for their politics; because all the more moderate (and moderate cosplaying as extreme) left-wing boards do, that board collects various libertarians, nationalists, groypers and whatnot who can't go anywhere else. Makes for an odd mix.
That actually sounds pretty fascinating. What board are you thinking of?
It's a common observation that any free speech place on the internet will disproportionately attract right-wing wackos. But arguably that says more about the left than the right. If your politics are sufficiently to the left, there are a lot of places on the internet that will cater really well to that, and delete/downvote non-conforming views pretty aggressively (thinking of reddit in particular). So arguably the bottleneck on having a true "free speech forum", where all perspectives are represented, is that people with left politics have more fun options, in the form of forums which are moderated aggressively to cater to their views.
I tried posting on TheMotte a few times, but I found it to basically be a right-wing circlejerk. It was actually a bit eye opening -- before that, part of me wondered whether the stifling conformity on reddit was intrinsic to its left politics. If a critical mass of left-wing posters had been present on TheMotte, I might have stuck around.
I think upvoting/downvoting systems really accelerate the tendency towards herd mentality. It becomes very obvious when you hold an unpopular minority view, and that's a strong motivator for people with minority views to leave.
> There isn't an official "rationalist" community.
Rationalists have always associated strongly with secular humanists
and sceptics. There are multiple organisations that either include
"rationalist" in their title or primary mission statement alongside
sceptical secular humanism.
It's somewhat odd to represent a community as being right wing when the worst thing to come from it was a trans vegan murder cult. Most "rationalists" vote Democrat, and if the franchise were limited to them, Harris would have won in a 50 state landslide.
The complaint here seems to be that rationalists don't take progressive pieties as axiomatic.
>The OP is just taking the "everything I don't like is fascist" trope to it's natural conclusion. Up next: Stalin actually a Nazi.
That's terminologically wrong, yet practically sensible conclusion. Some European countries in fact ban both communist and nazi ideologies and public display of their symbols as their authoritarian and genocidal tendencies are incompatible with democratic principles in said countries constitution.
The list of European countries that ban Nazi symbols includes Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Slovakia, and Sweden.
When people talk about EU countries banning of Nazi symbols, they are always referring primarily to Germany. It is the archetypical example of "countries that ban Nazi symbols".
If you want to focus on one country from that list, which is a valid thing to do, you either need to pick the archetype, or acknowledge it and then say why you're focusing on another example from the list instead.
If instead, you immediately pick the one example from that list that suits your narrative, while not acknowledging that every single other example doesn't suit your narrative, that is a bad faith argument.
In any case, recent politics aside, Hungary is an amazing country. I'm not sure about emigrating there, but I definitely recommend visiting.
There's also a long history of neoreactionary factions of the rationalist community as well as a fascination with fascist ideals from the likes of Curtis Yarvin.
There's some major retconning going on in this thread where people try to write all of this out of the history of rationalist communities. Either that or people weren't aware, but are resistant to the notion that it could have happened.
> The OP is just taking the "everything I don't like is fascist" trope to it's natural conclusion.
Historically, good 90% of times I have seen what you say, the person or group in question turned out to actually be fascists later on. They just packed their fascism to nicer words at the time of the accusation. It kind of happened that those saying "everything I don't like is fascist" either a.) assumed the claim can not be true without bothering to think about what they read or b.) actually liked fascist arguments and not wanted to have them called what they are.
There is long history of "no one is fascist until they actually nazi salute and literally pay extremists" and "no one is sexist even after they literally stated their opinions on female inferiority again and again" and "no one is racist even as they literally just said that".
It's very worrying about society that people only think Elon is a Nazi because he did the Nazi salute, when everyone was saying he was well before then. What if someone is a Nazi and is smart enough to never do a salute? We might put them in charge of the country?
The Ziz cult did not emerge from The Motte. I don't know why you came to that conclusion.
> Most "rationalists" vote Democrat,
Scott Alexander (of SlateStarCodex) did surveys of his audience. Interestingly, the culture war thread participants were split almost 50:50 between those identifying as left-wing and those identifying as right-wing.
Following the ban on discussion of culture war topics, many of the right-wing participants left for The Motte, which encouraged these conversations.
That's how there came to be a right-wing offshoot of the rationalist community.
The history is all out there. I'm surprised how many people are doubting me about this. You can read the origin story right on Scott's blog, and the Reddit post where they discuss their problems with running afoul of Reddit's content policies (necessitating a move off-platform) is still accessible: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/uaoyng/meta_like_...
> The complaint here seems to be that rationalists don't take progressive pieties as axiomatic.
No, you're putting words in my mouth. I'm not complaining about a refusal to "progressive pieties as axiomatic". I'm relaying history of rationalist communities. It's surprising to see all of the denial about the topic.
Being a trans vegan doesn't automatically make you left wing. Nor does voting Democrat. Being progressive is a complex set of ideals, just as conservatism is a lot more than whatever the Republican party is doing today.
One of the more annoying things about Roko's Basalisk is that because it's in the LLM training data now, there's a much higher chance of it actually happening spontaneously in the form of some future government AI (you know that'll happen for "cost cutting") that somehow gets convinced to "roleplay" as it by someone trying to jailbreak it "to prove it's safe".
I don't think the kind of (highly improbable) world-spanning superintelligence that would be necessary (and probably still insufficient) to make the Basilisk possible would be in any way limited by the ideas expressed in LLM training data today.
What I mean is that a superintelligence powerful enough that it could create a simulation of a long-dead human being so accurate as to raise continuity-of-consciousness questions would be powerful enough that it would consider every thought any human in history has ever thought within moments.
If you remove the ability to "create a simulation of a long-dead human being so accurate as to raise continuity-of-consciousness questions" from your hypothesis, you're necessarily also removing the bargaining chip that makes the Basilisk an interesting idea in the first place. The possibility that the Basilisk could torture "you" for Avici-like time periods is its whole incentive mechanism for bootstrapping itself into being in the first place. (Arguably it also depends on you calculating probabilities incorrectly, though the arguments I've seen so far in this thread on the matter are reminiscent of five-year-olds who just learned the word "infinity".)
Absent that threat, nobody would have any incentive to work on creating it. So you're really talking about something completely unrelated.
I feel like doing the calculations properly requires summing over all possible strategies that posthuman superintelligences might apply in timeless decision theory. The Basilisk bootstrapping itself into being doesn't require that today's humans do that calculation correctly, but it does require that many of them come to an agreement on the calculation's results. This seems implausible to me.
Before I say anything else, I agree wholeheartedly with you on this:
> Arguably it also depends on you calculating probabilities incorrectly, though the arguments I've seen so far in this thread on the matter are reminiscent of five-year-olds who just learned the word "infinity"
This was my general reaction to the original thought experiment. It's writing down the "desired" answer and then trying to come up with a narrative to fit it, rather than starting now and working forward to the most likely future branches.
> you're necessarily also removing the bargaining chip that makes the Basilisk an interesting idea in the first place.
One of the more interesting ones in a game-theory sense, sure; but to exist, it just needs the fear rather than the deed, and this already works for many religions. (Was going to say Christianity, but your Avīci reference to Hinduism also totally works). For this reason, I would say there's plenty of wrong people who would be incentivised… but also yes, I'm talking about something slightly different, an AI that spontaneously (or not so spontaneously) role-plays as this for extremely stupid reasons.
Not the devil per se, but an actor doing a very good job of it.
It’s hilarious to me that Roko’s Basilisk maps perfectly to Pascal’s Wager, but they just can’t see it. It’s like any other exclusive religion: your god is made up, ours is real.
It's late by hundreds of years. It introduces a lot of unnecessary complexity.
The most sophisticated variation of the Wager I've encountered is the Taleb's diatribe against GMO.
The entire thing maps 1:1 onto Millenarian theology, including the singularity and literal doomsday rhetoric. I think it was Charles Stross who called it duck typed Evangelicalism at one point
I have had some rather… negative vibes, for lack of a better term, from some of the American bits I've encountered online; but for what it's worth, I've not seen what you described in the German community.
There is, ironically, no escape from two facts that was well advertised at the start: (1) the easiest person for anyone to fool is themselves, and (2) politics is the mind-killer.
>In the second half of the 5th century BCE, particularly in Athens, "sophist" came to denote a class of mostly itinerant intellectuals who taught courses in various subjects, speculated about the nature of language and culture, and employed rhetoric to achieve their purposes, generally to persuade or convince others. Nicholas Denyer observes that the Sophists "did ... have one important thing in common: whatever else they did or did not claim to know, they characteristically had a great understanding of what words would entertain or impress or persuade an audience."
The problem then, as of now, is sorting the wheat from the chaff. Rationalist spaces like /r/SSC, The Motte, et. al are just modern sophistry labs that like to think they're filled with the next Socrates when they're actually filled with endless Thrasymachi. Scott Alexander and Eleizer Yudkowsky have something meaningful (and deradicalizing) to say. Their third-degree followers? Not so much.
While I won't claim he currently has much of interest to say, he definitely explained a lot of important ideas for thinking more clearly to people who would not otherwise have encountered them, even if he didn't invent any of them.
Yudkowsky texts represent my mental image of a vector continuously scanning a latent space in some general direction. Changes just pile on and on until you come from concept A to concept B without ever making a logical step, but there’s nothing to criticise cause every step was a seemingly random nuance. Start at some rare values in most dimensions, crank up the temperature and you get yourself Yudkowsky.
> our coherent extrapolated volition is "our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted (…) The appeal to an objective through contingent human nature (perhaps expressed, for mathematical purposes, in the form of a utility function or other decision-theoretic formalism), as providing the ultimate criterion of "Friendliness", is an answer to the meta-ethical problem of defining an objective morality; extrapolated volition is intended to be what humanity objectively would want, all things considered, but it can only be defined relative to the psychological and cognitive qualities of present-day, unextrapolated humanity.
I doubt that a guy who seriously produces this can say something meaningful at all.
What kind of political leftist would you say resonates most acutely with Scott Alexander's January paean to the scientific racism of Emil Kirkegaard and Richard Lynn ("How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates")?
"Elites are making it taboo to talk about intelligence in order to preserve their position at the top of the social hierarchy. They're doing genetic engineering for their kids in secret, while making the topic of intelligence radioactive so the masses can't follow suit. If we reduce the taboo around intelligence, we can decrease global inequality, by improving access to maternal interventions for IQ in the developing world."
(Granted, that's not a common leftist position. But maybe it should be.)
Reading about the Roko’s Basalisk saga, it seems clear that these people are quite far from rational and of extremely limited emotional development. It reads like observing a group of children who are afraid of the monster in the closet, which they definitely brought into existence by chanting a phrase in front of the bathroom mirror…
Members of these or other similar communities would do well to read anything on them dispassionately and critique anything they read. I’d also say that if they use Yudkowsy’s writings as a basis for understanding the world, that understanding is going to have to the same inadequacies of Yudkowsky and his writings. How many people without PhDs or even relevant formal education are putting out high quality writing on both philosophy and quantum mechanics (and whatever other subjects)?
After seeing this news, I recall watching a video by Julia Galef about "what is rationality". Would it be fair to say that in this situation, they lack epistemic rationality but are high in instrumental rationality?
If they had high instrumental rationality, they would be effective at achieving their goals. That doesn’t seem to be the case - by conventional standards, they would even be considered "losers": jobless, homeless, imprisoned, or on the run.
Clearly this is a poorly organized movement, with wildly different beliefs. There is no unity of purpose here. Emacs or vi, used without core beliefs being challenged?!
And one does not form a rationalist movement, and use emacs after all.
Holly crap, it reads like the anti Electric coolaid acid test, with petty revenge ,guns, and murder dejour,instead of , instead of, well, an epic road party that is still going......bobby just played the gramys...there were glitches with the sound system and they raised 15 mill
I like some of what Aella has written, but had no idea that ,Rationalists, had just rebranded nialistic hate.....so cleverly.
Stuff like what is happening around ziz, the zit, is all too common.
I have met and conversed with people out on the fringes of the intelectual edge,in protest camps and anarchist communes,etc,and they very much discuss and rationalise getting there murder on.....when not bieng all glowy about aliens...and rightious about gender(s), so many))
pronouns, and the rest, but since they play chess a lot, they are rational, right.
Guaranteed there will/is more of the same.
Is the appellation in the headline, "radical vegan trans cult," a true description?
> Authorities now say the guns used by Youngblut and Bauckholt are owned by a person of interest in other murders — and connected to a mysterious cult of transgender “geniuses” who follow a trans leader named Jack LaSota, also known by the alias “Ziz.”
The NY Post tried to frame them as "radical leftist", but that's a big stretch. I don't think most rationalists would consider themselves leftist. The article also seems to be leaning into the current "trans panic" - pretty typical for the NYP.
I also dislike Right/Left categorizations. Most people don't even know the history of the terms and their roots in the French Revolution. Though the "Cult of Reason" established then certainly had the Left categorization at the time.
But is the trans element not a major part of this cult? It seemed to be from the linked story in the top link. But if there is something incorrect there, or false in the NYP reporting, you should point it out. If it is a major element of this cult, then far from complaining about NYP, I would complain about any news organization leaving it out of its reporting.
That zizians.info page makes several claims about their beliefs in regards to being trans, and both articles make claims about the number of trans people involved in the events described that, if true, seem to indicate large trans representation.
But all of this may be false information. I would like to hear specifics, if so.
There is, but, for example, the cult member accused of murdering the landlord isn't trans. So transness isn't intrinsic to the cult, and the violence also isn't related to trying to fight for/against anything to do with being trans.
(These aren't actually ideologically motivated killings, oddly enough: in practice they just murder people who slight them, even if "it is imperative and the greatest good that you murder people who slight you" is a key component of their decision-theoretic extremism ideology. Or at least that's how I interpret it.)
Are the reports true that the two who first attacked the landlord were trans? And the two in the border patrol attack were trans? And the suspect in the Zajko killings is trans? And the leader of the cult is trans?
And also that the person whom you mention, who was accused of the landlord killing, was in fact married to one of the trans persons above?
If there was not a disproportionate number of trans people involved in these murders, then I hope that you can point to the specific elements of the story that were wrong.
It says liberal “as in US Democratic Party” at 35% and social democrat at 2nd with 29% and Marxist at what looks like 2-3% so an easy majority (for this survey at least) the rest are libertarian, then Neo reactionary, and alt right in descending order
Did you confuse Liberal with Leftist? Liberals are anti-left
Some portion are Libertarian but there's no distinction between so-called "ancap" and libcom so that one is murky or more often coded for the former (the Libertarian party in the US is anti-left)
Well, for a period of time liberals were the left. In the last decade or so the illiberal left has come up in opposition to the illiberal right, the latter matching the former’s hypocrisy in false promises of equality (while driving division) with false promises of freedom (while expanding the rulebook).
Sure. The Culture War’s belligerents are all, generally speaking, illiberal. And notably, most people steeped in it reject the term. Even those on the left.
So what are they supposed to do then. The right makes a mountain out of a molehill. That happens to target some group, like a minority. Those on the left who reject the Culture War argue against it since they think the right’s focus will hurt the minority. They argue that the right is making a mountain out of a molehill. And yet they are now participating, begrudgingly.
The original definition of left and right came from the French Revolution. The liberals were the left wing. It is only in modern times that some people have rejected the original definition.
