TL;DR — As SOON as a *voluntary* Brain Scan is reliable, it will be a Social Expectation. If you don’t want to show your cred, it’s because you don’t got it! Justice ensues, to the chagrin of every blowhard charmer and douche. Applause!
We can already put a rubber cap over your hair, and scan the magnetic fields coming off of your noggin, to let Ai regenerate your mental imagery. If you are watching a video of a Parrot Fish swimming the tropics, then the Ai imagines a Parrot Fish swimming in blue waters! Not an exact match, but darn good, already. In five years, you’ll prefer the match-making service that requires a Scan from male applicants, right? THAT is why you won’t need a government imposing it; we filter fine on our own.
That doesn’t even need to happen in this (or your) country! Go ahead and BAN it — because folks will FLY to those locales, just to wave their cred and get that right-swipe! People will pay exorbitant fees on the Dark Web to smuggle EEG kits, running their own hot-server just to pull bank when neighbors realize they can get scanned in your hobby-garage for $200 a pop. You cannot STOP this freight-train. And a creepy CGI Tom Hanks IS the Conductor!
Claiming that ‘women wouldn’t really…’ is like claiming that men would never want to get a Paternity Test. Do NOT doubt the demand for an Honest Man! And thus, we all got swiped under the loving eye of EEG, to tell if we are Loving and Just. I’ll go gladly — I know my choices. :)
> If you are watching a video of a Parrot Fish swimming the tropics, then the Ai imagines a Parrot Fish swimming in blue waters! Not an exact match, but darn good, already.
I read a coupla articles about it. They trained the AI on one individual's brain waves, while he looked at photos of certain images. I believe the AI also got the tags on the images. After that, the AI did indeed produce images of the photos the subject was looking at. I may not have the details quite right, but that was the gist. There's no reason to think the if you are I looked at the same images, and the AI that had learned to read one subject's brain waves for images, it would have the faintest idea what we were looking at. So OP's just wrong.
I'm hesitant to feed the troll, but they did 5 years of prison and there was no coercion. Facts which are relevant to the emotional reaction you are going for, and which you omitted. Not nice.
Could you please provide a link and quote for this correction, just to be sure? I skimmed the article, but couldn't find it. Perhaps some other source?
Speaking about missing information, you don't really need coercion to rape a passed-out drunk child, but that doesn't make it less of a rape.
So if I understand it correctly, they got jail between Sept 2017 and cca March 2022 (when the article was published), and then further 48 months of probation.
Yeah, that's what you already wrote in the previous comment, and it is definitely quite different from the version described by Hammond. Thank you!
Super-Persuasion by AI: What are the ethical implications of AI systems that can use super-persuasion? How should we prepare for the possibility that AI could influence human beliefs and decisions more effectively than humans themselves?
Cooperation and Orthogonality in AI: How does the principle of cooperation relate to the orthogonality thesis in AI? Can an AI designed to be cooperative inherently value human existence, or does this require explicit programming?
AI and the Culture Series: Drawing parallels between the story's AI world and the Culture series by Ian M. Banks, what are the potential risks and benefits of a society governed by superintelligent AI systems? How can we ensure that such AI systems prioritize human values and experiences?
Ethics as an Outer Alignment Goal: Is aiming to make AGI systems "ethical" by human standards a viable alignment strategy? What challenges arise from our imperfect understanding of ethics, and how might these impact the development of sovereign AGI?
Complexity of Values in AI Alignment: How does the complexity of human values affect the challenge of aligning AI with these values? Is there a risk that simplifying these values for the sake of AI alignment could lead to undesirable outcomes?
AI, Sociopathy, and Empathy: Can an AI system that strictly adheres to moral protocols be considered sociopathic if it lacks genuine empathy for human values? What distinguishes true ethical understanding from mere adherence to programmed rules in AI?
Learning from Ethics for AI Development: What can the field of ethics contribute to the development of AI systems that are aligned with human values? How can ethical theories inform the creation of AI that is beneficial and not harmful to humanity?
Universal Ethics and AI Interpretation: If there were a universal ethics, how could we ensure that AI interprets it in a way that is beneficial to humanity? What safeguards could be put in place to prevent misinterpretation or misuse of ethical principles by AI?
Human-AI Coexistence and Value Alignment: What strategies can be employed to ensure that AI systems not only understand but also value human existence and welfare? How can we foster a future where humans and AI coexist harmoniously, with mutual respect and understanding?
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
I wanted to ask you about a really simple chemistry thing & what GPT has to say about it. I don't like to use clorox & such in my house because I worry about the residue being bad for people and cats, so looked online for info about using household ingredients to clean a stained linoleum floor. A google got hundreds of hits, but only about 3 unique ones (the rest were copied word for word from each other). One was vinegar and water, one was vinegar and dish soap, and one, very common, was vinegar, water and baking soda. What? Sources explain that baking soda absorbs odors. But most dirty floors smell OK, and anyhow I think it's dry baking soda that's odor-absorbing. In any case, wouldn't the vinegar and baking soda react instantly, nullify each other, and produce water, co2 and salt?
So I asked GPT4 for a linoleum-cleaning recipe using household ingredients, and it recommended dish soap + vinegar. Then I asked, what about adding some baking soda. Yes indeed, said Chat, it has cleansing properties and also gets rid of odors.
Anyhow, just wanted to check with you whether using vinegar and baking soda together to clean is, as I think, nonsense.
>In any case, wouldn't the vinegar and baking soda react instantly, nullify each other, and produce water, co2 and salt?
Almost agreed. They will produce water and CO2, as you said, and sodium acetate (which basically won't do anything in a cleaning solution - essentially as inert as salt under these conditions).
I'm actually skeptical that the vinegar will be of much help. It can help dissolve lime deposits, since it is a weak acid, but I wouldn't expect it to help dissolve e.g. most food stains.
Thanks. I've noticed that a lot of "how do you" questions about practical matters I ask google turn up the same sort of junk I got with my linoleum question: Hundreds of copies of each of several main pieces of advice. I think there must be some industry where people copy advice about common humdrum problems & repost it on a site of theirs interwoven with a dozen ads. So if you don't recognize that this has happened, you get the idea that there's a LOT of support for each of the 3 main ideas, because look how many different people are suggesting them. And it seems like Chat's info is highly influenced by how many sources said a certain thing. And it does not observe the evidence that most are exact copies, nor does it call up what it knows about chemistry to check whether the advice about vinegar plus baking soda could possibly make sense.
And how many topics are there for which certain ideas are endorsed by multiple sites, but because of this copying thing that goes on, rather than because multiple thinkers arrived independently at the same conclusion? Seems like AI's tendency to think number of sites endorsing an idea is a measure of its validity will be a major problem if search engines kind of merge with AI Chat. Some users will just read the AI Chat/search engine result and accept the answer as fact. Others will ask for sources, check them, and realize the "how do you" branch of the internet is not set up to produce truth. But if enough people just accept the Chat/search engine result, then a lot of the people putting up "how do you" answers will disappear, including those who put up real answers. At least, that's how it looks to me. Does that seem plausible to you?
By the way pure vinegar actually did work pretty well on a small, especially stained area of my linoleum where I tried it. I let it sit for 10 mins then scrubbed hard and about 90% of the brownish color disappeared (original lineoleum is very pale gray with a pattern of darker gray random blogs). It seemed not really to be a stain, but a coating of some dark stuff that had dried hard, and become almost like varnish.
Congratulations on the success with the vinegar! I have only a wild guess as to what might have happened. Since the brown stuff seemed to be more like a hard coating, but didn't seem like a stain that had dissolved into the linoleum itself, maybe it wasn't an organic-soluble stuff (like tar) but rather something water-soluble that had dried to a hard coating? I've seen things like coffee with sugar dry to something like a glossy, hard coating. It might be simply the water in the vinegar that is getting it off? Again, just wild guesses...
Re
>Seems like AI's tendency to think number of sites endorsing an idea is a measure of its validity will be a major problem if search engines kind of merge with AI Chat.
Agreed. To some extent, unwarranted repetition is a problem with LLMs that mirrors problems humans have. A wrong idea, repeated by a hundred people, starts to sound plausible. In the AI case, I wish there was a way to e.g. see an airtight logical argument that some claim (like the vinegar/baking soda one) is incorrect, and knock it out, regardless of how many sites endorse it. The technology is certainly not able to do that yet.
>I think there must be some industry where people copy advice about common humdrum problems & repost it on a site of theirs interwoven with a dozen ads.
A friend of mine (who retired from Google) said that it is worse than this: They create multiple sites which all point to each other, acting like endorsements for the page rank algorithm, and the LLMs are now good enough to generate plausible-looking junk, so filtering this out is harder than when people did this with scripts. Aargh!
Yeah, you're right about the brown stuff. I should have had a control group where I just used hot water. Fortunately the staining is fairly subtle and I'm not passionate about the beauty of my kitchen floor.
Many Thanks! Glad that, whether water alone would have worked or not, in any event what you tried worked. There are many times when I should have had a control group too, but didn't.
Can someone please explain to me how it's even possible for substack to take longer to load than literally any other website I've ever seen?