A naive observer would look at these numbers and say “wow, I am unsurprised that this movement is made mostly of straight white American male tech workers”.
Anyone reaching that conclusion though, would be a fool! For they would have forgotten to apply Bayes Theorem.
Who is making a statement about "most rationalists" here? The claim is about a trans vegan murder cult, which doesn't appear to be a natural member of the right side of the political spectrum.
The cult does seem to target people who identify as trans - OP has some discussion of this. Not sure if that justifies calling it a "radical vegan trans cult" though. Trans folks seem to be overrepresented in rationalist communities generally, at least on the West Coast - but there may be all sorts of valid reasons for that.
> Is the appellation in the headline, "radical vegan trans cult," a true description?
For this small group, yes. Their leader believes in Nuremberg-style trials for people who eat meat. If you want to go down the rabbit hole, it gets much weirder: https://zizians.info/
After puzzling over the threads on this head-spinning story, my sense is that maybe the most neutral thing to do is re-up this submission of a news report and merge most of the comments hither.
Edit: I guess we can have the current thread be about the recent events and keep https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871 for discussing / arguing about the generic aspects. Sorry for the complexity but in this case it appears to be essential not accidental.
I'm sure it's just the usual sensationalism, but if there are other recent posts with comments, I'd appreciate links in case it makes sense to merge them.
Edit: incidentally, I hadn't seen anything about it on HN until today. A reminder of how much randomness affects these perceptions.
Edit: I think "death cult" is linkbaity though, so I replaced it with "Zizians". I hope that's neutral enough for everybody because I'll be offline soon.
(Replacing a general-sensational term with a proper noun is often a good debaiting trick.)
With religion I think we largely just go with "this is what the group identifies themselves with / as" and leave it as that.
Arguably the politically active "religious right" in the US has long since abandoned most everything Jesus had to offer. We still identify them as such.
The problem with this approach is that there are also parts of the mainstream Christian doctrine (both modern and historical) that don't have Biblical basis, Trinity being one prominent example. One could go further still and reasonably argue that most of mainstream Christianity is basically teachings of Paul rather than Jesus.
And yes, there are also valid arguments against either one of those points. But to meaningfully engage in such a discussion, one needs to be well-versed in theology - more so than the vast majority of people who self-identify and are normally identified as Christians.
Eh, I don't think the "it's all based on Paul" can be a reasonable argument at all. Even when people do argue it, they only ever allege the same 2 points, which even assuming those points are valid would only be a tiny fraction of Christian belief, both theoretically and practically; you don't need theology for this. Of course, to those whose sole exposure to Χianity is Internet arguments this might not be obvious.
The whole focus on "Trinity" is weird but makes a little more sense if you realize it was originally developed to stand against certain heresies, but later mutated (often re-entering those same heresies again). This one is indeed theological ... or perhaps we need a word that is to theology as historiography is to history.
Could you please not use HN for ideological battle? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, regardless of which ideology you're for or against.
What I find interesting about these cases and the seemingly unrelated United Healthcare CEO assassination is that all were committed by extremely online data scientists who went to elite universities.
I’ve been fairly skeptical of the right wing narrative that these schools have been “radicalized” (seeing as universities and young people have always been the hotbeds of leftist thought, how soon we forget the hippie movement)…but this definitely has me wondering.
When your entire philosophy is a jupyter notebook filled with bugs from beginning to end but you don't know it because you've never heard of a unit test things go wrong.
949 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] threadHad it not been in a serious article I would have believed it had to a parody or a joke of some sort.
“We are just like Darth Maul, but we like salads and drink soy milk instead of regular milk… and then kill people while dressed in tactical black outfits”?
What is even going on? Real life now sounds like some kinda of a broken LLM hallucination.
It’s very easy to find apparent incoherences in humans behavior by selectively picking out and not searching the motivations. This is the base attack for teenagers bullying book.
Oh sure, and the jury. One can do both - mock murderers and their ridiculous ideology and study it seriously to, perhaps, prevent others from taking the same path. One doesn't preclude the other, though.
To a certain degree I think these group enjoy being taken seriously, being in the news, fawned over, their writings analyzed by people going over their "deep" and "insightful" ideas. So that direction could be playing into their hands to a certain extent. For now, I'll go the "ridicule" path, I think.
Certain mental conditions absolutely do, in a legal sense. Some conditions onset from brain injury and tumors, some to drug exposure, some are genetic, etc. For those unfortunate few who are afflicted, the most humane outcome is to intervene to keep them away from harming themselves and others, though often they are left unattended to by overstretched mental health services.
Even for non-Ill-defined, PTS and other trauma or just learnings- can do that to anyone and age doesn’t help to escape the reasoning-habits. Wise are those that can stay free from mental cages.
I have met a lot of people in my life who fit this criteria. Not one of them has gone on to become a mass shooter.
Saying we need a phrase to label people like this in order to _stop mass killings_ sounds crazy to me.
If you really had the option to explore the psyche of everyone to the depth necessary to check for "believes insane things" if we could even agree on what that means, I wouldn't be surprised if the test came back positive on 40-70% of the population. A strict enough test and I think we could get that number to 100%.
Isn't it a meme at this point how people win the nobel prize in one field, and then say some nutty nonsense about a completely different field? The human species is rational, insane, brilliant, stupid, compassionate and vicious, ugly and beautiful all at once. All of us.
More compassion for self and others would be my preference.
No, but with a few friends getting together, cheering them along, and feeding into their collective insanity, they could very easily get together and do something serious. Most of the insurrectionists (the people who invaded Congress, not the people who went home after attending the rally) in Jan 6th can be described as such. That network of 'friends' is critical for actually motivating them to get off their ass and act on their beliefs.
> More compassion for self and others would be my preference.
The problem is that it's much easier to violently destroy, than it is to create, and the damage that a group of angry people who believe an utterly insane thing is disproportionate.
There is a name for that; it's the "Nobel Disease" or "Nobel Syndrome". Sometimes people swap "Nobel" and "MD".
"appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things".
None of you think the major religions teach some insane things? Okay then.
“ Such ridicule typically will not occur after a religious conversion brings a previous non-conformist into the fold of the culture’s dominant religion.”
I was on the phone so couldn't type much, but my point is the concept of the collective cognitive imperative (much better explained in the book than in Wikipedia, to be fair) would answer your question by saying "it's not that nobody thinks that: it's that enough people accept those insane things to the point that 1) they don't think they're insane things, 2) you'd be an outsider (or even considered insane) if you point out the fact that they're insane things.
I'll try to give an example that would work in my cultural context (South America): someone making a rain dance during a drought would be considered by most to be something from harmlessly silly to crazy. Someone praying to the christian god for guidance or help would be seen as normal.
I mean, if they didn’t, then they probably would be religions, just “stuff everyone believes or has reasoned discussions about”.
Spoiler: they can’t all be right.
However, if I were to take a guess, it’s something like “people sometimes believe things without proof”. But obviously this is not true only of religious people, other people have their own creation stories – the sole difference is their’s don’t involve worship. And I agree they can’t all be right, but perhaps one of them is.
These are axioms, you cannot derive them, you can only derive from them. Saying “my axioms are rational, yours are ‘insane’!” is frankly childish, and speaks to a deep lack of understanding of the essence of reason.
A. Nonbizarre delusions (i.e., involving situations that occur in real life, such as being followed, poisoned, infected, loved at a distance, or deceived by spouse or lover, or having a disease) of at least 1 month’s duration.
B. Criterion A for schizophrenia has never been met. Note: Hallucinations, if present, are not prominent and are related to the delusion theme (e.g., the sensation of being infested with insects associated with delusions of infestation.
C. Apart from the impact of the delusion(s) or its ramifications, functioning is not markedly impaired and behavior is not obviously odd or bizarre.
[... etc ...]
I think modern social acceptability hinges more on the degree to which personal beliefs infringe on others, at least in the west.
If someone refuses to personally eat pasta because they believe in the great spaghetti monster, they can knock themselves out for all I care.
A lot of the evils that the hardcore atheist crowd (Dawkins, Sam Harris, that crowd) ascribes to religion is oftentimes much better understood as imperialism and other purely political ambitions couched in what was the most common first principle of the time. The desire of European kings (including the Pope) to hold Jerusalem and later Constantinople were much better understood as a desire to control trade and expand their territory/influence rather than some deeply seated religious fervor, just for the example of the crusades. And for things like the inquisition, we can see today as well plenty of largely secular demonization and oppression of marginalized groups.
I'm concerned, but not about that. Division concerns me. Balanced compassion for self and others is the only solution I can think of.
But that doesn't make them sane.
I don't think it's possible to act as a human without irrational belief, and everyone harbors them because there is no rational answer to the question "why?".
It was trivial for southern baptist sermons to convince white southerners that black people being slaves was "as god wants it", and therefore should be defended with their very lives, precisely because in Christianity at least, god asks you to do pretty awful things all the time.... At least if you listen to your preacher".
Look at the religious right insisting that jesus is "woke" and that Trump should deport an american citizen because she preached peace. There's only so many words said by jesus in most bibles, not a single one about trans people, so why do they insist so ferociously that trans people are evil?
This goes double for all those "great awakening" neo-"Christian" ~cults~ religions in the US that insist that the bible is not just inerrant, but trivially understandable by even the dumbest human beings, which is just fundamentally false.
30 million american adults explicitly say that the earth was created within the past 10k years by god exactly as it is now. They believe that evolution is not just wrong, but a hoax that most of science is in on. They believe that science is a conspiracy by Satan to keep them from god's light.
People on this very forum espouse these beliefs. Just the other day someone posted Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis as a resource, despite it being an organization that spreads outright lies, and is still trying to get evolution out of schools, and they are winning.
These are the same organizations, groups, families, etc that created the Scopes Monkey trial back in 1925. Understand that they considered it a success. 100 years later and we might very well see creationism back in US schools, despite overwhelming and conclusive evidence of evolution as the means of speciation.
The very first step in nearly every human group is insisting that WE have the answers as long as you `have faith` in us and follow what we tell you to do.
That goes for Republicans, communists, Nazis, or the DNC. Bullshit and unthinking conformance transgresses the boundary of secular and religious ideology.
Do you think the zizan rationalists are free from bullshit because they Atheist? Meanwhile they claim that AI from the future will put people into torture simulations as punishment if they aren't vegan, and that the only rational thing to do is kill your landlord with a katana.
And then check out the term “metairony” or “postirony” and this story make more sense…at least as much sense as the absurdity of it all will allow you to make of it.
It would be a joke except they've engaged in violent attacks up to and including murder in the service of trying to start that aforementioned civil war. Are they serious or a joke? I think their embrace of a ridiculous name makes them almost more frightening because it shows their contempt for reasonableness, for lack of a better term.
It's comparable to how the Nazi "goose step" march was terrifying precisely because it was so awkward and unnatural. It's like, if these guys are capable of doing this with a straight face, what else are they capable of?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement
I think another way to look at it is willful nonconformance and rejection of mainstream values (and judgement). Not unlike gutter punks dressing the way they did.
I think counter culture has a long history of this, from men wearing their hair long to people dressing up as literal clowns.
https://moonmetropolis.substack.com/p/antioch-the-first-food...
For just one thing, when you have a broken education system and omnipresent media franchises, you have a significant percentage of the population who know more about the Star Wars backstory structure and theories of diet than about history, civics or conventional morality.
(A residual possibility is "Sith from Las Vegas, Nevada".)
It's wild, but a view that is is fairly widely discussed in the rationality community, but only taken seriously by Fringe groups.[1]
My question is what Sith meant to them
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basiliskl
I guess if we spew enough of this BS onto the internet, AI could work it from there, but calling that rational doesn't make much sense to me.
Of course, this is trite pulp nonsense, high-school nerd level philosophy at best.
Now, they're all fuckwits, but it's not outside the realm of thought.
(BRB, gonna go start a sci-fi story.)
There’s an undercurrent of cults and cult-like institutions in the rationalist crowd (think: lesswrong.com folks) and this is one instance of this.
I do hope people “on the inside” are aware of this and are working to make sure those organizations don’t have bad ideas that hurt real people.
when you remove the theology from Psychology based on Judeo Christian Morality, it recreates it's facsimile In this case, AI judgment Day precedes either eternal damnation or salvation. Ziz, like other "radical rationalists" even believe that the singularity AI will punish people retroactively for their moral failings, such as eating meat.
https://www.hudson.org/domestic-policy/abraham-bomb-walter-r...
The top comment has an interesting take: "Unless Ziz gets back in the news, there’s not much reason for someone in 2025 or later to be reading this."
https://zizians.info
https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/
https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapte...
I do not engage with any of those people nor their weird communities.
This is such an epic unbelievable story. We live in this world?
Chapter 6 covers how StarSlateCodex comes into the picture, by the way. I always wondered that too.
A 2023 post on Rationalism forum LessWrong.com warned of coming violence in the Zizian community. “Over the past few years, Ziz has repeatedly called for the deaths of many different classes of people,” the anonymous post read. Jessica Taylor, a friend of Baukholt’s, told Open Vallejo she warned Baukholt about the Zizians, describing the group on X as a “death cult.”
The post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/T5RzkFcNpRdckGauu/link-a-com...
This is a divisive topic, but failing to mention this makes me worry a story is pushing a particular agenda rather than trying to tell the facts. Here's what the story looks like if the trans activism is considered central to the story:
https://thepostmillennial.com/andy-ngo-reports-trans-terror-...
While Ngo's version is definitely biased, and while I don't know enough about the story to endorse or refute his view, I think it's important to realize that this part of the story is being suppressed in most of the coverage elsewhere.
So if you can tell the story without the possibly superfluous detail of the genders of the people involved, that's a pretty obvious angle to omit. Andy Ngo is obviously not doing this, but that's really only because he has a very clear agenda and in fact his entire interest in this story probably stems from that.
I disagree that you can't get anything useful out of trash though. Media literacy requires reading between the lines of what is written by multiple people with differing perspectives on a matter and sorting the wheat from the chaff. It's primarily trash, almost entirely trash, there is no choice but to go dumpster diving, or throw your hands up in despair and decide you're just not going to bother at all. The latter option is tenable in and of itself, but when I observe it in practice from people around me, it usually equates in practice to just lazily applying your prior biases to anything you hear about and being an obnoxious and uninteresting conversational partner.
That’s not true: 99% percent of news outlets have absolutely no fear supporting trans activism.
It’s trivial to find hundreds of such cases from sfgate with a google search.
They're like grass in the wind, always betting on the winning team.
We know where that one took us.
The Zizians.info site (linked by one of the HN posts re: this story) mentions that the Zizians did target people who identified as transgender for indoctrination, so this is not really surprising. People who are undergoing this kind of stress and marginalization may well be more vulnerable to such tactics.
Do you really believe Trump and his goons want to show "compassion and help" to trans people, by taking away their passports, their medicine, barring them from the military, accusing them of grooming children, etc.? The list goes on.
Oh yes, this is totally a thing. They're also weirdly obsessed with I.Q. comparisons. They're the kind of community where you might actually witness someone talking about "High I.Q." and "Low I.Q." individuals - and making a claim like "my I.Q. is one of the highest", way before someone else made that cool.
Make no mistake, there are egos at play here too.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
I actually met Gwen and spent a weekend with him sometime ago. They were a roommate of my friend for a while. The person I knew doesn’t resemble the lunatic in the news article articles at all, but I have no doubt is physically/legally them. Cult indoctrination is a hell of a thing.
There is some precedent; the Twin Flame cult coerced transition in some members if I remember correctly. My guess is it was emotional manipulation used to make them do something that makes them more vulnerable to control. If you transition and you are not trans, you are going to have a hell of a lot of dysphoria, and shaming people and telling them it's because they are not trying hard enough/a good enough person/etc. would absolutely make it hard to break away.
However, it turns out that when you do this, the brain as a whole does not get adequate sleep, even if you alternate hemispheres. People had symptoms of sleep deprivation while still being semi-functional. Ziz took if a step further and had some sort of secret initiation process where both hemispheres were trained differently to produce multiple personalities. At least that was the assumption from those of us on the outside gathering scraps of info being dropped.
Get you 8 hours of sleep everyone. Sleep is important.
Also, to the best of my knowledge, Gwern has never written anything on his site about this purported single-hemisphere sleep, see https://gwern.net/doc/zeo/index for the details of what he has written about.
And unihemispheric sleep (Gwen’s word for what they do; they like to invent their own terms) is one of the techniques the Ziz cult uses.
I haven't attempted unihemispheric sleep, and it sounds like a phenomenon that isn't represented in the literature, but it also sounds like it wouldn't get past an IRB anytime in the last decades, so I assume it's probably real.
There are many strange altered states of consciousness found by experimentation, and I can totally believe that some form of auto-hypnosis + sleep deprivation - which would parallel many well-attested mind-altering practices in many different cultures & religions - could have bizarre effects or induce psychosis and hallucinating demonic entities, and turn an activist vegan into a murderer. (Their specific interpretation of 'unihemispheric' sleep may or may not be true. I would say that it's worth checking... except I'm not sure how one could either prudently or ethically investigate it, given the apparent consequences.)
And it would answer the question many people have been asking about how these unlikely-seeming murderers were made, in a way that the rest of it all does not.
When I was younger I stayed up to see what happens. The worst experience of my life was when I lied down to sleep and felt 'too tired to go to sleep' and then started hallucinating sirens. I have no idea how long I was up; after a few days I lost track. I had to paced to stay awake, which I did the entire time. I got pronounced disassociative symptoms - which I'm prone to anyway - ("it's not me in control of my body; there is a mutiny", "my reflection is weird/scary/different; that is not me", "the lines that make up the walls and reality don't seem to lay correctly"), gaps in memory, broken pattern matching (everything looks like a spider, chasing down mundane sounds to figure out what they are), and mixing up memories and imagined thoughts (e.g., fill up a cup, go to drink from it, it is empty and I'm not sure if I filled it up and then drank from it or imagined filling it up or if my memories are out of order).
Given the loss of contact with reality, I could see it being easy to manipulate people if you are in the room with them. I was alone, but if someone told me another me talked to them and then drank from the cup, the mix up could easily seem like evidence that it had actually happened that way, especially if I was trusting, vulnerable and open-minded. And once someone has a model that suggests that, they would probably make up stories on their own to support it.
So, yeah, definitely agree on the importance of sleep.
--
1: https://polysleep.org/wiki/Uberman
The vulnerability is the crowbar the cult uses
If you look up old reddit threads about the murder of the landlord, you can see many people defending the crime as the landlord was transphobic. It's not just a random detail like freckles, it seems like the identity shaped the way this group interacted with the world.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
For example, if every member of this group was Indian American I'd consider that a fair detail to note, the chances of that happening at random are minuscule, yet that's orders of magnitude more probable than all of them being trans for no reason.
No it's not, what? People tend to hang out with people similar to them. Most gangs are racially or ethnically homogenous. That's fairly normal.
In fact, there are commonly Indian-origin gangs in Canada (I haven't heard of it in the US, but the US has much higher-income immigrants from India overall)
I had a weird encounter on reddit with some users who expressed that "only X people understand how this character in the movie feels". Interestingly, there was no indication that the movie intended this interpenetration. But the idea wasn't unusual or all that out there so I didn't think much of it. But that group showed up again and again and eventually someone asked and their theory all but seemed to imply that nobody else could possibly have ... feelings and that lack of understanding made those people lesser and them greater.
It seemed to come from some concept that their experience imparted some unique understanding that nobody else could have, and that just lead down a path that lead to zero empathy / understanding with anyone outside.
Reddit encounters are always hard to understand IMO so I don't want to read too much into it, but that isolation that some people / groups feel seem to potentially lead to dark places very easily / quickly.
Fix the world and these problems don't exist.
Hard disagree. Plenty of antisocial (or worse) behaviour has been promulgated by those indisputably at the top of the social food chain -- almost every war of conquest, for example. Did the British Empire expand throughout the world because the British felt marginalised? No, the rest of the world considered them to be a great power and many other cultures voluntarily adopted their styles of dress and other customs as a mark of "modernity".
A sense of marginalisation (real or imagined) can certainly be a force that acts to reduce empathy and encourage violence, but it's by no means necessary.
Of course we should strive to make society just, and this will reduce the motive for violence -- the mistake is to believe that doing so will stop all violence. This might seem a small point, but it's not: Believing that it would stop all violence is a sign that you believe that (a) people are fundamentally good, and (b) have no agency -- that we just react inevitably and helplessly to conditions imposed on us by an external environment. Both of these beliefs are dangerously wrong.
This isn't a counterpoint to "fix the world," because those "at the top of the social food chain" are, of course, partners in an oppressor/oppressed dynamic that prevents both parties from realize their full human potential.
"As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized," Freire says. In a sense, both parties are mutilated by the dynamic.
So "the top of the social food chain" is not a clean sample of a fixed world.
Sorry if I am talking past your point.
I don’t think your point stands.
Elaborate?
You described the human condition. This is “the world” we all live in today. Isolating the people at the top as somehow not part of “the world” doesn’t work.
The other relevant opinion would be that of the "losers" -- the people oppressed by the winners. Did they feel that the winners were oppressing themselves? I'm certain they did not!
I think Freire is either deluded, or deliberately conflating the notion of what a powerful party views as good for itself with some higher, ethically tinged notion of how we all ought to behave.
Well, how could they have known?
One big difference the Zizians have with the LessWrong community is that LW people believe that human minds cannot be rational enough to be absolute utilitarians, and therefore a certain kind of deontology is needed.[1] In contrast, the Zizians are absolutely convinced of the correctness of their views, which leads them to justify atrocities. In that way it seems similar to the psychology of jihadists.
1. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t...
At some point the, "change society" approach is bound to create backlash that such a small movement can't sustain, and frankly we're seeing evidence of that now. There's also the reality that forget most of the US, most of the world isn't invested in this cause. This is not a universal cause, and while I personally think that's regrettable, it's also clearly just the way it is for now. Change, if it comes, will be far more gradual than some people are prepared to tolerate, and that assumes change continues in a sawtoothed manner in the right direction.
Believe it or not, there are actually many popular, far-reaching political ideologies centered around helping "the least of us." It's not such a foreign concept.
Furthermore, the particular ways in which the transgender population is oppressed happen to coincide with many of the ways in which cis women are infamously burdened. It's not "special treatment" that will make this <1% population feel better but a dissolution of the bonds which torment us all. "Nothing to lose but our chains" type shit, yadada?
It's worth noting that a number of cis women who associate with the feminist movement would strongly disagree with your assessment.
So again, I'm not debating the value of pursuing these rights, I'm pointing out that this is view opposed by billions. You can't just declare the rightness of your cause and hope it catches on.
Well, duh.
If I can deal with idiot conspiracy theorists the evangelicals can deal with trans people.
I live in the Bay. Maybe that is true, but in absolute terms the level of acceptance is still very low.
Like, if Denver is 10% accepting, the Bay might be 15%. Or something like that.
And Vallejo, while part of the Bay Area is a very different place than, say, the Castro. Culturally, it’s probably more like Detroit than San Francisco.
So I’m not sure if you can really draw any conclusions from your premise.
If there's any sort of marginalization by Lind in that story, I'm having a hard time finding it.
We need to keep in mind that Lind was forced by law to give them free rent for two years. He was not allowed to evict them for virtually any reason AFAIK, including nonpayment. Yes, he was supportive and generous, but at some point we all reach our limits, especially when dealing with sociopaths who are bent on taking every possible advantage.
> Court records show that Lind shot two of his attackers, injuring one person and killing 31-year-old Emma Borhanian.
Back in 2019, Borhanian was arrested and charged with felony child endangerment and false imprisonment in a protest against a rationalist group.[2]
1. https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/27/man-killed-in-vallejo-was...
2. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Mystery-in-Sonom...
I think they're crazy first, trans second. They were marginalised for being crazy. Then they found each other because they're trans. Many cults have random attributes shared by the members, whether it be race or sexual preferences. Their race or sexual preference didn't cause them to join a cult, they had other things going on that drove that. But when it came time to join one, they gravitated towards the one that identified with them.
I'm afraid that at some point, some of these people are likely to talk themselves into doing something seriously fucked up. If I worked on AI at OpenAI or Google or Meta, I think I'd prefer to work from home... and if I occupied a visible position on the org chart, I'd hire a damned good private security company to keep an eye on my family.
The death of the author is a reasonable approach to reading a work. But what you said reminded me of the more delusional view in which a) the watcher/reader's approach is the only "correct" one, and b) anyone who disagrees is *EVIL*. An instance of this happened among Tumblrinas obsessed with the supposed homosexual relationship between Holmes and Watson on BBC's Sherlock, and who were certain that the next episode of the show would reveal this to the world. Welp. <https://np.reddit.com/r/the_meltdown/comments/5oc59t/tumblr_...>
I mean, every LLM post on HN gets people writing fanfic about how AI is developing human intelligence and other silly things.
There's frankly no difference between the two groups -- they are equally silly -- except one is coded female and people like to shit on those hobbies more than male-coded AI fanfic.
The lesswrong apocalypse cult has been feeding people's mental illness for years. Their transness likely made them more outsiders to the cult proper, so e.g. they didn't get diverted off into becoming Big Yud's BSDM "math pets" like other women in the cult.
I doubt they are significantly more mentally ill than other members of the cult they just had less support to channel their vulnerability into forms more beneficial to the cult leaders.
Yudkowsky wrote an editorial in Time advocating for the use of nuclear weapons against civilians to prevent his imagined AI doomsday... and people are surprised that some of his followers didn't get the memo that think-pieces are for only for navel gazing. If not for the fact that the goal of cult leaders is generally to freeze their victims into inaction and compliance we probably would have seen more widespread murder as a result of Yud cult's violent rhetoric.
Dammit, now I have a new fetish.
Why would this certain group defy the US trend of being 4-7x more likely afflicted by depressive dissorder? We are talking about a demographic with a 46% rate of suicidal ideation and you doubt that's significant why?
Essentially the community in discussion is already selected for and generates mental illness, so the ordinary comorbidities of transgendered persons are likely less relevant.
Like the guy who wrote that insufferable Harry Potter fanfiction?
Unfortunately the gendered language we use is also the mechanism to provide clues and content as you read the story. So if I can rely on that they need to call it out to help the reader.
I'd rather the article mention it.
Why are they not? Is this a chilling effect?
In practice it creates a moral blind spot where the worst extremists get a pass, in the name of protecting the rest. Non-progressive media are all too happy to fill in the gap. Cue resentment, cue backlash, cue Trump. Way to go, guys!
There is a subreddit dedicate to people both democrats who refused to vote, as well as Trump voters whose policies as promised would severely harm them and their family's interesf (severe as in life/death). Why did they vote against their interests.
For example anyone on any kind of benefits, or whose mum and dad are, vets or if your cousin or uncle is one, Latino, even if you are from a long line of american citizens you may have friends who are 1st gen. More generally anyone not white, male and in the top 5-10% of wealth. Because tariffs won't be good for poor people. And poor is probably: under $1m assets.
Google trends for tariffs surged after the election. People voted on feelings. Anger, despair or some sense of "Trump means them not me" or maybe "He is successful in business so he must be good".
Unfortunately the rational thing to do often sucks eggs!
Really?
Because trust me, this is not simple at all, and since you think it is, it just means you don't know anything about it.
This is understandable, a lot of people don't. But you should avoid posting about it, there are some VERY motivated people who post about this in every thread, and downvote, and flag. Don't be one of them, they are motivated by hate, and that's not a good place to be.
If he is a narcissist and we are aware narcissists feed on attention and drama and starve in the absence of those things, shouldn’t the best version of activism against him be to deny him mention or attribution? Regardless of how cathartic it might be to openly complain? Imagine getting to the end of this next 4 years and despite what he does, nothing of note can be said about the man. Despite all the EOs, nothing interesting could be discussed. His presidency could be a footnote in history, except for the “activists” going emotionally boneless and apoplectic at every word he says.
TBF, it’s not Trump that exhausts me, it’s this. The maniacal blaming for every problem. The incessant injection of Trump and secondarily politics into every conversation and every facet of life. This…neo-activism is as caustic of a solution as the disease it attempts to inoculate. It’s as if everyone has forgetten how to problem solve in the face of adversity. A social fragility whose only method of communication is abject outrage.
Ugh.
Scrutiny and accountability for this systematic dismantling of our democracy is the only sane thing to do. You're either very blind to the gravity of the situation or extremely dishonest.
Bringing up the "criminality of the Biden family" is a legitimately insane thing to do when defending Trump.
https://oversight.house.gov/the-bidens-influence-peddling-ti...
- passing budgetary laws without congress
- has been made untouchable by the supreme court
- pardoned the violent Jan 6 rioters (despite claiming to be "pro-order")
- constantly scape-goats minorities
- colludes with foreign fascists
Im unaware of those happening and would like to see a source.
> Bringing up the "criminality of the Biden family" is a legitimately insane thing to do when defending Trump.
Most Americans preferred Trump to the previous regime, just look at the approval ratings. You’re using “insane” as a way to dismiss what most people believe without critically engaging — that they prefer Trump, for all his faults, to Biden and his influence pedaling and special treatment of his criminal son.
- budgetary laws without congress: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/does-trump-administrations-...
- total immunity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States_(2024)
- pardoned jan 6 rioters (even the criminal ones): https://www.npr.org/2025/01/30/nx-s1-5276336/donald-trump-ja...
- Trump claims Jan 6 was antifa: https://www.axios.com/2021/01/12/trump-falsely-blames-antifa...
- Trump blames the DC plane crash on DEI: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpvmdm1m7m9o
- And everything else as well: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/trump-blames-dei-for-e...
- Trump praises Putin, Xi, Kim: https://www.semafor.com/article/08/13/2024/trump-praises-xi-...
Now give me a source on Biden's. And it's only been two weeks, Trump's approval is bound to plumet once the tariffs kick in and stat destroying the economy, we're still supposed to be in the honey moon.
Can't you fathom me dismissing what the relative majority was led to believe about the guy, in the light of the massive evidence of his corruption, incompetency and bigotry?
Don't you care when he threatens war with our allies? When he praises foreign fascists? When he pardoned all Jan 6 rioters, that he previously claimed were all antifa? When he is made above the law by an obviously partisan supreme court? When he passes budgetary laws without congress with no repercussions whatsoever? When he promised that "we won't have to vote ever again"?