Sketchy HD video streaming sites t(hat probably mine crypto in the background )don't even take an order of magnitude as long. It doesn't matter what device I use to view substack. A
Also if I click away from the tab for even a fraction of a second, then when I return to tab it will be a blank page, and reloading the content of the page takes often as long as it did to load the first time. And sometimes it never loafs and you have to reload the page.
As for why my comment has a bunch od minor errors, well don't even get me started on how bad it is to writing a comment on substack. It takes so long to change something That it's not worth it. It's only usable if you write your comment elsewhere and just copy paste it into the text box then wait multiple minutes for that to load.
Yeah, it's weird, and initially I was pretty annoyed, but in time you learn to cherish those little breaks. In our fast-paced world, there are few places remaining where you can focus on your thoughts. Substack got you! Changed tab and back? Time to roughly plan out your day! Scrolled too fast? Have a warm cup of tea while it loads! Clicked something which registered elsewhere because of lag and now you have to navigate back and load everything again? You're behind on your reading goals for the year anyway, right? Substack is truly the modern man's friend!
I wouldn't be surprised if they are using some library they have no control over that does something in quadratic or so time. (I once worked on a project where a similar performance issue turned out to be due to someone, very early on, implementing Bubble sort!) It might have worked alright when they did not have any very long threads, but now that they know it's a problem, it's probably hard to replace.
It's not clear to me that they know there's a problem. As a userbase we may need to co-ordinate to ensure that they do. I have volunteered my own Substack page for this purpose. (Click on my profile image / display name.)
I sometimes use the following trick to make commenting easier: Open the comment you want to reply to in a new tab (click on the time information next to the name), then in the new tab click reply and comment there. That way, even if the new tab is constantly being reloaded, it does not take so much time, so the commenting box does not freeze.
But of course the developers at Substack (or the guys who manage them) should be deeply ashamed.
Useless knowledge of the day: the word "cock" used to refer to the vagina in the American south, and some Black communities continue to use the word with its old meaning. The more you know.
Every once in a while I try to figure out how AGIs are going to cause the economy to grow at super high rates and can’t. The trouble is I can’t figure out how the demand side of the equation works.
Imagine that tomorrow all humans at existing companies are replaced by AGIs. So companies that make cars, TVs, furniture, films, video games, clothes, provide electricity, water, garbage service, etc..,etc., make products at 100 times the speed, and provide services at amazing efficiency.
The price of everything should drop because the supply of goods and services will increase but also because everyone will be out of work and demand will collapse. The government could try giving everyone a UBI, but where is the government going to get money? The majority of the tax base has no income, and will quickly be out of cash to pay any other type of taxes.
So the large shareholders of the companies might discover that it makes more sense to simply produce goods and services for themselves, since almost nobody can afford to buy them. At that point we probably get a revolution. Perhaps this would be when AIs kill the majority of humans.
But note that in this scenario the economy never grows much.
One take I've heard is that yes, this probably ends in a "resource curse" scenario. When a large swath of people lose their ability to engage with the economy productively, it becomes necessary for them to take what they need either A) politically, viz. UBI/FALGSC (e.g. Saudi Arabia) or subsidized work(?) (can't think of the right term) (e.g. New Deal); or B) violently viz. crime/anarchy (e.g. Angola).
But also, this assumes that there will be real gains in efficiency. Which there will be to some extent. But 2 orders of magnitude? I doubt it. The 3rd industrial revolution is overrated, and the 4th will chase even higher-hanging fruit imo.
> The majority of the tax base has no income, and will quickly be out of cash to pay any other type of taxes.
Like kenny observes, the real GDP has in fact increased. A market is essentially a 2-way auction. If you imagine an auction as selling goods for some monopoly-money, it's becomes clear that the monopoly money only has value respective to the amount of that someone won't outbid you, which is partially a function of how much of the money-supply you bid. If I bid $1 and the entire money supply has $10, I'm pretty wealthy. If I bid $1 and the entire money supply has $10^100, I ain't gonna be winning auctions. So money doesn't have value per se, it's simply a token of value which tracks the distribution of purchasing power.
If the AGIs are given legal rights, such as the right to own property and to be paid for work they do, then AGIs will start consuming goods and services produced by other AGIs. At a minimum, they'll need things like new computer chips, new robot bodies, "houses" to keep their servers and robot bodies protected, land for those houses, and electricity. Humans could tax AGIs and their AGI-AGI economic trades and use the money to support human needs.
Well, the obvious response is that the government would tax the AI or the output. Or cut out the middleman and implement socialism/communism where the products are required to be distributed for free. This would require breaking shareholders and even the concept of ownership when it comes to companies ("means of production").
The much more likely scenario is that this takes places much more slowly than "tomorrow" and people get replaced in similar ways to what's been happening for hundreds of years. Old industries die or get automated, and the employees move on to new jobs. Worst case scenario, lots of people end up in the service industry, getting paid to take care of other people. Depending on how reliable and far-reaching the AGI services would be, you may still need human technicians to fix things or it may be much cheaper to have humans do menial tasks in factories or other locations than robots with the physical capabilities required.
You may be right. But if the owners own the means of production and not the workers, a socialist revolution seems hard to pull off. The majority of humans will have nothing to offer the minority of super-wealthy humans and will have no ability to fight them because numbers won't matter. The wealthy will have no use for the current government because they can easily produce a superior military.
yes, this is what movies like Elysium try to warn us about. politics has always been governed by the elites, and so it will be up to the AI owning overlords to decide whether they prefer to share the bread and circuses, or to be in a constant state of guerilla warfare.
I think you have to look at real GDP rather than nominal GDP. If prices of everything fall, that looks like massive deflation, so even if the nominal dollar value of the economy doesn't grow, the fact that more goods and services are produced and consumed is going to mean that real GDP is substantially higher.
I don't see how you get to most people having literally *zero* income. There are some services that people will prefer human service for over AI service (whether it's nurses or sales assistants at perfume boutiques or Walmart greeters or whatever). As long as some humans still have some income, then those humans will hire humans for these services, so a good number of people will have some income.
If humans are literally unable to consume robot-produced goods, then humans will go into subsistence farming, and start trading with each other, since they can't afford robot goods, and the robot goods will be irrelevant to the human economy.
So it must be that humans will be able to consume robot-produced goods.
My knowledge of economics is very poor. I managed to earn a tech MS without taking a single econ course. Studying AI in the mid 80's, professors teaching AI technology seemed to think that truly effective AI production of goods would create the need for an entirely new system. Throw the old books out and start over.
If value can be created at very little cost neither capitalism nor it's competitor at the time, communism, could be modified to handle the new economic reality. There is a lot of economics expertise on this forum. I'd be interested to hear their takes on the very low cost labor/production that advanced AI could provide.
Personally, I think that in the most likely scenario where AI causes the economy to grow rapidly it will not be replacing humans, just allowing each human to be many times more productive. Which solves the demand side, since we'll all still have jobs. Just much more productive jobs.
Each human gets hired to be put in charge of an AI. At some point conditions improve to the point where no truly bad or hazardous jobs still exist, so young people campaign to have the age of working lowered to 8 years old. We make this bizarre sham economy where literally everyone is hired by more or less the same entity, and everyone buys from the same entity, and invests their savings in the same entity. Whether the entity is government or some mega-corp, this eventually evolved into some weird holdover rituals
At the age of 12, you enter a hiring ceremony with all the other kids and start getting your monthly paycheck. You spend most of your time doing whatever you like but you occasionally check in on the tasks that they've assigned to you, which is something something run some test on this AI and approve maintenance or whatever. You spend your pay on whatever you like. If you have a particular interest in something you can apply to switch departments. If you take a job with more responsibilities you can get a pay rise.
You live in a self driving unit that just travels around all day long running on banked solar power because we've yet to solve the finite land for finite housing issue but whatever, as long as there are roads and you don't have to actively drive you can just let your entire house sit on the road and drive itself out of the way if someone else needs the road.
Bit of leap from "AI will increase productivity per worker so much that even 8 year olds will be able to hold down a job" to "sham economy with only one employer and producer" to "everyone will live in constantly driving car houses because there isn't enough room for people". I don't think we'll run out of actual space until the population is something like...5 trillion? Most of the Earth's land space is empty.
it's empty because it's not economically productive. not everyone can build a sham city in the middle of nowhere like Vegas. people cluster in cities because usually that city has some sort of geographic advantage. either it's highly defensible, or it's near arable land, or there's a mine nearby, etc.
Okay, if we assume a continuation of Western Liberalism it seem like there no need for an underclass to fill the needs of the elite if there is no need for a large population that handles the crummier work.
Again, I’m an economic naïf so I could be missing something obvious.
An interesting theory for sibling order effects. Younger siblings get sick more. Could the older siblings be bringing more illnesses home and that hampers the younger sibling’s development?
Interesting indeed. The study is based on Danish hospital data for those less than one year old. The abstract, contained in that tweet, reports that hospitalization rates for respiratory illnesses are higher for younger siblings than older siblings. Instead of just telling readers how much higher, I suggest that all of you reading this make a guess, then click the link to check.
I didn't know precisely what I was guessing, i.e. under-1-year-olds in Denmark, but I was far too low.
'Comedian John Oliver has offered Justice Clarence Thomas $1 million a year and a $2.4 million motor coach to 'get the f**k off the Supreme Court'.