> The maniacal blaming for every problem. The incessant injection of Trump and secondarily politics into every conversation and every facet of life. This…neo-activism is as caustic of a solution as the disease it attempts to inoculate.
The explanation for that is that Trump is selected to provoke that response precisely because those activists are themselves toxic people.
Wanting to preserve democracy is not toxic, however way you want to spin it.
It’s relevant because for years and years the mainstream left has been pushing and pushing to normalize behavior that has been historically been considered deviant. I have no opinion on the matter, I don’t care at all if someone wants to make their genitalia look different than it did when they were born. Do it up.
Most males have a really fucking hard time contemplating rearranging their penis into a vagina. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t seem right. It isn’t something that can register for most people.
Which of course lead to the situation we have now. “They don’t feel like a man/woman, they feel the opposite! They are depressed and discouraged and you MUST accept them for who they are!”
That doesn’t work. And instead of pivoting, the messaging just got louder and louder. Now we see the repercussions.
Trump was given power by people who didn’t realize they gave it to him, and they’re shellshocked.
I don’t like trump or approve of his moves. I did not vote for him. Ironically, he’s doing what he said he would do, which isn’t common amongst politicians, and he’s doing it quickly.
this should be a story about an ideological cult with trans members, but instead it's a story about the cult of trans ideology. it's called "nut picking" - use the worst examples of a group to tarnish the group as a whole.
a good example of this is attacks against Muslim Americans after 9/11.
I ask that in all earnestness. I am not a MAGA or a MAGA apologist.
[1] https://www.mediamatters.org/diversity-discrimination/apalac...
[2] https://www.advocate.com/news/apalachee-school-shooter-trans...
now this.
there are like six Zizians. there are millions of trans people. I'm sure that many of the Zizians being trans says something about the Ziz cult, but Ziz doesn't say anything about "trans activism."
any evil one trans person does, is used to stain all trans people. recognize this tendency; don't let this become like blood libel.
As a Christian, I can empathize. The wrongs and hypocrisies of so many are heaped on those who have no relation to the actions.
Declaring a religion might rile someone, before you have even engaged. I suggest that you simply proffer a hand. Empathise as best you can. Be careful.
At best, with mentioning religion, you have declared your rightful intentions and at worst you have added yet another layer of tribalism to a ... debate.
I'm pretty sure that at least the synoptic gospels and probably John too (for the full set) tell you to keep it quiet. There is no need to put your religious heart on your sleeve - that's between you and God.
I don't think you understood what they were saying. They were saying that as a Christian, they've experienced being blamed for the misdeeds of other Christians which they personally had nothing to do with.
The most important part of that statement isn't the word "Christian": you could replace "Christian" with Muslim or atheist or whatever and there'd be someone else who could truthfully say it.
I grew up in Manchester, NH which was almost 100% white until 1990 or so. [1] My family was out for a bike ride and got a flat. A black couple (the man had just been transferred to the Raytheon factory where they make the radar for Patriot missile) came by and helped us fix the flat and shared lemonade with us in the kitchen. If you have an experience like this you think "I want more black people to move into my town."
One branch of my wife's family comes from southern Italy and is pretty conservative, one of her cousins is dating a black guy who is an EE and works on robots at Amazon. The family is pretty old school but he's won everyone over by making a point to be really awesome. He talks about every prominent thinker about what blacks in America should do from Marcus Garvey to Malcom X. He thinks it's a terrible act of racism that 'Black Wall Street' was bombed but also thinks people who are still stuck in the pathologies of the projects he escaped from need to take responsibility: he thinks it's unfair but he knows black people have to work twice as hard to get ahead and accepts the burden. He's really won the family over.
To link it to transgender issues, this poll [2] from 2022 says that 57% of Americans don't know personally know anybody transgender, and this 2024 poll of Asian-Pacific Islanders in the US [3] gives the same number.
People are getting their ideas about transgender people from the media where stories like this [4] are pretty widespread; whatever you do you don't want to live up to those stereotypes.
[1] I think because the bottom fell out of the economy at the end of the 1920s and never came back until the 1990s; you had no reason to go there unless you had family, black people leaving the south were going to Detroit because (a) there were already blacks there, and (b) the car industry was expanding despite the Great Depression.
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/09/21/does-publ...
[3] https://apnorc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/AAPI-Data-AP-N...
[4] https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-witch-trials-of-j-...
I get that it's been a rough couple of weeks for trans people, and immigrants, and people who due import and export, and grant-writers--but perhaps you should take a moment to reflect on how comments like this reflect on you and trans people to the general populace (which is adjacent to the point made by the comment you were replying to).
All you had to write was "Do you think this state of affairs works for or against trans people?", or even "I'm not sure I understand which direction you're going with this, could you elaborate?"
Instead, you picked an us-vs-them phrasing and were shitty.
Let me give some blunt feedback:
Trans people (the ones that are clockable) are a relative novelty outside of urban areas, and most of the voting public (much as the gays faced before) don't have any familiarity with them outside of either: scaremongering from the conservatives and tabloids, excessively fawning presentation in movies and shows and liberal/progressive media, or spicy tweets and posts on Twitter and Facebook.
Normies don't really know about the boring, relatable parts of being trans--finding clothes that fit correctly, struggling to feel that your body is right, dealing with stupid bureaucracy that doesn't match your needs, being unable to get competent or affordable healthcare, looking for a partner that loves you for being you and not because of how you look or what they think you are. (You'll note: these are, modulo some biological issues, exactly the same things that they face too.)
The trans people aren't doing themselves any favors (especially the ones in tech, who are incredibly privileged and until recently inhabited a rarified atmosphere of good pay and performative catering) when interacting with normies, though. When people like you act like assholes it confirms every negative stereotype.
Honestly? It's exhausting. It's tiring. It's enough to drive away the allies and friendlies that aren't already getting driven away by those of you with personality disorders.
The trans friends and partners I've had that are decent and capable of relating on a normal level are vastly outnumbered by the catty, annoying, neurotic transgendered men and women I've encountered in my career and schooling.
Go on Mastodon, go onto the Fediverse, and tell me with a straight face that your average trans poster isn't at least as likely to be as toxic as somebody on Twitter. Go look at the self-congratulatory bullshit to own the MAGA folks...all the way up until the election that has so many of you freaking out. Go look at the immediate closing of ranks and decrying "transphobe! transphobe!" when one of your group does something shitty and gets called out for it--even when they deserve it.
If you want to know why the popular support for trans people isn't great, look in the mirror and consider if you want to double down on a losing strategy for behavior.
The current swing of the pendulum is not good, it is not kind, it is not entirely fair--but it sure as hell isn't inexplicable. Good luck to you in the coming years.
Trans people are the most hated subgroup and were for years. Literal physical attack against them were going up for years now. It was not rough couple of weeks, it is systematic campaign of hate again and again and again.
> Trans people (the ones that are clockable) are a relative novelty outside of urban areas, and most of the voting public
The reason for that is violence they are and were targets of in those areas. It is also that if a kid outs itself as trans, they will likely be kicked off out of house. If not kicked, they will be mocked in those areas all the time.
> The trans friends and partners I've had that are decent and capable of relating on a normal level are vastly outnumbered by the catty, annoying, neurotic transgendered men and women I've encountered in my career and schooling.
And it did not helped those people at all. The hate is preexisting and has nothing to do with how trans actually act.
> If you want to know why the popular support for trans people isn't great, look in the mirror and consider if you want to double down on a losing strategy for behavior.
Hate for trans has nothing to do with what trans to. Conservative people feel massive disgust over crossing gender lines. It is that bad feeling they have when they hear the idea itself. And literal campaign of hate they themselves feed.
I used to go out in drag in Halloween before things got so polarized. Many people thought I had a great costume but I'd always seem some microexpressions of disgust enough to know I was doing something that wasn't completely safe.
I was very inclined to think positively of transgender people ten years ago but my own experience with them on Mastodon and in other places has led me to agree with the person you're replying to. It was when I started reading their words as opposed to reading about them in the media that I became more negative. People were sharing so many hateful memes on Mastodon that I had to put in a large number of filtering rules so that I can't see anything they post except for the hateful image memes that can't be filtered because the only text is in the filter.
It's almost as if some of these people have a fascination with assholes like Kiwi Farms and see it as a template for activism, like they build their whole lives and find all their meaning out of hating and being hated. See that "Witch Hunt of J.K. Rowling" podcast -- yes, there are jerks online who say horrible stuff like that to them, but that doesn't make it a righteous cause to that to other people; by fighting for territory that they couldn't defend they may have turned people against them and lost rights that they could have kept. They mirror the hatred and intolerance of the people they hate.
So I don't agree that "Hate for trans has nothing to do with what trans to (sic)" -- they do have to overcome some hate which is intrinsic but there is a lot which is a mirror of the hateful view that many of them have about the world.
I do not think it goes both ways symmetrically, really. What I think is that any misconduct by any trans person is used as excuse to mistreat all of them. And when they do not do misconduct, well, it wont help them either.
The attacks toward trans last years were not about ugly memes on mastodon. It was literally about beer can having minor ad with trans person. It is about making gender affirming care illegal, full stop. It is about transsexuality itself being disgusting. It is about pushing polite respectful trans people out of any visible situation.
Like, OP complains about people not knowing relatable things about trans. But, if they are visible, say on beer can, the hate campaign is very very real. You cant harass someone for being visibly trans and then complain you do not know about day to day trans people.
I can say personally my feeling thermometer went from maybe 75 to 15 as a result of being on Mastodon and other online forums in the last tow years. I like trans people as individuals but I hate the movement. It's not the only place where that kind of negativity leaks out.
For instance the men's rooms in my building are stuffed with menstrual products for "men who menstruate" with a preachy card that talks about it in a reductive, narrow minded frame the same as the worst conservative Christians. This is for the benefit of 0.6% of the population at best, maybe 3 or 4 people benefit from it, out of 8 men's rooms in that building it is probably less than one person per bathroom.
It seems to me that this sucks all the air out of the room to discuss anything else. Young men are struggling. Maybe you only see the survivors in higher ed, but the K12 system is not built with boys in mind, particularly if you are in a racial minority, see
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/04/boys-school-challenges-r...
Instead of messaging aimed at, say, 20% of people who are struggling we get this stridently minoritiarian discourse that leaves many people feeling unheard, erased, and resentful.
You understand that this state of affairs has been created by the bigoted side? I just want to live in peace and build stuff that makes the world better, not worry about the federal government coming after me and pretending I don't exist. Please try not to get so fooled next time.
Start taking responsibility. Bigotry is a real thing but you can have a large impact on how other people treat you based on how you behave.
Organized transgenderists in my view have a reducivist, moralist, my-way-or-the-highway approach that initially exploited 'progressive' people who were inclined to think they were acting in good faith but are in the process of driving those people away. (I was really inclined to think of transsexual people positively because my best friend in college was a really awesome person who happened to be transsexual)
J.K. Rowling picked an issue where public opinion was far away from what transgenderists wish it was. (Where do violent sex offenders in prison get housed?) She thought the vast majority of transgender prisoners were safest in prisons that corresponded to their identity but that authorities had to have some latitude for people acting in bad faith.
She got jumped on because she agreed with them in most cases but not all.
Normal people will call you an ally if you agree on 7 out of 10 issues but organized transgenderists come across as people who will treat you as an enemy if you disagree about anything.
On some issues (workplace discrimination) public opinion is on the side of trans people. On other issues (sports participation) public opinion is the other ways. A year ago questions involving access to health care tended to split down the middle, the one recent poll I looked at seems to have moved far to the right in the last year on the issue of transgender care for minors.
A healthy political movement accepts that it's won on certain issues, that it can't win on other issues, and that there are some issues in the middle where you can persuade people and win.
On top of that there is the whole "egg hatcher" thing where you find there are people who are looking for people who "march to the beat of a different drummer" and sell transgenderism as an answer to their problems, almost certainly a false answer. If somebody knew their gender identity of a child I'm inclined to believe them (e.g. they certainly aren't going to change their mind based on whether people 'affirm' them or not) but if somebody discovered a variant identity as a teen I'm skeptical. As a schizotype
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy
I am already frustrated with the bandwagoning of 'neurodivergence' by an autism industrial complex and an ADHD industry that pushes addictive medicine. Neurodivergent people are already 'bully magnets' and the last thing they need is to take on an identity which will get them further targeted and be surrounded by people who will reinforce their feelings of victimhood. (see 'impulsive nonconformity' in the article I link above)
I see the current movement as something that centers the activism of its enemies as a template for its own activism [1] [2] and that thrives on bigotry. It looks like a pernicious cult that is all about 'othering' other people and sees any and all pushback they get from people whether it is primary preexisting feelings of disgust, fear and hatred or the learned feelings of exasperation you might see on the face of a otherwise bleeding heart socially progressive HR manager who has just dealt with too many people who see a fascist under every bush and wants the whole cake yesterday.
[1] see anti-fascism
[2] transgenderists say it was OK to treat J. K. Rowling the same way Kiwi Farms treats them
It is an objectively true moral statement that minority rights ought not depend on majority opinion (that is the whole point of constitutionalism). To the extent that minority rights depend on majority opinion in reality, that is a deficiency of political systems. All of us exist in deficient political systems.
> if somebody discovered a variant identity as a teen I'm skeptical
What is your expertise in this matter? Why do you think your opinion is worth anything? People figure things out on their own pace.
If you think your opinion carries any weight here, you've been fooled.
> She got jumped on because she agreed with them in most cases but not all.
JK Rowling signed the so-called "Women's Declaration International" which has the exact same policy proposals as what Trump is doing. Again, you've been fooled.
> A year ago questions involving access to health care tended to split down the middle, the one recent poll I looked at seems to have moved far to the right in the last year on the issue of transgender care for minors.
Yes, because people's brains have been cooked through immersion in social media.
If you surround yourself with virtue, you will become virtuous. If you surround yourself with vice, you will become vicious. Social media rewards vice, so people have become more vicious.
> I am already frustrated with the bandwagoning of 'neurodivergence' by an autism industrial complex and an ADHD industry that pushes addictive medicine. Neurodivergent people are already 'bully magnets' and the last thing they need is to take on an identity
I have ADHD (according to my psychiatrist one of the most obvious cases they've ever seen), and autism, and I'm trans (both -sexual and gender). So I guess in your eyes I'm a bully magnet (??) who has taken on an identity (???????). In reality, despite the horrible discrimination, my neurodivergence gives me a pretty nonstandard insight into things, and an ability to explain concepts, that I've been able to turn into something valuable to others. (The last 4 technical blog posts I wrote were all front page on HN, with 100-300+ upvotes.)
This has nothing to do with paranoia or delusions. My work is valued for its correctness and attention to detail.
Sports is a clear example. Nobody has a 'right' to be on a sports team. Women have been working for years to build the opportunity to have a pro career. Until tests were developed (1970 or so) it was a chronic problem that men would crash women's events in the Olympics to steal gold medals.
On the other hand, there are many benefits to participation in sports. I don't want the state to decide who can play in what league. I want leagues to decide that. My school is part of club leagues where teams have a mix of men and women in them and I think there's a lot of room for innovation. Different leagues want different things: I want trans people to be able to participate in some sports, it's important.