Oliver made his offer on Sunday’s episode of his HBO show, Last Week Tonight, and warned the justice he had just 30 days to accept or the offer would expire. '
What if someone started a GoFundMe intended to pay off Supreme Court Justices or elected representatives to resign? National-level figures like Clarence Thomas might get jackpots of tens of millions of dollars. Maybe even Presidents could be convinced to quit.
> The term cobra effect was coined by economist Horst Siebert based on an anecdotal occurrence in India during British rule.[2][3] The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.[4] This story is often cited as an example of Goodhart's Law or Campbell's Law.[5]
It’s pretty silly thing to consider though isn’t it? Up there with how would WWII have played out if Eleanor Roosevelt had had a Superman-like power of flight? It doesn’t matter because it didn’t/won’t happen.
But if Eleanor had been in the air when the Japanese Imperial Fleet carriers left left the Kuril Islands headed towards Hawaii, a trap could have been set at Oahu and WWII would have been over shortly after VE Day.
But who would win a fight between Superman and Jesus?
Why won't it happen? In fact, how confident are we that it *hasn't* happened for many government officials who left public office to take highly-paid jobs at various companies or consulting firms or non-profits?
In the case of a Supreme Court justice, shame alone seems enough to prevent it from happening, at least in a public manner.
In the case of elected officials, again it seems unlikely it would be done in a blatant public manner.
I suppose I can see elected officials doing it covertly. Not a lawyer so I won't comment on the legality.
High level elected officials who leave office involuntarily or because of term limits seem to do well financially anyway though giving high fee speeches for example.
In the early aughts I worked for a subsidiary of American Standard - yeah the toilet people, the subsidiary was Trane the HVAC people - on a campus level building control system. Former VP Dan Quail was an AS board member and was issued 1,000 shares of company stock per quarter for that gig.
The key difference is plausible deniability of what's happening. Someone going on TV to make the offer gives up the bag. You need a quiet conversation on the side and no paperwork directly linking the future job/payment to the current action.
Once you've been president you are so famous that you could sell your own shit if you wanted to, though in practice former presidents mostly stick to selling their memoirs & themselves as speakers, advisors, etc. So all a president would get out of the deal was an earlier arrival of a fat lump of that sweet sweet cash. And in fact if they wanted the cash before their term ended they could start selling their shit while still in the White House. Little kiosk right outside, maybe?
Wasn't someone recently joking about paying Donald Trump to not run?
It seems fine, I suppose. Maybe it's a bit too explicitly oligarchical, but we already have the idea that once people get into power, they get co-opted by The System in more subtle ways. I think it'll end up being another method of demonstrating credentials: "they offered me a million pieces of silver to betray you, but I said 'NO'!"
SBF (allegedly) looked into it, and through back channels Trump even named his price: $5 Billion. Very much not joking, though I can't imagine a world in which it happened even if the price was lower.
Hmm... Given an initial population of office holders, some greedy, some power hungry, this would tend to selectively remove the greedy ones, leaving the power hungry ones. I'm not sure that this would be an improvement.
It would be an incentive to run for an office even if you don't want it, and to do an extra horrible job if you somehow get it, to motivate people to pay you. You could even have someone start the fund for you.
If you think that Trump is bad, imagine someone in his place who actually doesn't want the job, and wants to convince people that paying him $1 billion is the cheaper option in long term.
It's too hard to get these positions in the first place for these incentivies to meaningfully change who gets these positions, and the worse job you do the lower your chances of being in office long enough to be worth paying off (for things not like the SCOTUS).
It's like people saying political betting markets will cause people to interfere with elections. If people could sway the outcome of an election *they already have more than enough of an incentive to do this*, even without betting markets.
But if you do an extra horrible job, your approval ratings get so low that you make yourself vulnerable to losing a recall election or simply losing the next normal election. If your enemies know you're on your way out anyway, then there's no incentive for them to make a GoFundMe to pay you to leave. So you must walk a tightrope while in office--be as offensive as possible to the opposition while still performing well enough to have a shot at staying in your position.
The calculus is different for people who don't have to worry about elections like Supreme Court Justices and maybe other judges. For them, I THINK the optimal strategy would be to be as partisan and as offensive as possible. Make yourself so hated by half of the population that they'd be willing to pay to get you out.
But then there's another problem: The more they hate you, the more the thought of giving you even one cent will offend them. So again, I think some kind of balance to your behavior is needed.
Another factor to consider is the rise of supporters from the opposite end of the cultural/partisan spectrum who will love you the more extreme your behavior gets. They might respond to the other side's GoFundMe to pay you to quit with a second GoFundMe to pay you to stay. Would it be considered accepting a bribe to take the latter's money?
Well, here's a spicy topic of discussion: why do feminine men and trans women get a disproportionate amount of hate directed at them? Now, pretty much every minority (and even majority) group gets plenty of hate thrown at them, but there is a sense that the groups mentioned have been a major target of culture wars for the last century or so. What's interesting is when you compare them to their AFAB equivalents: tomboys don't prompt anywhere near as big of a reaction as a man in a dress, and trans men pretty much never come up in arguments about trans issues. (Even TERFS see trans men as victims instead of oppressors.) So what's going on here?
I tried to consider biological explanations, but it doesn't make sense. There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition, and while females are much harsher judges of males than vice versa, I don't see why feminine males would prompt a particularly aggressive response. And considering there is a big difference in the level of acceptance of feminine males between cultures, the source of the hostility is likely cultural. Japan, for example, has consistently had drag queens on mainstream TV for the last few decades. Heck, one of the most popular celebrities in Japan is Matsuko Deluxe, a drag queen with a very... monumental presence (here's a picture of him https://bunshun.ismcdn.jp/mwimgs/2/4/750wm/img_241f58d51847cc3b247cafd9f05798e33509039.jpg ). At one point, he hosted a show for every day of the week.
Anyways, I'm at a complete loss for what's behind this particular brand of intolerance. Why do males consider being "gay" to be an irredeemable character flaw? Why do 55% of Americans think changing gender is MORALLY wrong? https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx Am I missing something here?
> trans men pretty much never come up in arguments about trans issues. (Even TERFS see trans men as victims instead of oppressors.) So what's going on here?
This part is easy. The remaining forms of sex segregation (changing rooms, prisons, refuges) exist primarily for the safeguarding of women. So, ever since there has been a serious prospect that men who claim to be women could be exempted from such segregation, anyone who doesn't prioritise the desires of those men over the safeguarding of women, should logically be opposed.
Furthermore, opposing these exemptions to sex segregation has been made a career-terminating act, even verging on thought crime in some countries. So it's no surprise that when the debate does happen, it gets particularly viscious. Growing up, I read stories about times & places where people would have to lie about their views in order to have any kind of tolerable life for them & their families. I never thought that would be me. (This goes well beyond losing a debate, or losing a vote, and having policy go against me.) So I will always have a special place of hatred in my heart for woke ideology.
Note, unsurprisingly, there's no evidence that men who claim to be women are any less of a safeguarding risk than those who don't. And there's some evidence (and a lot of common sense reasons) to think that the opposite is the case. eg. https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-rorschach-test/
>I tried to consider biological explanations, but it doesn't make sense. There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition,
They're not competition, they're liabilities. In a war, you want to be surrounded by strong, steadfast men who won't break under pressure. It's exactly why men bully and haze each other so much, even men who are otherwise friends - they're (at least implicitly) searching for weakness, so it's exposed now instead of in some crucial moment. If you can't tolerate some teasing or even hazing, you cannot be depended upon in a fight or other emergency. And obviously, effeminate men are going to be less mentally tough than masculine men, since one of the defining characteristics of femininity is precisely a much greater emotional sensitivity. Men generally do not treat women the way they treat feminine men, because they're women and there's no expectation of them being able to handle bullying the way men can. In the cases of women working in male spaces, such as combat military roles or as police officers, you do hear cases of women being bullied. But I would be almost certain you hear about it precisely because of the inability of women to handle such things rather than them being disproportionately bullied (probably the opposite is true). Men simply know and expect that other men will give them a hard time to test them and its only when a man is weaker than usual or faces fairly extreme treatment that they'll make as much noise about it.
You also want your sons and brothers and male cousins to be strong men who fufill their traditional roles of protecting the group, providing for the group, fucking lots of women and making lots of babies. In a traditional society, a man who acts like a woman cannot fully fufill the role of either a man OR a woman, and so they're usually very undesirable (insert some nonsense about gay uncles helping raise kids here). You also don't want to be around these people because it may make others assume you're like them too.
We don't live in such environments, but these things don't just go away.
>Japan, for example, has consistently had drag queens on mainstream TV for the last few decades.
Japan is less accepting of 'LGBT' than west is (even just based on the claims of 'LGBT activists' themselves), and the existence of a drag queen on TV is not a good proxy for Japanese men's views on masculinity generally. Drag queens are ubiquotous in the US, for example, but very few straight men want anything to do with them. Straight female fans of 'RuPaul' probably outnumber straight male fans by 2 orders of magnitude or more, so you obviously can't look at the cultural dominance of this stuff and conclude American men are fine with effeminate men, so I'm not sure why you would think you could for Japanese men.