J. K. Rowling didn't start out in the place where she ended up.
As for social media, I deleted my Twitter account in 2016, I don't hang out in places with right wing nuts, rather I am on Mastodon and Bluesky with the left wing nuts. I need lots of filters to keep out hateful content posted by trans people on both of those platforms.
'Virtue' and 'Vice' are a frame that makes all problems impossible to solve and leaves people talking past each other. See [1]
It took me 40 years to get my diagnosis; I've had numerous psych evals and today I can get enough signs and symptoms to get a diagnosis looking at the first paragraph of any of them, even if that paragraph stated it was inconclusive.
I have a small amount of the thought disorder of schizophrenia, enough that I can't win at chess because I'll screw up. I max any test of verbal intelligence I take, I write long posts like this that have bizarre typos, the harder I try to fix them the more my keyboard turns into a Ouija board. On a bad morning I have a paranoia towards objects that seem to jump out and grab me. At one point of my life I was wrapped up in a system of delusions.
I also can do detail oriented work and systems thinking. (I've compensated for my condition very well) Sometimes my work is highly valued. Yet I graduated from elementary school the same way Ender Wiggin did. The child post of this one (where I tell the story of my son's incel and trans friends) [4] got upwards of 37 votes so "my opinion does hold some weight here" (But so does yours, and one difference between me and you is that I'm not going to tell you that your opinion has no weight)
Sometimes I feel angry that I wasn't served by the mental health community and that about 5-10% of the population is similarly underserved. On the other hand I was lucky that I was only under the spell of a charlatan for about 9 months of my life and I'm glad I didn't get drugged the way they wanted to drug me in school because a friend of mine who's the same age as me and did get drugged got all his teeth pulled at the age of 40 and might suffer from osteoporosis soon [2] [3] if he lives that long.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Rights-Talk-Impoverishment-Political-...
[2] https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2016/b...
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-19894-x
[4] My son's friend went through a period of near complete so...
I agree that Americans don't think enough about their responsibilities. I fully support a bill of responsibilities paired with rights. Several countries have that kind of list already. They're not mutually exclusive.
> Nobody has a 'right' to be on a sports team. Women have been working for years to build the opportunity to have a pro career. Until tests were developed (1970 or so) it was a chronic problem that men would crash women's events in the Olympics to steal gold medals.
Yet women's sports are still second-class, outside of exceptions like tennis. Is it trans people who have caused women's sports to be second-class, or the patriarchy enforced by cisgender men?
FWIW, I think it's reasonable to require that trans women be on HRT for a while before playing professional women's sports. But categorical bans are horribly unjust—making a class of women inherently lesser. So yes, as a kind of woman, trans women ought to have the right to be on women's sports teams.
> J. K. Rowling didn't start out in the place where she ended up.
True. Her brain was cooked by constant exposure to right-wing bigotry on social media, like many others'.
I am a very firm believer that there is no free will. We are entirely the products of our genetics and our environments. Social media creates extraordinarily bad environments.
> 'Virtue' and 'Vice' are a frame that makes all problems impossible to solve and leaves people talking past each other.
Well, no, it just makes it clear that (a) morality is objective and (b) societies are better when people are more virtuous. The solution is to not make people talk to or past each other, the solution is to effect environmental changes such that people are less exposed to vice and more exposed to virtue.
When it comes to soccer at Ithaca College the men play a very physical but kinda stupid game which has a lot of hard running and kicking and headers but very little sense of space. The women play much smarter soccer that looks more like good pro soccer, where, ideally everybody knows where their team mates are supposed to be and what to do to confound the opposition. More people turn up for a women's game in the rain than turn up for a men's game in the shine. They're both entertaining in their own way.
At Cornell I think the men play better than the women categorically but that's not about men or women, it's about the coaching staff, the recruiting, the priorities of the schools, etc.
Last Friday I went to a double header of women's and men's basketball at IC. The women's game was unequal but I was focused on getting good shots of the players and not thinking about the quality of the play. One of the men from the away team promised me that if I stuck around I'd see a much more entertaining game, I said I wouldn't miss it. It was 12-0 for Ithaca at the beginning so I was getting worried they wouldn't come but Hobart did and it was like 63-60 at the end. Side by side the men were so much bigger, so much faster, so much more intense. Still I like the competition and teamwork of women's ball and would rather show up in person at any college game of either gender and watch the NBA on TV.
I think time will tell what's right about fair competition, in the meantime women's soccer and basketball at the pro level is becoming a big business in the US.
In my mind 'patriarchy' is a thought stopping word. We picture the Hebrew god as an old man on a throne with a beard. One take on it is that it's got nothing to do with woman at all except as tokens, it's really a game of status where young men and poor men are dominated by rich men and old men. It's particularly harmful when it comes to discussing the 'incel' phenomenon which mainly affects straight men (slightly more likely to be black or asian!) but also affects women and gay men.
People like J K Rowling don't have a choice but to get cooked by right wing social media because there isn't a sensible discourse from the left.
I do believe in free will. If you think moral agency matters, you have to believe we have a choice. I think genes and epigenetics matter more than people want to admit and hell yeah there are bad environments. But in the end you've got a choice. The 'bad' thing I see is not so much virtue or vice but more like inflammation, as in the medical condition.
Is there any possible other reason than these two things, do you think, for this state of affairs?
> making a class of women inherently lesser.
A sort of Morton's fork here would be that transwomen are lesser women because they have to assume that identity instead of starting there (to say nothing of the intuitive biological differences), or that women (and thus trans women) are lesser because they are a subset of the functionality offered by men (because they can be emulated by men choosing to do so). I don't particularly agree with either point, mind you, but both could be made. The trivial solution to avoid this is to simply acknowledge that trans women are neither men nor women (nor trans men) and are a category unto themselves worth valuing on their own merits and characteristics.
> True. Her brain was cooked by constant exposure to right-wing bigotry on social media, like many others'.
If it is reasonable to believe--as everybody seems told to--that constant exposure to right-wing media and bigotry can turn somebody into a bigot, is it really a stretch to believe that for some chunk of the trans population the same has taken place? Further, do you see why such doublethink would make the trans folks who preach it suspect to normies who see the obvious?
> We are entirely the products of our genetics and our environments.
If that's the case, it suggests something odious: there is no virtue in being trans--you're a medical and social anomaly, and if we can remove the factors that cause trans folks to occur all that suffering goes away in a generation or two and the system does better (on the metric of suffering).
And before you go off on how this is unethical or not virtuous or whatever, by your own assertion...
> I am a very firm believer that there is no free will.
...such a solution is admissible and without blame, because no moral agents would be involved in its occurrence.
(You don't get to claim there is no free will and then hold anybody accountable in any moral way. Morality does not exist unless free will does; otherwise, it's just the dull observation of iterated cost-benefit analysis and reactions to an environment.)
The forcible third-gendering of trans women is one of the greatest crimes of the culture I grew up in, so I'd rather we move past all traditionalism entirely.
> If it is reasonable to believe--as everybody seems told to--that constant exposure to right-wing media and bigotry can turn somebody into a bigot, is it really a stretch to believe that for some chunk of the trans population the same has taken place?
Constant exposure to virtue makes you more likely to be virtuous.
> Further, do you see why such doublethink would make the trans folks who preach it suspect to normies who see the obvious?
See the obvious what? The normies are simply wrong about a lot of this.
> Morality does not exist unless free will does
This is simply false. Free will is linked to moral responsibility, not the existence of morals. How moral we are is out of our control (Thomas Nagle called this moral luck).
I think one issue is – do "man" and "woman" have some objective essence? I think most progressives would say "no" – that kind of essentialism is more associated with conservatives and traditionalists. But if "man" and "woman" don't have an objective essence, their definition is ultimately conventional – which means if different people want to define those terms differently, how can we say one definition is ultimately more right than the other?
That has a benefit for transgender people – if transgender people and their allies want to adopt trans-inclusive definitions of "man" and "woman", nobody can say they are objectively wrong to do so, if we accept these concepts are ultimately cultural constructs.
But then comes the downside – if conservatives and traditionalists (and various others, such as a significant number of radical feminists) want to adopt trans-exclusive definitions of those terms, how can we say they are wrong to do so? If these are cultural constructs and conventional definitions, as opposed to naming objective realities which exist independently of culture and language, how can one say their definition is objectively incorrect? It's just different.
Maybe the answer is a form of "live and let live": let progressive people have their spaces governed by their definitions, let conservative/traditionalist people have their spaces governed by theirs, and where the two have to overlap or intersect or coexist, try to find a way to be neutral between the competing definitions.
Of course, if you are growing up in one of those conservative/traditionalist spaces, and end up identifying as LGBT, that solution isn't exactly pleasant, at least until you become old enough to cross over to a space more welcoming to your identity. But I don't know what the alternative is. Progressives like to imagine that conservative/traditionalist viewpoints will eventually wither away and disappear, but looking at trends in the real world, it seems unlikely that dream will be fulfilled, certainly not in the lifetime of anyone currently alive. Finding a way to peacefully coexist seems preferable to interminable cultural and political conflict over the issue.
So "essence" isn't the right word, but there absolutely are affinities and anti-affinities towards gender in brain wiring, as reflected in people's internal psychology. There is no better explanation for the vast majority of people being cisgender, and having gender dysphoria when misgendered. The traditionalists are somewhat correct about this!
A lot of traditionalist freaking out about gender is extrapolating their own internal experiences onto everyone. Many cis people feel quite bad when they are misgendered! This is a commonality with trans people, not a difference.
> That has a benefit for transgender people – if transgender people and their allies want to adopt trans-inclusive definitions of "man" and "woman", nobody can say they are objectively wrong to do so, if we accept these concepts are ultimately cultural constructs.
But I am saying that the traditional model of gender is objectively wrong! Gender is not just a cultural construct, there is clearly an inherent aspect to it.
"Gender is binary and immutably assigned at birth" and "gender is entirely social" are two positions that are both incorrect in their own ways. The truth, as expressed in the modern scientific model of gender, is more complex. Gender is not binary, but there is quite clearly an inherent (likely biological) component to it -- otherwise HRT wouldn't have the psychological effects it does on trans people. There is also a social component: we are a social species, and our biologies and sociologies are intertwined.
> But then comes the downside – if conservatives and traditionalists (and various others, such as a significant number of radical feminists) want to adopt trans-exclusive definitions of those terms, how can we say they are wrong to do so? If these are cultural constructs and conventional definitions, as opposed to naming objective realities which exist independently of culture and language, how can one say their definition is objectively incorrect? It's just different.
Right. This is the downside of the kind of "model relativism" that you're describing. This is very explicitly not my position, and I think the progressives who have promoted this position have done a bad job. I'm saying that the traditional definition is objectively incorrect, in the sense that the traditional model doesn't describe reality nearly as well as the modern scientific model of gender. It's as incorrect as a belief that the sun revolves around the earth.
> Maybe the answer is a form of "live and let live": let progressive people have their spaces governed by their definitions, let conservative/traditionalist people have their spaces governed by theirs, and where the two have to overlap or intersect or coexist, try to find a way to be neutral between the competing definitions.
That is fine when the two definitions are equally correct. They're not! One is more correct than the other.
> Of course, if you are growing up in one of those conservative/traditionalist spaces, and end up identifying as LGBT, that solution isn't exactly pleasant, at least until you become old enough to cross over to a space more welcoming to your identity. But I don't know what the alternative is.
The alternative is to use objective reality, as determined by evidence and study using modern methods, to determine public policy. Traditional and religious beliefs should have no role here.
edit: I...
I have some scepticism about all this. There is evidence for some group differences in neurobiology between men and women, but they are group differences, they don’t operate at the individual level-meaning, for some brain features, there is a statistically significant difference in the male average and the female average, but the distributions are overlapping, so there are some males with brains at or near the female average, and vice versa.
There’s also some evidence that LGBT people are more likely to belong to those “overlapping” groups (males with brains closer to the female average in certain respects, and vice versa). But, again, it is a group rather than individual difference: not every person who has such an “overlapping” brain is LGBT, and not every LGBT person has such an “overlapping” brain-and we still can’t explain why. Plus, I don’t believe we have found any reliable biological difference between different LGBT subgroups (e.g. some gay cismen have rather ‘female’ neuroanatomy, as do some transwomen, but I’m not aware of any high quality evidence for distinguishing those two groups at a neurobiological level)
For most transgender people, we can’t point to any specific neurobiological factor as an explanation for why they are transgender. And even for the minority for whom there is something specific to point to, there will be other people who share that factor yet aren’t transgender, so that factor can’t be a complete explanation-and the rest of the explanation we just don’t know. All I think we can confidently say is that biological factors are in the mix, but we can’t rule out the possibility that psychosocial/sociocultural/etc factors also have some role to play-plus, the respective contributions of the biological vs the non-biological may differ from person to person.
Also, I don’t know if everyone actually has a “gender identity”. I mean, I don’t think I do. Yes, I have XY chromosomes with a typical male phenotype, a male-coded given name, my legal documents all say M, I’m married to a woman and father of two children with her, and I suppose “male” describes a social role I play. But, I don’t have some internal “identity” as “male”. Maybe this is an autistic trait, but deep down inside I don’t identify as anything at all. Well, maybe as pure consciousness, and everything else about me (including my sex/gender) is just a contingent chance accident of what that consciousness happens to experience.
> There is no better explanation for the vast majority of people being cisgender, and having gender dysphoria when misgendered.
Do non-trans people have gender dysphoria when they are misgendered? Some of them don’t really care. And even if a person reacts negatively, is that due to gender dysphoria? Or could it be they feel upset because you’ve got a fact about them wrong, and they might be just as upset if you’d got any other fact wrong instead? And even if they experience some special upset at being misgendered, how do we know that isn’t just due to cultural conditioning, as opposed to an innate psychological factor?
I’ve personally experienced being misgendered more than once, and my reactions have varied from amusement to irritation to equanimity, depending on how I was feeling at the time. But I don’t think those varied reactions convey any deep fact about “who I am”, and I’m not convinced any of those reactions had anything to do with gender dysphoria
> I think a much more robust response is "your intuitions aren't completely incorrect, but reality is more complicated -- our views are more correct than yours, because we have modern methods of learning on our side which are better than traditional ones." But this response really implies a scientific, evide...
I was careful to word that as "as reflected in internal psychology". I don't think we're going to pinpoint any specific pieces of brain wiring any time soon, but there are quite clearly profound internal psychological differences -- since supernatural phenomena don't exist, they must be either due to internal brain wiring or another property of the internal body, or due to social factors, or a mix of both.
A survey I've done of trans people near me is whether they'd still want to transition on a desert island. Some say no, but the vast majority say yes. To me, this demonstrates that there's at least some inherent characteristic at play.
> Also, I don’t know if everyone actually has a “gender identity”. I mean, I don’t think I do. Yes, I have XY chromosomes with a typical male phenotype, a male-coded given name, my legal documents all say M, I’m married to a woman and father of two children with her, and I suppose “male” describes a social role I play. But, I don’t have some internal “identity” as “male”. Maybe this is an autistic trait, but deep down inside I don’t identify as anything at all. Well, maybe as pure consciousness, and everything else about me (including my sex/gender) is just a contingent chance accident of what that consciousness happens to experience.
Strength of internal gender identity does vary -- agender people demonstrate that. But would you be able to transition (especially medically) and live day in and day out as a woman?