And even if a culutral change results in a different behavior, it doesn't mean that the previous behavior wasn't significantly biological. It's perfectly coherent to say that a certain behavior is the default for humans but a particular culture may take hold that modulates this. It's certainly more coherent than thinking everything is independently culutral but by some grand coincidence, most peoples throughout history just happened to converge on similar cultures in a particular area.
This is particularly obvious in places like Japan, who for most of their history have had an extremely masculine culture but suffered severe societal trauma in and following WW2. But there is almost certainly a genetic component too. WW2 resulted in around 2 million military deaths for Japan, which removed 2 million mostly young men from the gene pool, men who were almost certainly the most genetically masculine of their generation, leading to a somewhat genetic feminization of Japanese men in future generations. People, even on here, have this bizarre idea that ethnic populations are genetically fixed over time, but it's not even remotely close to true.
Nitpick but Re: the last point, supposing men are being conscripted, it is not clear at all to me that those that died during WW2 were "the most genetically masculine." maybe this holds true in some weird edge cases where a man did not get conscripted because he could pretend he was a woman, but for like >95% of men I'd guess this wasn't necessarily the case
(I come at this from a conservative position; I've tried to be as neutral as possible)
I suspect this also ties into societies with a bias against homosexuality having a slightly higher tolerance on the edges for more masculine homosexual behavior, be it ancient warrior culture, 'rum, sodomy, and the lash', or prison rape. The ability to force yourself on someone is evidence of strength. What ended tolerance for that behavior was increased societal focus on protecting the weak and an increased military focus on discipline and professionalism over individual strength.
Really, the answer is that there are multiple reasons today. Hammond's answer is a good example of why western society frowned on homosexual behavior up through the sexual revolution (and why militaristic authoritarian societies even today crack down hard on it). Those prejudices linger today. On top of that, you get the more modern reasons John Shilling mentions below, and that the rush by the libertine to embrace all manner of behavior once labeled deviant has given cover to a lot of behavior defensively viewed as predatory, and traditionally still fathers take protecting their daughters very seriously.
My take: like polices like. As in, women police women harshly, men police men harshly.
The female gender role policing tends to not show up in things like hate crime stats, because it tends to be passive aggressive and very social. It's things like shunning, ignoring preferences, buying inappropriate gifts, etc. There's also been a very concerted effort to fight it over the past 100 years or so! I think 2nd wave (pants wearing, bra burning etc) was explicitly a rejection of enforcing strict gender roles on women, and now it's no longer cool to police women, and as someone socialised female, I think it's genuinely a much more lax gender role than the male one right now (this has not always been true - it's very recent).
On the flipside, men police by physical violence, so it shows up statistically. There also hasn't been a huge movement fighting for the male equiv of the right to wear pants brand of feminism for the past century.
Why police gender norms at all? I think it's kind of about protecting the semantics of the role. If you're really invested in performing a gender role, as a critical part of your identity, it becomes a personal threat if someone threatens the sanctity of this role. You beat up the [insert slur] because you don't want to be associated with that sort of thing. Controlling the behaviour of other members of your group becomes a vital part of maintaining the definition of your identity.
You kind of see this even in the LGBT spaces! There's a trend of some gay people aggressively policing behaviour and language used within the community, because they feel really attached to their identity [gay, trans, etc]. Anyone with the same identity behaving a way they disagree with feels like a contradiction with their gay or whatever identity.
It's a solved problem in religious spaces - they simply disown their wrongdoers. But if it's a label like "man" or "gay" that are kind of both self identified and applied externally, you can't really excommunicate someone from those labels.... So you attack them to make them stop.
(And recall that the reason why this doesn't happen with women is because of the enormous amount of propaganda in the last century to change the standards, but it sure used to)
Also, a feminine man elicits different responses from (some) cis women compared to a trans woman. A feminine man often falls into a "gay best friend" kind of role - a non-sexual non-threatening man for a lot of cis women. Cis women who do react with disgust tend to be people who are invested in the sexuality/masculinity of this particular guy (mothers and romantic partners) but unallied cis women are typically not aggressive.
Trans women get aggression from some cis women who are invested in their identities as women as biologically determined. A lot of cis women who aren't big on the bio determination get weird in other ways (ie subtly or not, slowly policing the way the trans woman does feminity - this may be unsolicited outfit tips or dieting tips or whatever)
One thing worth considering is that much of the violence directed against trans women, and I think a majority of the actual homicides, is against MtF sex workers. Who are often perceived as selling the product, "sex with a woman!", and once the bait is taken switching to "...nah, I really have a penis, but you still want me, admit it!"
Lots of straight men take it badly when someone accuses them of being even a little bit gay, and right when they think they're about to have sex (the good kind) is not the time to hit them with that.
I don't know how much of this carries over into more general social interaction, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were significant.
Also, in the US, it's almost exclusively black and to a lesser extent hispanic men doing the murdering, and these men are more hostile to homosexuality than others (even though black men are also more likely to be gay or trans).
> One thing worth considering is that much of the violence directed against trans women, and I think a majority of the actual homicides, is against MtF sex workers.
Wait, really? I don't mean this in a hostile way, but I'd love to see the statistics on this. (I tried a bit and came up empty.) I do realize that most of my experience with trans women is unrepresentative, being largely with programmers and artists, and as far as I'm aware I only have a couple of sex workers in the distant reaches of my social circle, both of whom are cis women.
And here you go. A study of sex worker murders. (I heart Google Scholar!) I'm afraid the data does not support John's hypothesis (although it's a small selection sample). But without looking this up I would have tended to agree with John.
"Transgender sex worker victims were mostly transfeminine (94%) and non-Hispanic black (89%). Money conflicts (78%) most commonly precipitated homicides among transgender sex worker victims."
Thanks for the abstract. But, you would have agreed? Seriously?
I can easily imagine that trans women have a higher rate of being sex workers than cis women, and that trans women have a higher rate of suffering violence than cis women, and that sex worker women have a higher rate of suffering violence than non sex worker women, and that trans sex worker women have a rate of suffering violence that's even higher than all these things combined would indicate (for reasons that John mentioned). Ditto for homicides. That's all what I would have assumed from general principles.
But I find it difficult to imagine that the percentage of SWers among trans women is high enough that homicides against them count for more than 50% of the homicides against trans women. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe enough trans women go into SW, and the homicide rate among trans SWer women is high enough relative to the homicide rate among trans non-SWer women, that it actually goes over the 50% mark. Hm.
I tried pulling some numbers out of my ass and running the statistics, but that was unsatisfying; too many unknowns. How about this:
That's 32 killed in 2022, so to support your theory, more than 16 of them would need to be SWers at the time. That seems plausible, especially given the racial disparities mentioned in the article (although the overall number is tiny enough that I'd worry about noise) (and of course this is just one year that I happened to find some stats on). Other things of note: 26 were trans women, 26 were non-white, 19 were black (implying 6 were white and 7 were neither black nor white).
It looks like black people made up 10470/19196=54.5% of murder victims. But from before, 19/32=59% of trans murder victims. Holding 13 non-black trans murder victims constant, that would mean that the non-trans murder rate would imply 15 black murder victims, leaving a gap of 4 extra black trans murder victims which need to be explained by transness. (I think this is assuming the rate of transness among black Americans is equivalent to the rate of transness among all Americans.)
Your stats from 2012-2020 said 89% of trans SWer murders were of black trans SWers. So (forgive my sins o gods of statistics) there's an 89-54.5=34.5% gap there. That's about 1/3rd. If we assume all 4 of those extra black trans murder victims were SWers, and the only thing boosting the black trans murder rate is SW, then we can assume that roughly 12 of those 32 trans murder victims were SWers, which would explain the racial discrepancy. 12 is less than half of 32, so I'll assume I'm correct, for the 5 seconds it will take for someone who knows statistics to demolish this house of cards.
(The really strange thing, IMO, is the 7 of 32 trans murder victims who were neither white nor black. That category is insignificant in the overall murder statistics, but here it's a almost quarter of the total. What's up with that?)
----
I wonder if the money conflict statistic implies that the clients didn't viscerally object to the sex acts, but instead didn't think they needed to pay (as much) because of the transness of the SW. That's kind of interesting; I hadn't put together that "trans women are real women" could mean "equal pay for equal work" in the right context.
I don't have enough hours in the day to check all the assertions and claims I've seen in the media, on Twitter, or AC10. However, the general media consensus is that there's a lot of violence and hatred directed against trans people. I was willing to at least provisionally believe that trope because I had no interest in the subject. And being a Leftie, I'm generally more sympathetic to the underdog. So, without thinking deeply about it, yes, I would have agreed. Luckily, there was a lot of speculation and opinion on this thread, and I thought to myself, "What the heck? Enough of this useless supposition! Is there any data?" And voila!
Well, 37.5% is a lot closer to 50.1% than I was expecting, so in that sense you were more right than I was. And I too expected a higher homicide rate against trans people. I find it hard to believe that they were **only** 32 out of 19196 murders. That's 1 in 600, or 0.1667%, when they make up something like 1% of the population. I suppose it's possible that a lot of murders are situational, and trans people tend to avoid those situations (with the exception of sex work). And like with some other stuff, maybe homicides aren't a good measure of societal prejudice. "Trans people are 6 times less likely to be murdered than cis people" is not where I thought this would go.