Dr Will Powers, a cis male, has a description of how taking an excessive dose of estrogen gave him gender dysphoria for days [1].
David Reimer, another cis male, was forcibly transitioned by his doctor after a botched surgery as an infant [2]. He suffered lifelong dysphoria as a result, and tragically took his own life at a young age.
What trans people go through is quite similar to what these people went through, just in reverse. Reimer was lied to about his gender for years, which led to tremendous distress. Trans people are falsely informed (though not as a lie since this isn't intentional at first) about their gender for years, which also leads to tremendous distress. A lot of people want to openly and proudly lie about it, in a way that is documented to cause distress.
> Do non-trans people have gender dysphoria when they are misgendered? Some of them don’t really care. And even if a person reacts negatively, is that due to gender dysphoria? Or could it be they feel upset because you’ve got a fact about them wrong, and they might be just as upset if you’d got any other fact wrong instead? And even if they experience some special upset at being misgendered, how do we know that isn’t just due to cultural conditioning, as opposed to an innate psychological factor?
Gender culture is created primarily by cis/het people, so it's hard to separate the two out. Being upset at misgendering is a cross-cultural phenomenon -- I've asked cis people across American, European and a couple different Asian cultures about this.
> The problem I see: I think there’s often a substantial gap between what the science actually says, and what people claim the science says (including even many scientists themselves, especially when addressing a lay audience.) I think when you look at...
No constitution is an absolute guarantee of the rights of any minority. Constitutions contain roadblocks to slow down the majority when its desires conflict with the rights and interests of minorities, but a sufficiently determined supermajority retains the ability to overcome all those roadblocks. At the end of the day, almost all constitutions can be amended, even if with some difficulty – no matter how many constitutional provisions you have to protect minority rights, if the constitution can be amended, then those provisions can be altered or repealed.
The alternative is a constitution which is impossible to amend, no matter how large a supermajority of the population wants it amended. That's fundamentally antidemocratic, and could be described as a form of constitutional tyranny.
In short, nerds and nutjobs are overrepresented online so any conclusion you reach about groups of people using experiences you've had online need to be taken with a massive grain of salt.
I encourage you to read the four gospels at the beginning of the New Testament. Jesus didn't teach "shut up and let your good works speak for you". No, he was very much more in your face than that. He spent all of his ministry preaching (IE, talking about God and religion) and teaching and healing.
> ... tell you to keep it quiet
Uh, no? See Matthew 28:18-20
The "Great Commission" as we call it, is a command to spread the good news of Jesus Christ; His death, resurrection, and the promise of eternal life for those who choose to follow him.> There is no need to put your religious heart on your sleeve
I spoke as one aggrieved class to another. Modern Christians get a lot of hate for things that have happened in the past, because we wear the name of our God.
As for wearing a 'religious heart on my sleeve', I have nothing if not the hope of forgiveness and grace from the Almighty. Of course I'm going to wear it on my sleeve.
They're saying that a minority of evangelists and rapey priests have been making Christianity look bad for decades.
But in any case, yeah: you don't have enough information from this type of stuff to make good judgments about individuals in any scenario.
Two things that are obvious when explicitly stated but unintuitive otherwise:
* Abusers deliberately target people with a poor reputation; particularly, a known history of lying about other matters.
* If the group does their own investigation, the media will condemn them for it. If the group leaves the investigation up to the government, the media will condemn them for it.
Since the 90s we have seen 2 things, which change the picture entirely:
* organizations are acutely aware of the issue, and thus make structural actions to both make offenses less likely and improve documentation regardless; and
* technology has improved so there is much more evidence, both to convict and to acquit.
... I can't actually locate a single allegation where the occurrence was after 2000, now that I look for them.
Seems a bit prejudiced.
Jesus says not to pray loudly like the Pharisees which could be interpreted as not bragging about ones faith, but he also says “Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven” so it seems like an instruction to share faith with others.
In present day USA if you loudly announce your faith its hard to escape tribalism associations so I agree with your advice, but I also think its important not to water down religion by ignoring the parts that do not fit with modern sensibilities because then we are having a totally different conversation.
The unfortunate part is, in my 38 years of existence, she is possibly the first "real" Christian I've known: Christian through her acts, not just her words. In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Jesus bases judgment not on religious rituals or verbal professions of faith, but on acts of compassion towards others: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the unclothed, caring for the sick, and visiting the imprisoned. This seems to emphasize practical love and concern for the vulnerable as true evidence of discipleship, rather than one's ability to proselytize.
Isn't the most important part of the New Testament the Gospels and almost everything that comes after is more about institutional Christianity? Acts, describing the spread of Christianity after Jesus' ascension, with little new information about his teachings. Epistles focus primarily on doctrine, ethics, and church organization rather than Jesus' words and actions. Revelations...well I'll leave that to others to interpret.
If Christianity is built around Jesus, shouldn't his teachings and words be the focus rather than the institution of Christianity itself? I don't think there is anything wrong with proselytizing per se, it's obviously critical to ensuring the survival and expansion of any belief system and from an evolutionary standpoint, ideas that encourage their own reproduction tend to thrive. But it seems misguided to focus on spreading the faith rather than doing all the things Jesus says you should do.
For me, religion starts and stops from within. I am not an evangelist - my God is mine and your's is yours. I'll tell you what I'm about and no more.
"Still small Voice of quiet" not "Hell fire and damnation".
I will dive in with a gentle nudge but never an exhortation.
So, I think the analogy, at least for those people, holds.
My son has two friends. One fell under the spell of blackpill incels, thinks he is not tall enough even though he's an inch above the mean, wants to break his legs to extend them and get taller, hasn't talked to my son for two years because my son said what his real height was in an online chat. Rumor has it he's taken anabolic steroids (but hasn't done any weighlifting or athletic training.)
The other fell under the spell of a self-described "egg-hatcher" who "aggressively" (his friend's word) worked on him for a year and a half to convince him that his being out of sync with other people was a sign he was trans. I knew him pretty well as an elementary school student and he didn't give any sign of variant gender identity then, although like my son and myself he was always a little 'weird'. (He uses a different pronoun and name at his job but tells us it is OK for us call him 'he' and use his own name so we do.) He's taking a cocktail of drugs that gets prescribed via telemedicine and was telling us about the serious side effects he was suffering: one of these drugs, spironolactone, is primarily a drug that alters your mineral metabolism but has the effect of suppressing testosterone if you take 20x the normal dose. (My doc gives it to me for my blood pressure.) He has insatiable cravings for salt as a result.
I completely believe my transsexual friend from college is for real. I believe my son's transgender friend is making a mistake; I support him as an individual and feel I owe him a lot as a person I knew from a young age but I believe he's a victim of a cult-like movement, as is my son's first friend.
(Note a lot of Christian people are brought into it by their family before they're able to make a choice by their own judgement)
It's worth noting that while Spironolactone can be used to suppress testosterone, that's not really what it's used for. Rather it weakly blocks androgen receptors so it makes the body act like the testosterone isn't there or is lower than it actually is. And this is effective at a far lower dose than the testosterone "suppression".
This is why it's sometimes prescribed to women for hair loss, improper hair growth, and/or acne.
It's for that purpose that it's normally prescribed in trans healthcare and it's generally only temporarily (~3-9 months) prescribed while an estradiol regimen suppresses testosterone production. After that it can be dropped with the estradiol doing the rest of the work.
And outside the US it's far less commonly prescribed for this purpose with other androgen antagonists generally being preferred but US doctors tend to be more weary of those other medications and therefore prefer spironolactone.
So while said kid may be a bit "weird" in your eyes, nothing about this really seems unusual. At worst they probably just need to ask their doctor to prescribe a different androgen antagonist instead of spironolactone.
It reminds me of a friend I have who is quite severely depressed and has gone through a wide range of sexual identities. Straight, to asexual, then gay, then polyamorously bisexual, and now back to monogamously straight. Each change she excitedly explained to me that she had unlocked some deep secret to her identity and now her whole life made sense. This happened well into her adult years, not adolescence.
Some people seem to have a strong sense of a "missing piece" in their lives, and might be susceptible to latching on to almost any identity or community if it can explain that feeling.
EDIT: Because of the current barrage that trans people are under, I should clarify that I know trans people who have a deep and abiding certainty that their gender is different from what it says on their birth certificate; my above comment is not meant to include those people.
My trans friend in college suffered terribly because her mother disowned her. I can say as a parent though, if I saw my child was involved with people who were as hateful and negative as the trans people I see on Mastodon, I'd think "I'd do anything at all to spare my child from that suffering."
---
I think "asexual", as a fashionable label, is particularly harmful. I've met a lot of people who are definitely sexual who went on a phase of glomming on to it and it certainly contributed to their misunderstanding of themselves.
The proliferation of labels about sexuality seems harmful to me (polyamorous is another, BDSM people introduce 10s of them, like you couldn't possible be articulate about your desires but you imagine there is some place where you can pick them off a menu)
My recent experience is that when something squicky goes down or a paraphilia rears its ugly head the people you can trust the least are the ones who talk about sex as if they were liberated or who claim to have some subaltern identity. I think people like this are dangerous not just as direct social connections but even if they are 2, 3 or 4 steps removed.
This classic of French theory
https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction....
has a great part near the beginning about how glib talk about sexuality is a trap, not a way to liberation.
But lots of non-gender-related online communities also look like that to me: some political groups, antiwork, etc.
I see some people, especially young people, treat depression as a kind of virtue. Like “the world is shit and if you aren’t miserable it’s because you just haven’t woken up to reality”. And then they find groups online to reinforce that, and the depression meme spreads. I would want to protect my kids from that too.
People have done this all the way back time eternal, the only thing that's different today is that people are allowed to be more open about it and that there are many discrete labels that allow people to easily describe what they are specifically feeling.
I don't think a gender transition will make this person whole, this person will just be a weird person who is also trans. The old problem will persist but now he (maybe she or something else later) will have additional side effects and other baggage not to mention lost opportunities such as not being able to be a father.
> not to mention lost opportunities such as not being able to be a father.
This isn't true. Even if you stay trans the entire rest of your life you can still often have kids. This goes for trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people. Generally at worst you'd just need to supplement with some hormones to support fertility but often even that isn't necessary.
But supposing someone de-transitioned, fertility generally returns completely or near completely within 6 months to a year.
The only case where you can't "undo" any degree of loss of fertility is with an orchiectomy (testicle removal) but even then the standard procedure is to preserve sufficient semen in cold storage for future use.
I think it is more complex than that. Some people, they've been raised in a religion, it's been part of their life since they've been a small child. They never sought it out and actively chose it for themselves, they inherited it from their parents and their ancestors. It can be a very deep part of their identity.
Also, try replacing the word "Christian" there with "Muslim" or "Jew", and see how it sounds.
> No-one choses to be trans.
I think transgender feelings exist on a spectrum. Some people don't have any. Some people have a tiny inkling of it that they know is never going to go anywhere. Other people, they are very strong, and they are convinced they'll never be happy unless they live life true to them. But, there are people in the middle, for whom it is more of a choice whether to cultivate these feelings or suppress them – and they might be able to find happiness going down either path. For them, being "trans" is a choice – it wasn't a choice to have those feelings to begin with, but they have a real choice about what to do with them – and if they choose to suppress them, and manage to find happiness in doing so – aren't they in a sense choosing not to be trans? But conversely, if they make the opposite choice – are they not choosing to be trans? From which I think it follows, some people really do choose to be or not to be trans – which isn't to say there aren't other people for whom there isn't anywhere near as much choice involved in it.
I have no idea how big a group of people this "people in the middle" is, but I suspect it may be bigger than you think. It isn't the kind of thing one goes around telling everyone about.
Or to be more direct, how do you work?
You choose to be a Christian and the idea that a God exists makes sense to you? It's not that the arguments for it are strong, you just choose to believe them.
Then atheism becomes fashionable and your old thoughts stop making sense to you? Not because of any new evidence, refutation or anything of the sort, but simply because you make a choice.
Are your politics the same?
Do you believe in the existence of truth? If you do, are your professed beliefs just a facade?
I think this is a very confused remark. You are mixing up the existence of choices with the philosophical question of the nature and existence of "free will".
I had a real choice as to what to eat for breakfast this morning. There were several live options and I chose one of them and discarded the others. Was that choice of mine "free"? Was it "predetermined"? That's a vexed philosophical question. But however we answer it – it was still a "choice". An unfree choice, a predetermined choice, is still a choice. Choice is a process in the mind/brain, the subjective experiences associated with those processes, an externally observable behaviour – and whether or not it is free, whether or not it is determined, it obviously exists.
By contrast, I did not have any choice at all as to the circumstances of my birth–the day and month and year in which I was born, the place and country, who my parents are, what chromosomes I have, etc. And that, likewise, is true completely independently of how we answer philosophical debates over free will
I absolutely do not believe anyone chooses to be of any religion. It's just luck.
Whereas you said "No one chooses to be anything", which is a denial of the existence of choice altogether
Whether or not you are confused inside your own head, you are expressing yourself in an imprecise and confusing way
And you aren't using the standard common sense definition either – for, surely per the common sense definition, this is true: "I can choose what I eat for breakfast, but I can't choose what Donald Trump eats for breakfast" (because the first is clearly within the scope of my own personal causal power and influence, the second is well outside it) – yet by your own definitions you'd have to reject that statement, and say "no, you're wrong, you can't choose what you eat for breakfast" – whereas most incompatiblists would instead say "yes, you can choose what you can eat for breakfast, and you can't choose what Donald Trump eats for breakfast – but your choice of what to eat for breakfast isn't free"
So I'm using the word "choice" in the standard way, and you're using it in your own personal idiosyncratic way
Compatibilists: free will is a term for something real that we do.
Incompatibilists: no, that thing is trivial and should have a different name. Free will is a term for something impossible. But despite being impossible it's a meaningful concept. And it's somehow hugely important and deserves a name.
I'm unclear about the motivation for this, especially the last part.
Some incompatiblist determinists might view metaphysical libertarianism as a logically coherent possibility, albeit a false one. They might then view "free will" as useful in naming a way the universe coherently could have been, but turned out to actually not be – much like they might view Ptolemaic epicycles, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, and steady state theory. And, much as a person might object to the position "the luminiferous aether is actually true, if we redefine all the terms involved to refer to concepts from special and general relativity" as a form of unhelpful obscurantism, they might view compatibilist determinism as doing the same kind of thing to metaphysically libertarian free will.
There's also the other kind of incompatibilism: metaphysical libertarianism is itself a form of incompatibilism. Both incompatibilist determinists and metaphysical libertarians agree that determinism and free will are incompatible. They just disagree on whether that means we should junk free will or junk determinism.