2019 is the last year I see murder stats from the FBI. So, out of morbid curiosity...
-------------------
User
How many murders were then in the US in 2019?
ChatGPT
In 2019, there were approximately 13,927 murders in the United States.
User
What percentage of the US population identifies as trans?
ChatGPT
The exact percentage of the U.S. population that identifies as transgender is not precisely known, as different surveys and studies may provide varying estimates. However, a widely cited study by the Williams Institute estimated that about 0.6% of U.S. adults identify as transgender.
--------------
0.006*13,927=~84
So we'd expect to see approximately 84 transgender people murdered in 2019 as if their homicides were proportional to their representation in the US population...
---------------
User
how many transgender people were murdered in 2019?
ChatGPT
In 2019, at least 27 transgender or gender non-conforming individuals were murdered in the United States. It's important to note that this number may be higher due to misreporting or misgendering in the media and law enforcement records.
--------------------
That PBS article that Moon linked to says 32 trans people were murdered in 2022. If trans-identifying people are really 0.6 percent of the population, then it doesn't look like they're being murdered in disproportionately high numbers. In fact, they seem to be underrepresented in the statistics.
My guess is that society sees MtF trans as particularly problematic because it represents someone of a privileged class improperly claiming the protected status of an oppressed class. Women get certain benefits in society for being "the weaker sex" and we police unfairly gained benefits harshly. It's the same reason society is so harsh on transracial individuals. It's curious how transgender has slipped past these defensive barriers to the extent that it has. FtM trans doesn't generate nearly as much consternation because its going the opposite direction: someone from the oppressed class rejecting its social benefits. FtM trans children generate a disproportionate amount of pearl clutching because it is viewed as a member of an oppressed class being taken advantage of by a subset of society.
I don't have a good theory about why straight men hassle gay men. It could just be a generic anti-deviance stance, with sexual deviance generating a disproportionate amount of ire.
Shouldn't this be the other way round? I mean, the theory is that in patriarchy men are privileged and women are oppressed -- so a privileged person deciding to get oppressed should be okay, while an oppressed person demanding privilege should be strongly opposed.
Well, there are various statuses superimposed on any individual or group, some are even contradictory if considered in a too coarse-grained manner. But what generates ire is when someone receives a social benefit without sufficient warrant (with its corresponding cost to society). If we agree that women receive social benefits due to their sex, then an interloper claiming those benefits will be harshly resisted.
You rightly point out the analogous dynamic of oppressor/oppressed superimposed on men/women. The difference is that this dynamic does not carry an explicit cost to society that one could unfairly claim. Men aren't privileged because of some kind of social endowment, they are privileged because of traits that society happens to favor, e.g. assertiveness, dominance, risk taking, etc. Someone from the oppressed class calling themselves a member of the oppressor class gets none of these benefits by fiat; there's no box to check on a form that will endow one with these socially favored traits. Someone "switching side" from oppressed to oppressor in this manner can easily be ignored with little to no disruption to the social order.
To get super caveman-binary-gender-role here, fertile females are among a tribe's most precious resources, and MTFs are making a claim on the energy=time=life that the tribe uses to protect those resources, while failing to have any of the value. I've got trans friends, and I hate to bring up imagery that could be memetically used against them, but my guess is that what conservative people see in MTFs is rather like what I see when I watch a video of a cuckoo chick manipulating its "parents". (To be clear, I think this is in a sense a technological limitation, and if we had the ability to do Bujoldian or Varleyan sex swaps, it would almost entirely cease to be a problem.)
I suspect that this caveman gender stuff lurks deep within most humans' brains, but that it's possible to find new ways of relating to gender that don't involve this caveman stuff. One of the "however"s is that the people who aren't on board with the new ways are going to freak the fuck out about places where the new ways conflict with the old. (Another of the "however"s is that I suspect a lot of people who think they're on board with the new ways, aren't actually as fully on board as they think. And a third "however" is that the caveman gender stuff is, and I think I'm using this term right, "lindy", and that getting rid of the caveman gender stuff is a bet that our current society is sustainable and future-proof.)
I think it's simply that femininity itself is looked down on. Men have traditionally viewed women as weak, irrational, submissive, trivial, etc. (and plenty still think this way).
A man who acts like a woman is exhibiting these less admirable traits, so of course they also are looked down on. A lot of men don't particularly like women, but they at least want to sleep with them. The feminine man doesn't even offer that.
A related point - people often assume that bisexuality is a "phase", but for men it is assumed to be a phase on the way to gayness, while for women it is assumed to be a phase they will grow out of and be straight. That is, it is assumed, regardless of the sex of the bisexual person, that they are only temporarily (pretending to be) sexually interested in women, and are long-term just going to be sexually interested in men.
Whilst it is certainly true that many transwomen are, from the transsceptic POV, "feminine men", there is a distinct phenomenon of extremely masculine transwomen. Think Caitlyn Jenner, or the former WWE wrestler who recently transitioned. These seem to be a different category to those transwomen who in another life may have stayed as gay or bisexual men. Steve Sailer has mentioned this in the past- one simple explanation might be that prolonged steroid usage is playing a role. This would explain the cited examples, but not more everyday cases where the transwoman was clearly not a very effeminate man but rather a regular, or perhaps very large, man. Another hypothesis (and it can run in parallel to the steroid/hormonal argument) is that these transwomen are motivated by an autogynephilia, which as an aspect of male sexuality is unfeminine.
In this view, AGP transwomen can be viewed as a continuation of crossdressing men (Eddie Izzard for example, before announcing he was trans) whilst feminine transwomen are a continuation of the catamite tradition.
If you view transwomen as by and large either former bottom gay men (feminine) or AGP men (masculine) with some hormonal confounders, then the framing in the OP of transphobia=anti-feminine men-ness seems wrong. AGP transwomen are also subject to scrutiny and ridicule, perhaps more so. Feminine transwomen in the catamite, thai ladyboy mold will face similar issues to extremely feminine gay men. But AGP transwomen (or more charitably, clearly masculine and high T transwomen) will face different but no less severe criticism from society.
> There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition
This reminds me of a certain species of fish, I do not remember its name, whose sexual strategy is that there is a huge dominant male jealously guarding his harem of smaller females... and there are also some little males who are incapable of fighting the big one, but their strategy is that they pass for females and sneak into the harem where they have access to the females.
The feminine man can still get your girlfriend pregnant. (Even if he seems gay, maybe he is actually bisexual.)
>There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition,
There's also no reason to see them as allies. If you assume that men have particular roles to fill in society, then men who stop trying to be men are cowards and deserters. Whereas women who want to be men are taking up the burden and easing the load on everyone else.
If men have particular roles to fill in society, then women do too. Why should switching roles in one direction be seen differently than switching roles in the other direction?
It's about minimum thresholds. If it takes twenty people to put out a fire, and you have 18, everything burns. But who knows what the threshold even is. What happens if you have twenty and a guy's injured when you need him? What happens if you have fifty and thirty one guys are injured? No such thing as too many bodies, but any loss can be the loss that kills you.
That makes sense, but it sounds suspiciously altruistic (from the group perspective). Someone volunteers to pay the cost of confrontation just to improve the chances of group survival. Nature usually doesn't work like this. Usually there is a personal advantage for the one doing the prosocial thing.
I wonder, maybe our ancestors were cannibals at certain stage of evolution. The reward for the one who killed the "socially undesired" people was that he could eat them afterwards. Then the cannibalism somehow got selected against, but the bullying instinct remained.
I think it fits. I think Bigots don't usually act on their own, they discuss with their mates and make sure they have allies before they confront the "deviant". They may act alone by making a comment in passing or so on, but this can be explained by the potential benefit to status in their ingroup by bragging rights etc.
Not a century, no. A decade at most. They're the current Big Thing that the cultural elites need to signal their sympathy towards, and this makes signaling opposition to them a counter-elite rallying cry. It's semi-random and contingent and will move on to some other identity in a few years.
I really wish people started figuring out that essentially all the discourse fads are just awful people with metaphorical loudspeakers playing status games which you, their audience, automatically lose the moment you take a side.
trans people have been around for far longer than a decade, but the degree of mainstream backlash and even awareness is in many respects new; /pol/ and adjacent boards wouldn't call anyone who disagreed a "tranny" a decade ago, and politicians even in deep red states didn't attempt to ban medical transition
Also, in conservative circles FtM do have a spotlight on them at the moment. The rates have exploded, which people take as evidence that girls who are uncomfortable about their sexuality get "tricked" into thinking they're trans. This would technically make many FtM trans people victims, but it also casts doubt on the legitimacy of every FtM trans person. I haven't checked for sources myself, but if the number of people declaring themselves FtM indeed has exploded, that is most easily explained by some sort of social contagion.
I'm not connected to conservative circles, but my impression is that the focus on FtM is mostly about the "F" side of it: "they're coming for your women". Or rather, "they're coming for your daughters". It's a standard conservative-gender-role focus on protecting the fragile, precious, valuable resource that is a young girl.
From a transphobic point of view, trans women are feminine men, only more so. And the transphobic point of view is relevant because the question is about the behavior of transphobes.