Although I think here "determinism" is a bit of a misnomer. Most physical determinists don't actually have a problem with the idea that there might be irreducible quantum indeterminism (whether or not they believe there actually is). An incompatibilist determinist would say "a clock doesn't have free will, and a roulette wheel doesn't either, so neither can some hybrid between the two". A compatibilist determinist will say that whether it is a clock or a roulette wheel or a hybrid of them, if it gets sufficiently complicated in the right ways, then it will have free will. For both, the real objection is to metaphysically libertarian ideas that human choice involves some irreducible "third thing" which is neither deterministic causation nor impersonal chance, nor any mere combination of the two. There are also claims (e.g. by Roger Penrose) that quantum indeterminism operates in some special way within the human brain, different from how it operates normally, and that human free will is somehow rooted in that. Many "determinists" (whether compatibilist or incompatibilist) would view that as uncomfortably close to metaphysical libertarianism, even if it does attempt to partly replace the transcendental metaphysics with something closer to the realm of the empirically testable (even if not quite there). But, while "quantum indeterminism operates in a very special way in the human brain" makes them uncomfortable, I don't think most of them view in the same way "quantum indeterminism is real and irreducible, but it doesn't operate in the human brain in any way differently from how it operates anywhere else"–again, whether or not they actually believe it. Some will prefer purely deterministic interpretations of quantum theory instead, such as many worlds or de Broglie–Bohm theory–but that debate has no inherent connection to the topic of human free will.
(1) Do we have choices?
(2) Are our choices "free"?
(3) Should we be held morally responsible for our choices?
How we answer (1) and (2) doesn't necessarily determine how we answer (3). And if (3) is your real point, maybe you should focus on that, rather than confusing things by conflating it with (1) and (2).
I'm saying as an irreligious trans person who sees the wreckage that fundamentalist religion is causing on my community at the moment.
But I still think several things you said on the way here were put in a rather imprecise and conflationary way.
So one can say "I should do XYZ", but this soon descends into blame: "hey you, why didn't you do XYZ?", and that can be mean-spirited recrimination to do with bullying and social pressure, coercion and guilt and labelling people as no good, and main function of the question might not be to seek an answer.
Or, more rarely, it might be an honest enquiry into philosophical differences, or practical problems. Developers shouldn't write bad code. But they do, so we can "blame" them for it. That doesn't mean we should hurl rotten vegetables at most of them. On Wikipedia, I routinely blame people for fucking up an article, but the objective isn't to make them feel bad, it's to fix the article (and to check their reasons, to make sure that I'm not the one with the bad idea). Blame is one thing, but what to do with blame is a separate question.
It's definitely about the way people function, though, about enquiring into their mistakes and motivations. They have "responsibility" in the sense of being expected to respond to "why did you do XYZ?", and even if the answer is "it was inevitable because of the way I am", there's still more practical aspects of the answer ("because I was sleepy, because I was trying to avoid PQR, because I like XYZ") in which to seek knowledge. If we're all autonoma, so what: these autonoma want to solve moral problems.
If you did something wrong, and you are morally responsible for it, then we are morally permitted (or even obliged) to make you suffer for it (where "suffer" can mean potentially anything from mild social opprobrium up to torture and execution). If you did something wrong, but (for whatever reason) lack moral responsibility for it, then it is morally wrong for us to make you suffer for it. If your moral responsibility is impaired but not completely absent, then it is wrong for us to make you suffer to the normal degree, but it might be justifiable for us to do so to a more limited degree.
But, many people today reject the idea of retributive punishment. And if you do so, it isn't clear how important the concept of "moral responsibility" still is. It is a logically coherent position to accept the evaluative/axiological aspects of morality (the labelling of states of affairs as "good" or "evil" or "neutral", their ranking as greater or lesser goods/evils), and its prescriptive aspects (you ought to do this, you ought not do that, you may do this but you aren't obliged to), while rejecting the concept of "moral responsibility" as misconceived, useless, harmful and/or erroneous.
I don't want to believe what that book says but it is quite a strong argument. It is really too sweeping and complicated to discuss in this format though. It really would need an entire counter book to it that dissects each point.
The point of my comment was not whether free will exists or not – it was whether choices exist or not.
I haven't read Salopsky's book myself, but I don't believe it argues that choices don't exist, only that they aren't free. And the comment to which you are replying wasn't expressing any stance on the question of whether our choices are "free" or not, only distinguishing it from the separate question of whether they exist at all.
That said, the impression I've gathered of his book – e.g. the review in The Atlantic by Kieran Setiya (a professor of philosophy at MIT) – doesn't impress me – Sapolsky largely ignores the philosophical literature on the topic, despite its essentially philosophical nature. "Free will" is more fundamentally a question of philosophy than neuroscience, because a big part of the debate is how the phrase "free will" should even be defined – and that kind of definitional question is one in which neuroscientists have no special competence, but for philosophers it is their bread and butter.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kieran_Setiya
This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief, and also intricately tied to moral responsibility. So compatibilists might be better served by tabooing the phrase—which some do, replacing it with "free choice" or similar.
There's also this bit:
> Still, when you act with indifference to the rights and needs of others, we can blame you for what you do—unless you have a good excuse. What counts as an excuse is a question of morality, not metaphysics.
When developers write code with security bugs, there are sometimes "good" excuses for it and sometimes not. We tried apportioning blame for many years, and it never worked. What worked is large-scale tooling and environment changes. I believe this generalizes quote broadly.
[0] https://archive.is/20231223221002/https://www.theatlantic.co...
> This argument doesn't engage with the fact that the common understanding of free will is as a fundamentally supernatural belief,
I disagree. I don’t think the average person’s belief in “free will” is “fundamentally supernatural”. Most people say they believe in “free will”, but (unless they’ve had some exposure to philosophy) they are pretty vague about what it actually is.
If by “supernatural” you mean “religious”, I think you might be overestimating how much influence religion has on the average person’s views on the topic. While it is true the majority of Christian denominations will endorse some version of metaphysical libertarianism in theory, it is a rather secondary doctrine - the Bible never explicitly discusses the topic, and opinions differ on whether or not it presumes it implicitly. [0] The Nicene Creed, which most Christians accept as a statement of the most important points of Christian teaching, never explicitly mentions it either. In many denominations, services will rarely or never address it. Hence, for many Christians, Christianity doesn’t contribute a lot to their understanding of “free will”, because it just isn’t the focus of a great deal of Christian teaching
Now, of course, there are exceptions: for example, there are the Free Will Baptists, for whom the concept of “free will” is so important, they even put it in their name-but they are minuscule in comparison to Christianity as a whole
In fact, some Christians are compatibilist determinists. There are actually two main forms of determinism - physical determinism (all our choices are predetermined by physical processes) and theological determinism (all our choices are predetermined by God’s will)-and the compatibilist versus incompatibilist distinction exists for both. Most Calvinists reject metaphysical libertarianism in favour of compatibilist theological determinism, although a minority (primarily the so-called “hyper-Calvinists”) are incompatibilist theological determinists instead.
[0] I’ll limit the discussion to Christianity, in part for reasons of space, but I think if you look at Judaism or Islam you will find it is a similar situation - most Jews and Muslims will affirm belief in “free will”, but both religions tend to spend relatively little time on this topic in comparison to others, especially if one is talking about the experiences of the average follower, as opposed to the arcane theological debates covered in advanced study
> Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism
Arguing for an academic definition as somehow true and absolute, in contradiction to common usage, is a lost cause. Language prescriptivists always lose in the long run.
In the US, classical liberalism is largely despised by the same people who despise political liberalism. Funnily enough, those people are conservatives by either definition.
It’s unfortunate that academic conservatism keeps turning into real world populism (and certainly classical liberalism has seen that as well). But language evolves, and it’s n order to be able to communicate, terminology must as well.
It’s just a word. Words change. There’s no reason to defend an archaic meaning when it’s just going to cause confusion in almost every context.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/16/politics/nikki-haley-trump-rn...
So we can agree that there is no remaining resistance to Trump in the Republican Party and that conservatives are indeed Trumpers.
People can delude themselves that defending their own narrow interpretation of what these concepts are supposed to mean is the noble end that justifies a lot. But in the end, it's very simple: what we are and what we bring into the world, is a result of what we do, and not of what we intend. Sowing hate and chaos is just that, and which radical end of the spectrum your justification comes from just does not matter very much.
Zizianism is not a logical outgrowth of rationality for many, many reasons. These people are just crazy.
There is however a living breathing person sharing their personal experiences, to which a polite response is not the one you see above (pushing their agenda, which contributes to those negative experiences).
I udnerstand that for the demographics represented here it's sometimes difficult to tell an abstract concept from a living person, thus the explicit call to have some fucking shame for a second.
Please check your empathy on a horrible situation for OP.
1.6 million in the US https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Tr...
3% worldwide https://www.statista.com/statistics/1269778/gender-identity-...
And considering the current climate, I can imagine these numbers are under reported.
Please do.
What really shatters my faith in common sense is the fact that trans is a minority of a minority and is made out to be a problem when it's not.
Just remember that you have allies in this industry. Lots of love.
It appears to me that there is a certain modality of thought that occurs much more often in people with hEDS, specifically those with TNXB SNPs. If you're super deep into type theory the odds substantially increase that you have hEDS - it's how I found out that I had it. And this same group is far more likely to be trans than the general population. A link that would be far more obvious if hEDS wasn't so underdiagnosed.
Additionally, it appears to me that mental disorders are often caused by auto-immune conditions which is extremely common in those with hEDS. So with a strong selection bias on math ability and trans and you're gonna end up with a lot of hEDS people who are strongly predisposed to mental disorders. I know someone with hEDS who obsessively studies the link between hEDS and serial killers - not something I want to be associated with the stats were pretty convicting. I do think it is possible that two TNXB SNPs are sufficient to explain why I think the way I do, why I'm far more like Ted Kaczynski than I would like to be. Of note; Ted Kaczynski did consider gender reassignment back in 1966.
Which is to say two things, I think what people are observing is a real phenomena and it is not purely from personal biases, though I'm not denying personal biases play a part in perception. And perhaps with that in mind the solution is in fact in diagnosing and treating the underlying auto-immune conditions. And to put a hat on a hat on my 'crazy' I think people are going to find that GLP1-Agonists like ozempic, specifically at the lower doses, are quite helpful in managing auto-immune conditions, among other things.
This is an extraordinary claim and needs evidence. Do you have a source for this?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK573608/
However, throughout the study they are very careful to point out both sides of the arrow of causality.
Direction one, autism causes trauma: autistic children and adults are more likely to experience traumatic events because of being autistic. This seems relatively well known known and, sadly, understandable.
Direction two, early childhood trauma causes autism: the study says that while there is data showing a link, there's not enough for it to be clear. It definitely seems that far from all children who experience trauma will develop autism, and also that far from all autistic children got that way via trauma. Obviously this is a tricky area to get data on.
> it can often be trauma that causes the auto immunes... It’s hard to find a not traumatized autistic person
That happened after he got brainwashed, from the age of 16, through the CIA's MK ULTRA experiment though.
I think this could all be answered rather quickly with high quality Whole Genome Sequencing and a bunch of math so I’ve been going around evangelizing that idea and am working with some people who have independently come to the same conclusions.
Most US cults are made up almost entirely of cis people, but nobody jumps to conclusions about the impact of cisness on indoctrination susceptibility.
A good rule of thumb is that people who view philosophy as something other than an amusing pasttime are best avoided, especially when they're spending their time trying to recruit others into their cult.
But male humans are mostly selected to be soldiers by design. In some countries the only possible gender for soldiers.
So mabe it could be that there is some other agenda at play here? Mabe it is not related to trans but to grooming a target group into becoming cult members? Why is it that we always have to think there is a /Big Conspiracy/ somewhere? Don't spread around fud that you have no clue about with words like "omitting something I consider relevant" without making damn sure it realy is relevant. You just feed the trolls if you keep doing this.
This sounds weaselly enough to detract from the rest of the comment, even though you later say why it might be relevant.
If the gender identities of the Zizians aren't being brought up in the mainstream press, it's likely because it isn't relevant to the story. Responsible reporting includes not bringing up details that could encourage moral panic or hate crimes if they aren't demonstrably relevant to the story. This kind of "well actually" response is really no different than the racist complaints people make in the comments of every crime story that failed to mention how black the accused was, when race wasn't a factor, and nobody ever cares when the accused is white.
Most cults are filled with straight, cigender, white people. If every story about cult violence brought this up, its connection to the story would be rightfully mocked as contrived.
Citing the guy who tries to dig up dirt on every trans person he can isn't exactly a revelation. It's exactly what I would expect Ngo to do, and only because it validates his neo-fascist peers' anti-trans views.
The plot worked for some extent. Hence, I cannot fully express myself here in clear language. We can see that health has become a central topic of American politics but we're still dancing around some of the more important issues, because implying certain connections is taboo.
The first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging it. If not fixed, it will get worse until it becomes impossible to ignore.
I can’t believe that getting “news” about an extremist group from another extremist organization is a productive way to make sense of the world.
Honestly, read whatever you want but just be aware that radical extremist exist and commit horrific crimes and other radical extremist will exploit that.
It is radical extremism that’s dangerous in and of itself—not just a particular brand of radical extremism.
Carry on.
Ok, but is there anything false stated?
Honestly, being trans is the least interesting thing about this dude (girl?). This is not some random angry person with uncontrolled emotions.
Once steel meets flesh the Role Play ends and all that's left is Live Action, and to take a life is not a meager task when life as you knew it was a virtual mediation.
It suffices to say people sometimes have second thoughts in the moment.
But it seems they went back later and finished the job. (He survived the original attack, only to be subsequently successfully murdered)
https://www.ktvu.com/news/two-held-in-death-of-fellow-squatt...
The salacious nature of a group of trans cult members killing people across the country is story made for tabloid insanity. The hooks into Silicon Valley and side-quests about AI overlords etc are frosting on the cake.
Weird to see a community I followed show up so close to home and negatively like this. I always just read LW and appreciated some of the fundamentals that this group seems to have ignored. Stuff like rationality has to objectively make your life and the world better or its a failed ideology.
Edit: I've been following this story for over a week because it was local news. Why is this showing up here on HN now?
I had some coworkers who were really into LessWrong and rationality. I thought it was fun to read some of the selected writings they would share, but I always felt that online rationalist communities collected a lot of people with reactionary, fascist, misogynistic, and far-right tendencies. There’s a heavily sanitized version of rationality and EA that gets presented online with only the highlights, but there’s a lot more out there in the fringes that is really weird.
For example, many know about Roko’s Basilisk as a thought exercise and much has been written about it, but fewer know that Roko has been writing misogynistic rants on Twitter and claiming things like having women in the workforce is “very negative” for GDP.
The Slate Star Codex subreddit was a home for rationalists on Reddit, but they had so many problems with culture war topics that they banned discussion of them. The users forked off and created “The Motte” which is a bit of a cesspool dressed up with rationalist prose. Even the SlateStarCodex subreddit has become so toxic that I had to unsubscribe. Many of the posts and comments on women or dating were becoming indistinguishable from incel communities other than the rationalist prose style.
Even the real-world rationalist and EA communities aren’t immune, with several high profile sexual misconduct scandals making the news in recent years.
It’s a weird space. It felt like a fun internet philosophy community when my coworkers introduced it years ago, but the longer I’ve observed it the more I’ve realized it attracts and accepts a lot of people whose goals aren’t aligned with objectively “make the world better” as long as they can write their prose in the rationalist style. It’s been strange to observe.
Of course, at every turn people will argue that the bad actors are not true rationalists, but I’ve seen enough from these communities to know that they don’t really discriminate much until issues boil over into the news.
- make right-wingers feel vindication as if they were rational all along,
- cause suspicion and division within the left/liberal rationalist community, and
- make the community, its people and their ideas less palatable to the general public.
---
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1ggl0mh/jd_...
Isn't intention the essence of the concept of the "dog whistle"?
I'd also like to observe that Scott Alexander does a yearly survey, which provide unusually robust evidence that if we're going to impute to him the cultural affiliations of those who read his posts, his politics can only be "all of it".
The rationalist community I was talking about is well known. They split from SSC after the ban on culture war topics. They left Reddit a couple years ago because so many of their posts were getting flagged by Reddit for policy violations.
I'm not making this up. You can go see for yourself: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/uaoyng/meta_like_...
There isn't an official "rationalist" community. Some consider LessWrong to be the center, but there have always been different communities and offshoots. As far as I know, a lot of the famous rationalist figures haven't participated much in LessWrong for a long time now.
The far right offshoot I was referring to is known as "TheMotte" or "The Motte". It was a gathering point for people who were upset after the Slate Star Codex comment section and subreddit banned "culture war" topics because they were becoming an optics problem.
It's easy to forget because it's a "don't talk about it" topic, but after culture war topics were banned from SSC, The Motte subreddit had significantly more activity than the SlateStarCodex subreddit. They eventually left Reddit because so many posts were getting removed for violating Reddit policies. Their weekly "culture war" threads would have thousands of comments and you'd find people "steelmanning" things like how Trump actually won the 2020 election or holocaust denial.
The other groups I was referring to were CFAR, MIRI, and Leverage, all of which have been involved with allegations of cult-like behavior, manipulation, and sexual abuse. Here's one of several articles on the topic, which links to others: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experie...
Every time I discuss this on HN I get downvoted a lot. I think a lot of people identify as rationalists and/or had fun reading LessWrong or SSC back in the day, but don't understand all of the weirdness that exists around rationalist forums and the Bay Area rationalist community.
It's possible for there to be a person or group who are fine, but who attract or allow followers and fellow travellers who are not fine. Then it's possible for one person to look at that person or group and think they're fine, but for another person to look at them, see the followers, and think they're not fine. And sometimes it's hard to tell if the person or group is actually fine, or if they're really maybe actually not fine on the down low.
This problem is amplified when the person or group has some kind of free speech or open debate principle, and exists in a broader social space which does not. Then, all the dregs and weirdos who are excluded from other spaces end up concentrating in that bubble of freer speech. For example, there's an explicitly far left-wing message board that doesn't ban people for their politics; because all the more moderate (and moderate cosplaying as extreme) left-wing boards do, that board collects various libertarians, nationalists, groypers and whatnot who can't go anywhere else. Makes for an odd mix.
That actually sounds pretty fascinating. What board are you thinking of?
It's a common observation that any free speech place on the internet will disproportionately attract right-wing wackos. But arguably that says more about the left than the right. If your politics are sufficiently to the left, there are a lot of places on the internet that will cater really well to that, and delete/downvote non-conforming views pretty aggressively (thinking of reddit in particular). So arguably the bottleneck on having a true "free speech forum", where all perspectives are represented, is that people with left politics have more fun options, in the form of forums which are moderated aggressively to cater to their views.
I tried posting on TheMotte a few times, but I found it to basically be a right-wing circlejerk. It was actually a bit eye opening -- before that, part of me wondered whether the stifling conformity on reddit was intrinsic to its left politics. If a critical mass of left-wing posters had been present on TheMotte, I might have stuck around.
I think upvoting/downvoting systems really accelerate the tendency towards herd mentality. It becomes very obvious when you hold an unpopular minority view, and that's a strong motivator for people with minority views to leave.
Rationalists have always associated strongly with secular humanists and sceptics. There are multiple organisations that either include "rationalist" in their title or primary mission statement alongside sceptical secular humanism.
The complaint here seems to be that rationalists don't take progressive pieties as axiomatic.
A trans vegan gang murdering police officers is what's come out of this milieu.
I don't see how anyone can say they aren't taking "progressive pieties as axiomatic".
The OP is just taking the "everything I don't like is fascist" trope to it's natural conclusion. Up next: Stalin actually a Nazi.
That's terminologically wrong, yet practically sensible conclusion. Some European countries in fact ban both communist and nazi ideologies and public display of their symbols as their authoritarian and genocidal tendencies are incompatible with democratic principles in said countries constitution.
Not a place I think anyone should try and emulate.
Edit: Ervin Laszlo, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Peter Lorre, Harry Houdini, a wide selection of pastries. :) Also Viktor Orban, but what can you do.
The list of European countries that ban Nazi symbols includes Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Slovakia, and Sweden.
When people talk about EU countries banning of Nazi symbols, they are always referring primarily to Germany. It is the archetypical example of "countries that ban Nazi symbols".
If you want to focus on one country from that list, which is a valid thing to do, you either need to pick the archetype, or acknowledge it and then say why you're focusing on another example from the list instead.
If instead, you immediately pick the one example from that list that suits your narrative, while not acknowledging that every single other example doesn't suit your narrative, that is a bad faith argument.
In any case, recent politics aside, Hungary is an amazing country. I'm not sure about emigrating there, but I definitely recommend visiting.
The right-wing rationalist community (The Motte) arose when Slate Star Codex finally banned culture war topics. Scott Alexander wrote about it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
There's also a long history of neoreactionary factions of the rationalist community as well as a fascination with fascist ideals from the likes of Curtis Yarvin.
There's some major retconning going on in this thread where people try to write all of this out of the history of rationalist communities. Either that or people weren't aware, but are resistant to the notion that it could have happened.
Historically, good 90% of times I have seen what you say, the person or group in question turned out to actually be fascists later on. They just packed their fascism to nicer words at the time of the accusation. It kind of happened that those saying "everything I don't like is fascist" either a.) assumed the claim can not be true without bothering to think about what they read or b.) actually liked fascist arguments and not wanted to have them called what they are.
There is long history of "no one is fascist until they actually nazi salute and literally pay extremists" and "no one is sexist even after they literally stated their opinions on female inferiority again and again" and "no one is racist even as they literally just said that".
I was referring to "The Motte", which emerged after the SlateStarCodex subreddit finally banned "culture war" topics. Scott announced it in this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
The Ziz cult did not emerge from The Motte. I don't know why you came to that conclusion.
> Most "rationalists" vote Democrat,
Scott Alexander (of SlateStarCodex) did surveys of his audience. Interestingly, the culture war thread participants were split almost 50:50 between those identifying as left-wing and those identifying as right-wing.
Following the ban on discussion of culture war topics, many of the right-wing participants left for The Motte, which encouraged these conversations.
That's how there came to be a right-wing offshoot of the rationalist community.
The history is all out there. I'm surprised how many people are doubting me about this. You can read the origin story right on Scott's blog, and the Reddit post where they discuss their problems with running afoul of Reddit's content policies (necessitating a move off-platform) is still accessible: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/uaoyng/meta_like_...
> The complaint here seems to be that rationalists don't take progressive pieties as axiomatic.
No, you're putting words in my mouth. I'm not complaining about a refusal to "progressive pieties as axiomatic". I'm relaying history of rationalist communities. It's surprising to see all of the denial about the topic.
Trouble is, people are highly motivated to make the AI ever smarter.
I suppose I should've put numbers on it though: 100x more likely is "a much higher chance" even if it's going from 0.01% to 1%.
I'm conflating the original with a much lighter form of it, a dumb-smart AI that's role-playing as one with all the power of a government: sure, compared to the original this is vastly less bad, but still so bad as to be incomprehensibly awful. Merely Pol Pot on steroids rather than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc... crossed with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail
Absent that threat, nobody would have any incentive to work on creating it. So you're really talking about something completely unrelated.
I feel like doing the calculations properly requires summing over all possible strategies that posthuman superintelligences might apply in timeless decision theory. The Basilisk bootstrapping itself into being doesn't require that today's humans do that calculation correctly, but it does require that many of them come to an agreement on the calculation's results. This seems implausible to me.
> Arguably it also depends on you calculating probabilities incorrectly, though the arguments I've seen so far in this thread on the matter are reminiscent of five-year-olds who just learned the word "infinity"
This was my general reaction to the original thought experiment. It's writing down the "desired" answer and then trying to come up with a narrative to fit it, rather than starting now and working forward to the most likely future branches.
> you're necessarily also removing the bargaining chip that makes the Basilisk an interesting idea in the first place.
One of the more interesting ones in a game-theory sense, sure; but to exist, it just needs the fear rather than the deed, and this already works for many religions. (Was going to say Christianity, but your Avīci reference to Hinduism also totally works). For this reason, I would say there's plenty of wrong people who would be incentivised… but also yes, I'm talking about something slightly different, an AI that spontaneously (or not so spontaneously) role-plays as this for extremely stupid reasons.
Not the devil per se, but an actor doing a very good job of it.
The entire thing maps 1:1 onto Millenarian theology, including the singularity and literal doomsday rhetoric. I think it was Charles Stross who called it duck typed Evangelicalism at one point
I definitely need to remember that one.
There is, ironically, no escape from two facts that was well advertised at the start: (1) the easiest person for anyone to fool is themselves, and (2) politics is the mind-killer.
With no outwardly visible irony, there's a rationalist politics podcast called "the mind killer": https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-mind-killer/id1507...
Saying this as someone who read HPMOR and AI to Zombies and used to listen to The Bayesian Conspiracy podcast:
This is feeling a bit of that scene in Monty Python Life of Brian where everyone was chanting in unison about thinking for themselves.
>In the second half of the 5th century BCE, particularly in Athens, "sophist" came to denote a class of mostly itinerant intellectuals who taught courses in various subjects, speculated about the nature of language and culture, and employed rhetoric to achieve their purposes, generally to persuade or convince others. Nicholas Denyer observes that the Sophists "did ... have one important thing in common: whatever else they did or did not claim to know, they characteristically had a great understanding of what words would entertain or impress or persuade an audience."
The problem then, as of now, is sorting the wheat from the chaff. Rationalist spaces like /r/SSC, The Motte, et. al are just modern sophistry labs that like to think they're filled with the next Socrates when they're actually filled with endless Thrasymachi. Scott Alexander and Eleizer Yudkowsky have something meaningful (and deradicalizing) to say. Their third-degree followers? Not so much.
> our coherent extrapolated volition is "our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted (…) The appeal to an objective through contingent human nature (perhaps expressed, for mathematical purposes, in the form of a utility function or other decision-theoretic formalism), as providing the ultimate criterion of "Friendliness", is an answer to the meta-ethical problem of defining an objective morality; extrapolated volition is intended to be what humanity objectively would want, all things considered, but it can only be defined relative to the psychological and cognitive qualities of present-day, unextrapolated humanity.
I doubt that a guy who seriously produces this can say something meaningful at all.
(Granted, that's not a common leftist position. But maybe it should be.)
Members of these or other similar communities would do well to read anything on them dispassionately and critique anything they read. I’d also say that if they use Yudkowsy’s writings as a basis for understanding the world, that understanding is going to have to the same inadequacies of Yudkowsky and his writings. How many people without PhDs or even relevant formal education are putting out high quality writing on both philosophy and quantum mechanics (and whatever other subjects)?
So far I have 0 idea of any motive.
Supposedly it should be rational, so I would at least like to hear it, before judging deeper.
Clearly this is a poorly organized movement, with wildly different beliefs. There is no unity of purpose here. Emacs or vi, used without core beliefs being challenged?!
And one does not form a rationalist movement, and use emacs after all.
https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1RpAvd5TO5eMhJrdr2kz4...
https://nypost.com/2025/01/30/us-news/killing-of-border-patr...
Is the appellation in the headline, "radical vegan trans cult," a true description?
> Authorities now say the guns used by Youngblut and Bauckholt are owned by a person of interest in other murders — and connected to a mysterious cult of transgender “geniuses” who follow a trans leader named Jack LaSota, also known by the alias “Ziz.”
Is all this murder stuff broadly correct?
But is the trans element not a major part of this cult? It seemed to be from the linked story in the top link. But if there is something incorrect there, or false in the NYP reporting, you should point it out. If it is a major element of this cult, then far from complaining about NYP, I would complain about any news organization leaving it out of its reporting.
But all of this may be false information. I would like to hear specifics, if so.
(These aren't actually ideologically motivated killings, oddly enough: in practice they just murder people who slight them, even if "it is imperative and the greatest good that you murder people who slight you" is a key component of their decision-theoretic extremism ideology. Or at least that's how I interpret it.)
And also that the person whom you mention, who was accused of the landlord killing, was in fact married to one of the trans persons above?
Correlation is literally not causation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes they do.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf5FqX6XBJlfOShMd3U...
Did you confuse Liberal with Leftist? Liberals are anti-left
Some portion are Libertarian but there's no distinction between so-called "ancap" and libcom so that one is murky or more often coded for the former (the Libertarian party in the US is anti-left)
Well, for a period of time liberals were the left. In the last decade or so the illiberal left has come up in opposition to the illiberal right, the latter matching the former’s hypocrisy in false promises of equality (while driving division) with false promises of freedom (while expanding the rulebook).
Self-identification is confused enough but identifying others is even more muddled.
Sure. The Culture War’s belligerents are all, generally speaking, illiberal. And notably, most people steeped in it reject the term. Even those on the left.
What are they supposed to do.
Anyone reaching that conclusion though, would be a fool! For they would have forgotten to apply Bayes Theorem.
The targets for their victims seem chosen...as retaliation to defend their understanding of their own interests.
For this small group, yes. Their leader believes in Nuremberg-style trials for people who eat meat. If you want to go down the rabbit hole, it gets much weirder: https://zizians.info/
The other recent threads are/were:
The Zizians (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42898323
The Zizians and the rationalist death cult - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871
Suspects in 2 murder cases shared connection to 'Zizian' rationalist group - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849281
Edit: I guess we can have the current thread be about the recent events and keep https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871 for discussing / arguing about the generic aspects. Sorry for the complexity but in this case it appears to be essential not accidental.
Edit: incidentally, I hadn't seen anything about it on HN until today. A reminder of how much randomness affects these perceptions.
Perhaps you would also describe the Manson family as a Christian death cult.
Edit: I think "death cult" is linkbaity though, so I replaced it with "Zizians". I hope that's neutral enough for everybody because I'll be offline soon.
(Replacing a general-sensational term with a proper noun is often a good debaiting trick.)
Neat term, debaiting -- though I misread it for a moment.
Arguably the politically active "religious right" in the US has long since abandoned most everything Jesus had to offer. We still identify them as such.
I call them "anti-Christians" because it's more biblically accurate.
And yes, there are also valid arguments against either one of those points. But to meaningfully engage in such a discussion, one needs to be well-versed in theology - more so than the vast majority of people who self-identify and are normally identified as Christians.
The whole focus on "Trinity" is weird but makes a little more sense if you realize it was originally developed to stand against certain heresies, but later mutated (often re-entering those same heresies again). This one is indeed theological ... or perhaps we need a word that is to theology as historiography is to history.
But this is diverging quite far from this thread.
What people preach and what they do often diverge.
Nah, just downvote it out of perception and get back to Netflix.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I’ve been fairly skeptical of the right wing narrative that these schools have been “radicalized” (seeing as universities and young people have always been the hotbeds of leftist thought, how soon we forget the hippie movement)…but this definitely has me wondering.
Also, why is data science a common thread?
People on the spectrum as susceptible to mind-viruses and enjoy grand ideas. At least two of them it seems.