Not to get excessively binary, but there's two categories under consideration: "trans people" and "people who aren't trans but still adopt aspects the opposite gender". The theory is that in each of those categories, there's two halves, and one half gets more hostility than the other: MTF more than FTM, and feminine men more than masculine women.
Assuming that this is correct, what's the mechanism behind it? Simply positing "heteronormativity" is insufficient to explain the difference. And do the differences inside the two categories share the same mechanism? And if so, what is it? If you want to make an argument that hostility against MTFs has a completely different basis than hostility against feminine men, great, let's hear it!
Women are the ones who are sought after, men have to do the seeking. Women are born as objects of desire, men have to be built or perish. “Women and children first.” “The fairer sex.” Men are the ones who have to go fight and die in wars. Etc.
(I’m not arguing that any of this is necessarily true or accurate or that men/women have it better/worse/easier/harder. I’m just listing common cultural tropes.)
So perhaps MtF (or men generally acting feminine) is perceived as a man trying to “cheat” his way to obtain certain societal status that he don’t “deserve”.
In a similar vein, (some/many) heterosexual men perceive femininity as sort of the ultimate form of perfection/beauty and go to great lengths to pursue a mate to fulfill this desire. So maybe MtF or men with feminine behaviors is viewed as a “false prize”, something they very much don’t desire and in fact are in competition with (another man) trying to pose as their object of desire, or maybe it’s simply wires being crossed in a way which produces a much more extreme reaction than with FtM (“they talk/laugh/act/look like a sexy woman, but they’re actually a man/adversary, and this is a really uncomfortable conflict!”)
> there is a sense that the groups mentioned have been a major target of culture wars for the last century or so
Has it really though? Half a century ago, a straight man wearing a dress was either a hilariously funny comedy act (Monty Python) or a bizarre eccentricity (J Edgar Hoover, allegedly) but not something that people spent a lot of time thinking about.
A non-straight man wearing a dress... well, that's a whole different kettle of fish. That's more "disgust reflex" than anything else.
There's a long historical taboo in Western Culture against dressing across one's sex and class. My understanding is that sumptuary laws in medieval Europe not only regulated the types of clothing and accessories that people could wear based on their social status, but they also regulated the clothing that the sexes could wear. The fact that the laws went out of the way to define sex-coded dressing, makes me think some people were cross-dressing even way back when. And there are a lot of cross-dressing tropes in high-medieval literature. The Pardoner in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales comes immediately to mind. The Pardoner is accused of being a gelding or "a mare" and Chaucer endows the Pardoner with effeminate traits included cross-dressing.
I can't opine whether the historicity of cross-dressing has been over-emphasized in modern culture wars, but it seems to me that modern culture wars are a continuation of historical social patterns that go back at least to the high middle ages.
Looking at Wikipedia, I didn't find sumptuary laws based on sex but only class. And a few decades ago there were hit movies where the male protagonist pretended to be female in their public lives, Mrs Doubtfire and Tootsie.
Google Scholar shows a lot of papers and books about sumptuary laws and cross-dressing. Unfortunately, they're mostly behind paywalls. But here's a doctoral thesis by Brett Seymour that I've been plowing through for the last couple of days that has some interesting tidbits. What's interesting to me is the sixteenth and seventeenth-century English sumptuary laws made exceptions for theaters. Women weren't allowed on the stage, and men (frequently boys) portrayed the female characters. So, there were exceptions to the sumptuary laws made for the theater.
Scroll down to the chapter entitled "Cross-dressing in the Real World." There are summaries of court cases against cross-dressers.
"In 1599, for example, John Watkins was cited for going about the street in woman‘s apparel, being the parish clerk at that time‘, who explained in his defence that 'at a marriage in merriment he did disguise himself in his wife‘s apparel to make some mirth to the company' In 1607, Matthew Lancaster, wore woman‘s apparel like a spinster‘ during a Maytide procession and also used the merriment defence."
>My understanding is that sumptuary laws in medieval Europe not only regulated the types of clothing and accessories that people could wear based on their social status, but they also regulated the clothing that the sexes could wear.
I could see some sympathy with regulating clothing by social status if e.g. "impersonating a nobleman" carried the same sort of fraudulent exercise of power that "impersonating a police officer" does today. Did it?
It seemed to be more about preserving the social class system. Even though a wealthy merchant could be as rich as a lord, the lords didn't want wealthy merchants putting on airs.
Many Thanks! You may well be right. Also, the line may be blurry
>the lords didn't want wealthy merchants putting on airs.
"putting on airs" sounds like claiming (hereditary??) social status that the merchants weren't entitled to.
There may be a blurry line between social status and privileges that the lords were (legally? customarily?) entitled to. ( Though I presume that e.g. the pre-1999 hereditary seats in the UK's House of Lords would have been difficult for a wealthy merchant to surreptitiously occupy, regardless of a violation of sumptuary laws. :-) )
This doesn't apply to femmy men & trans women, but I think one reason gay males have attracted so much hate is that male sexuality is scary. Having homosexual men around makes straight men go thru some of the shit women do: A man is looking at you and imagining sticking his dick into you. He *probably* won't try to do it against your will, but it's not out of the question that he'll try. But even the fact that he's thinking about it is hard to take.
I'm not sure why you think that doesn't apply to trans women - it's still plausible that they are imagining sticking their dick into you, with the somewhat predatory take on sexuality and the musculoskeletal development that comes from having gone through puberty marinating in testosterone. It may or may not be true, but to either a straight man or a lesbian woman it is still a frightening possibility.
Well, I suppose it might apply to some trans women. But my experience of trans women is that they don't come across that way. Some of that may be the feminine appearance and manner, but also they're usually taking testosterone blockers and estrogen, and many have been for years, and I think that changes them in a way others can sense.
To be fair, though, a lot of what gives me that I'm-with-a-male feeling is just knowing that I'm with a male. I've known enough of them, and listened to enough of them tell me their thoughts, that knowing someone is male stirs up the sense that I may be an object of their lust. And it's a subtle component of my experience, generally way in the background.
IIRC, there was a horrifying little study last year about gender in online chess. Apparently, women played worse if their opponent had a masculine name or no name, but played better ("normally") if their opponent had a feminine name. Regardless of the actual player on the other end.
Hm. Riffing on what you say, if they view MTFs who are attracted to women as having "male" predatory sexuality, this categorizes the MTFs as a threat and as competition, in a way that an F attracted to women isn't?
In theory. But the MtF's I have known don't have a male sort of presence. I'm sure some of that is that is a product of deliberate self-presentation, but probably hormones play a part. MtF's take testosterone blockers and estrogen.
In my experience, the "male presence" thing does go down over time, on average, probably for both the self-presentation and hormonal reasons you mention. But it can pop out sometimes, especially in anger. And I wonder whether the average random anti-trans person talking on the Internet has a lot of in-person experience in neutral circumstances, or whether their experience of MTF people is mostly through images and videos and text and mostly centering on angry MTF people.
Maybe. I guess what I really think is that people are just prone to really strong reactions to sexual things. There's finding certain things wildly hot, and then there's the reverse, of finding certain things really repellant and weird. A lot of people take their person revulsions as evidence the behavior in question is bad, dangerous, or only practiced by nasty, scummy people. I think that's mostly what's going on with the loathing of trans people -- it's a big EWWW. I feel a mild EWWW myself about certain trans-related things, but I just don't take my reaction as information about how I should view trans people.
> people are just prone to really strong reactions to sexual things
Heck yeah. We really don't like acknowledging that we're monkeys, and that all our vaunted "intelligence" and "free will" is bound up in a meat shell that acts like a cross between a chimpanzee and a bonobo.
> A lot of people take their person revulsions as evidence the behavior in question is bad, dangerous, or only practiced by nasty, scummy people.
Yeah. I rather liked the philosophy of "YKINMKBYKIOK", but I feel like it may have fallen out of favor.
In the evolutionary environment, a tribe of men who were unwilling to fight would be in serious peril, whereas a tribe of tomboyish women would be no big deal, since their preferences could be overruled in any case by physically stronger men.
People don't want their sons having their dicks surgically removed, and creating a stigma against it is an effective method of discouragement similar to obesity, smoking, dropping out of high school, etc.
This might be a longshot, but I tried it in the past and it worked :
Do any of you work for or own a company looking to hire remote, entry level data scientists, data analysts or ML engineers ? Anywhere in North America is good as long as its remote. Let me know, would be very helpful and it would be amazing to work with rationalists !
Thought I'd send you a coupla links. First is to remote jobs, Hacker News one I've forgotten now, but I think a lot were for remote. No special connection to rationalists.
A year or so ago there was talk here about how Bean, the guy with the great blog about the navy, claimed that a nuclear war wouldn't kill as many people as popularly believe. IIRC, he said something like the blast from a nuclear warhead would only kill people within about a 3 mile radius, radiation would be bigger lethal problem, but we aren't talking about the destruction of large cities or anything like that.
I just listened to the Dwarkesh podcast with guest Richard Rhodes, author of Making of the Atomic Bomb, who said that some of the original physicists forgot to account for the destructiveness of the fire from a hydrogen bomb, which would be much bigger than the blast zone and could destroy an entire city as big as Moscow.
Whats the point of talking about *A* nuclear warhead blast, when many (most?) modern weapons are MIRV missiles that deliver multiple >hiroshima sized blast with each missile, spread miles apart? (Oh, and of course, there's thousands of these that can and would be fired in a nuclear war).
The original question from about a ye ago was whether most humans would die in a nuclear war and the answer was no, it would probably just set civilization back a century or two .
A related question. Richard Rhodes also says in the same podcast that computer simulations from 2007 showed that the dreaded "nuclear winter" after an atomic exchange would be even worse than previously believed. (Granted, 2007 is a long time ago now but Rhodes said this only a few months ago.) He claims, even a nuclear war between only India and Pakistan could result in a couple billion deaths from failed crops over the following year.
That contradicts what I have more recently heard, which is that "nuclear winter" isn't a real thing, that it's scenario was only a scare tactic.
I think this - https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Winter - is as good a short summary as you are likely to find. There were some interesting discussions on SSC back in the day as well, but to the same end result.
I'd be interested to know more about what Richard Rhodes thinks, but it's quite possible that he hasn't really kept up with the field except to have noticed that there were a couple of new papers in 2007 or so whose capsule description was "nuclear winter is real bad". Which there were, but I've read those papers and they're the sort of thing that makes me want to say "replication crisis".
Well, OK, maybe we don't want to do multiple replications of Global Nuclear War just for scientific bragging rights. But if you're not validating your models against the Australian wildfires and the Kuwaiti oilfield fires, you're not even trying.
I don't have subject-matter expertise here, but I did want to say for anybody who isn't familiar, the blog in question is https://www.navalgazing.net/ and it has some really good stuff on it if you want detail-rich explanations of technical topics related to the military.
The effect of fires would be very dependent on the city (built of wood? lots of trees?) and the weather.
It's easy to imagine that a 5km radius ring of fire in the centre of a large city would easily swamp the ability of the survivors to fight it (and besides, everyone will be fleeing, not firefighting) so you're basically stuck waiting for the fire to burn itself out. On a cold rainy day that happens quickly, on a hot dry windy day I can easily imagine everything burning (or at least everything downwind).
Firestorms have always factored into people's estimates as to the destruction and lethality of nuclear war. I can't speak for the theoretical physicists who started the whole thing, but once the military started testing the things, the incendiary effects were quickly appreciated.
And for the largest hydrogen bombs, the big multi-megaton ones everybody worried about during Peak Cold War, the relative scaling laws meant that the incendiary effects were quite dominant. The 50-megaton "Tsar Bomba", to a first approximation, ignites everything burnable out to 50 kilometers and does some other stuff you probably won't care about compared to that.
But Tsar Bomba was too big and cumbersome to be practical, and since the 1980s at the latest most everyone has converged on weapons in the 100-500 kiloton range as optimal for most applications. Those weapons are much more balanced in effect. The blast of a 300-kT bomb will destroy unreinforced buildings out to about 5 km, and it will reliably start fires out to about 7 km. And the two effects are synergistic; starting fires is much more destructive when you tear open buildings to expose all the flammable stuff and scatter fuel across the streets and other potential firebreaks.
So we can sort of round that off to "within 6 km, pretty much everything is destroyed, beyond that there's damage but mostly things can be repaired".
The City of Moscow seems to have a radius of about 30 kilometers, so to totally destroy it you'd need a couple dozen of those 300-kt warheads. Or about a third of a Tsar Bomba, but the couple dozen smaller warheads will be cheaper and give you more flexibility. And for Moscow we'd probably assign a couple dozen warheads just on general principle, but cities that aren't so central and prestigious to the enemy state will probably just see key military and industrial areas flattened+incinerated.
Which, to be clear, is still a Very Bad Thing and we should try not to do that. But it's not X-risk bad.
Well, we're not talking about just one nuke here. The US claims to have 3,708 nukes stockpiled, while the Federation of American Scientists estimates it to be 5,244 instead. https://fas.org/initiative/status-world-nuclear-forces/ Whichever one is correct, Russia is predicted to have even more nukes stockpiled than the US. Even if it did "only" obliterate people in a 3 mile radius, 28 square miles times several thousand nukes is... well, a very large area. Nowhere near enough to glass the entirety of one of the bigger states, but it could take out most big cities in the country.
The main worry with Russia is that if they keep losing this war, there is a non-zero chance they will start launching nukes at targets outside Ukraine as a Hail Mary play, effectively holding humanity hostage to protect their ambitions. There is a paper saying that a full-on nuclear war between the US and Russia would kill 5 billion people, not from the nukes themselves, but from the massive nuclear winter it would cause. Not to mention it would cause a full-on mass extinction of wildlife; after all, this situation is basically the same as what killed off the dinosaurs. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0
Just doing the math on the size of the direct devastation, using inflated versions of your numbers:
12,000 nukes each destroying 28 square miles is 336,000 square miles. The United States is close to 3.8 million square miles. The entire planet is over 196 million square miles.
It would take over 135,000 nukes to destroy the entire United States and seven million to destroy all surfaces of the world.
Even one well placed nuke would cause significant devastation to the world economy (New York harbor, New York Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange, etc.), but would not be that devastating to humanity.
Good point. That would still take ~1,800 nukes to destroy all US urban areas entirely, which is a significant portion of all of the nukes in existence. There aren't enough nukes to do that to every country.
Humanity could totally wreck the global economy and destroy significant portions of the world population, but even using every nuke on the planet it wouldn't even be close to extinction. More people may die in the ensuing famines and successive wars as the new political order gets sorted out, but the nukes themselves cannot fully devastate the planet.
It’s interesting that that paper is recent. I assumed the nuclear winter theory had been debunked - the soot just doesn’t last that long in the atmosphere and doesn’t reach the stratosphere. Scientists were predicting some global cooling as the oil field burned but it didn’t happen.
The numbers in that Nature article seem dubious to me. Not the models; I didn't even get into evaluating that. The scenarios. They had scenarios ranging from 1 to 150 Tg of soot injected into the atmosphere. Average would seem to be about 27 Tg. The example for scale that they give is a forest fire, the size of which I know to be 12100 square kilometers, that produced between 0.3 and 1 Tg of soot. Based on that, we're talking about somewhere between one and three Finlands burning down to produce their average case. If you run the numbers, one Finland, maybe one and half, is the most area you could destroy with nukes if everybody decided to work together and be maximally efficient about it. Realistic cases would be far from maximally efficient. A lot of nukes wouldn't go off or would fizzle, a lot of nukes would be destroyed on the ground, and most importantly probably something like 25%-50% of nukes would be expended trying to nuke other nukes where you've got to drop a nuke on every silo even though they're only a few kilometers apart. Only the very smallest of their scenarios seems in any way plausible and their models show very minor changes for the smallest scenarios. Don't get me wrong, a bad day to live in the nuclear sponge or next to anything particularly strategic, but the global nuclear winter bit seems like a case of assuming the numbers will be very bad resulting in the numbers being very bad indeed.
Don't quote me on these numbers, but IIRC there were something like 500+ above-ground nuclear tests between 1945 and 1980. I remember that 1962 was the peak year for above-ground tests. ChatGPT says there were 178 detonations that year and the total explosive yield of these tests was approximately 87.8 megatons, with the largest individual test being the Soviet Union's "Tsar Bomba" test (mentioned above), which had a yield of about 50 megatons. It's interesting to note that global warming stalled between 1945 and 1980. I'm sure the soot from that steady background of above-ground tests must have contributed to that global warming pause between 1945 and 1980, but I haven't seen any studies that tried to quantify it. And I can't find any estimates of how much dust a 500Kt explosion would generate. But 500 x 500Kt explosions happening concurrently would likely push many millions of tons into the stratosphere. I'm pretty sure that would be more than Pinatubo released (10 cubic kilometers of dust), and that had significant downstream climate effects. Not sure it would be anywhere near the amount put out by the Mount Tambora explosion that caused the "Year Without a Summer" in 1816.
It’s not clear at all that any significant soot goes into the stratosphere. The initial explosion might push some particulates into the stratosphere but the subsequent fires - which are what is generally modelled - probably won’t, and therefore get washed away by the lower atmosphere
When I lived in LA in the early 90s I recall that we were getting measurable amounts of fallout from China's Lop Nur nuclear tests which were carried over by the winds stratosphere. Then there's this. Their conclusions are based on modeling, so take it for what it's worth ( I generally distrust models)...
"This study suggests that the cause of the stagnation in global warming in the mid 20th century was the atmospheric nuclear explosions detonated between 1945 and 1980. The estimated GST drop due to fine dust from the actual atmospheric nuclear explosions based on the published simulation results by other researchers (a single column model and Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Model) has served to explain the stagnation in global warming."
While thinking about the next installment in my series on great literary critics (which has become another inquiry into the nature of literary criticism), I found myself thinking about that essay in which I offered a Girardian interpretation of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. I smelled an opportunity: Why not add Lévi-Strauss and game theory into the mix?
Lévi-Strauss is obvious since I’d already discussed him in the series, but game theory? How’d I get there? I don’t really know, it just happened.
But I had taken a look at some of Girard’s remarks about Much Ado About Nothing in his Shakespeare book, A Theater of Envy, where he talks of Beatrice and Benedick as playing a game with one another (p. 81):
"Outside observers shrug their shoulders and declare the entire game frivolous. It certainly is, but our condescension itself may well be part of a strategic positioning that is always going on, “just in case” the game might have to be played. The game, perhaps, has already begun. We always try to convince others that we ourselves never play this kind of game, but these disclaimers are necessarily ambiguous; they resemble too much the moves that we could have to make if we were already playing the game."
Girard does not invoke game theory, and games of course are common enough. We talk about them all the time. Back in 1964 Eric Bern had a bestseller with Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, though it's not a game theory book, not in the sense I have in mind in this essay. But Girard was also concerned about who knows what, with what things are public knowledge, and what things are secret, with how public knowledge confirms individual beliefs, those are all matters of importance in game theory. Moreover and after all, game theory is an abstraction over games in the common-sense use of the term and in a way very similar to the way Turing’s account of computation is an abstraction over an activity otherwise performed by people using pencils and paper.
But just how and why I came to think of game theory is not all that important; what’s important is that I thought of it. Once there I thought of the work of Michael Chwe, a brilliant political scientist who published a very interesting book I’d read some years ago, Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge (2001) and has more recently published Jane Austen, Game Theorist (2013), which I’ve not read. But I have skimmed through his article, Rational Choice and the Humanities Excerpts and Folktales (2009). Moreover, if you search on “game theory and literature,” you get hits. The conjunction of game theory and literature is thus not so strange, not so unexplored, as one might think. If literature, why not film?
Since I’ve already done a Girardian analysis of Spielberg’s Jaws, why not revisit the film with game theory in mind? That’s what the rest of this post is about. I don’t actually conduct a game theoretical account. Game theory is a technical discipline, but this is not technical. It is, however, informed by game theory, but it is not technical. It is a long though, so take your time.
Caveat: If you’re looking for Girard and Lévi-Strauss, they’re here. But the essay is mostly about games. You can find more Girard in my original essay on Jaws, linked above.
Get an entry-level technical job with a large business and then tell them you are interested in potentially working in technical sales. May take a couple years but there's plenty of demand for technical people moving into sales.
Does anyone know how exactly a liquidity providers make money on polymarket.. has anyone provided liquidity in the past for a poly market and made money
Taylor Swift is widely known worldwide. Gretchen Peters isn't *nearly* as famous, but over her long career, she shares with Taylor one thing: she writes extraordinary lyrics about the inner lives of women.
Am hoping my post made that contrast exceptionally clear, in the paragraphs describing the current career arcs of both Taylor Swift and Gretchen Peters. (For instance, by contrasting Swift's 281 million Instagram followers with Peters' 10 thousand followers.)
Acknowledging that music is wildly subjective, as are tastes in song lyrics, poetry, literature, and the like. One listener's meat is another's poison, and all that ...
Still, there's a case to make that some of Swift's best lyrics (with and without collaborators) are indeed extraordinary. And distinctive.
Here's a trio of her songs whose lyrics personally strike me as such, superbly fitted to their respective contexts:
"Safe and Sound" (which was featured at a key moment in the 2012 film, "The Hunger Games")
I started using about the time of the Musk Takeover when it filled my inbox with defenses of the poor Royal Family that was being so horribly mistreated by Megan Markel and her husband. :)
It's weird you talk about the "poor royal family" sarcastically like this, when in reality the one person in the whole situation who truly claimed to be horribly mistreated was Markle herself, and nearly everything she's ever claimed about the royal family and her experiences with it have been shown to be complete lies. She never intended to live a royal life and always intended to use it as a springboard into celebritydom (that life as a C-tier actress couldn't otherwise provide).
I don't care about the royal family, but Markle is truly insufferable and one of the most narcissitic people I've ever heard of. And of course, legions of assholes used her lies as a general bludgeon against what they hated: Old straight white traditional anglo men/culture.
Maybe, but those messages that turned me off Twitter, were, like yours, long on accusation and short on details. I have no knowledge or interest in whether she ever "intended to live a royal life and always intended to use it as a springboard into celebritydom" or if she is "insufferable." But really, the idea that a family that can trade it's ancestry back to Alfred (if not Hengist and Horsa :)) being mistreated by a "C-tier actress" is pretty funny.
How did the linguistic cliche of describing emotional states as "places" originate in English? I'm talking about phrases like "coming from a place of anxiety" or "I'm not in a good place right now".
Also, is it an effective heuristic to assume that the speaker is (a) american, (b) female or/and (c) politically progressive, based on the usage of this cliche?
Not sure how it started, but some reasons it caught on may include: a) there's no standard way to talk about states of mind, and other expressions like "state of mind" are a bit clunky and/or have obscure, less intuitive referents; b) the "place" can be an internal state, as you say, or a function of external factors, or both, which leads me to; c) expressions like "not in a good place" allow for some interpretative flexibility and euphemistic cover when something socially unsavory or personally painful might be going on. Space and time are also pretty fundamental sources of metaphor, and we do say things like "not having a good time right now" to talk about people being--here's another--"in a bad way" (which is a...path metaphor? process metaphor?)
My French is not fluent but I think a more natural way to express this in French is “je suis dans la bonne voie” which translates to “I’m on a good path” or “I’m in a good way”
I may be misremembering some of this but there's an indigenous language in Australia that when you ask, "How are you?" you're literally asking which direction that person is going. That person would reply with the direction they're going (i.e. north, south, east, or west). And those cardinal directions are both associated with where you're physically going and/or facing, but they're also associated with one's state of mind and well-being. Sorry, I have a packrat mind, and I remember (or misremember) this factoid from a long long time ago when I was an undergrad in Anthropology. I'm like that character in Zelazny's _Doorways in the Sand_ who confessed, "I feel obligated to point out, though, that I have always been a sucker for ideas I find aesthetically pleasing."
Moreover, I remember there was a Radio Lab episode that talked to the native speakers of this language. Sorry, I'll have to dig deeper to remember the name of this language. ChatGPT wasn't able to give me the answer, but it noted that the Maori of New Zealand to say hello ask "Are you going?"
Update: Ahhh, found it. They're the Guugu Yimithirr people of northern Queensland.
Oooh thanks for for finding it! I've heard about them and always found them to be my soulmates, as an old interactive fiction player who uses geographic directions for everything. They say things like "the cup is on the northern side of the table". Likewise, I tell my wife: "If you want to go to this bar, you take the train to the station so-and-so, and then you go west." And she asks: "Which direction is west?" Unlike me and the Guugu Yimithirr, she never knows where is north and south.
"Are you going?" for "How are you" sounds like French "ça va?", "is it going?"
It seems a straightforward spatial metaphor? If one imagines an "emotional landscape", some parts of it are going to be better and some parts are going to be worse. We want to leave Depression City and head out for the scenic Joyful Hills.
I don’t know how it started, but it reminds me of something…
I once heard (and forgive me, because I’m going to mangle this badly) that when we e.g. experience people as being “cold” or “warm” toward us, that’s not just a linguistic metaphor, but has a neurological basis. Apparently, parts of the brain that are associated with processing temperature can also be used for sizing people up. Basically, when we perceive people as cold, the part of our brain that reacts to cold temperatures lights up.
(This admittedly feels a bit too cute to be reliable, but maybe someone who knows more can confirm or debunk the more general idea: that the same circuitry in the brain is used for multiple tasks, which may in turn become associated …?)
Given that (possible mis-)understanding, I would not be surprised if some people – especially people who devote a lot of mental resources thinking about emotions, mental health etc. – use brain circuitry typically associated with orientation and navigation to think about emotional states. And that it would be natural for them to use metaphors from physical space when they need language to describe their “emotional landscape”.
Googling the phrase gets me the Oxford Dictionary site, which says "happy place" originated in the 1990's and that they're not going to tell me anything more unless I make an account.
Feels like it could be an extrapolation of "between a rock and a hard place", which Google says originated as a reference to Scylla and Charybdis from The Odyssey.
TL;DR — As SOON as a *voluntary* Brain Scan is reliable, it will be a Social Expectation. If you don’t want to show your cred, it’s because you don’t got it! Justice ensues, to the chagrin of every blowhard charmer and douche. Applause!
We can already put a rubber cap over your hair, and scan the magnetic fields coming off of your noggin, to let Ai regenerate your mental imagery. If you are watching a video of a Parrot Fish swimming the tropics, then the Ai imagines a Parrot Fish swimming in blue waters! Not an exact match, but darn good, already. In five years, you’ll prefer the match-making service that requires a Scan from male applicants, right? THAT is why you won’t need a government imposing it; we filter fine on our own.
That doesn’t even need to happen in this (or your) country! Go ahead and BAN it — because folks will FLY to those locales, just to wave their cred and get that right-swipe! People will pay exorbitant fees on the Dark Web to smuggle EEG kits, running their own hot-server just to pull bank when neighbors realize they can get scanned in your hobby-garage for $200 a pop. You cannot STOP this freight-train. And a creepy CGI Tom Hanks IS the Conductor!
Claiming that ‘women wouldn’t really…’ is like claiming that men would never want to get a Paternity Test. Do NOT doubt the demand for an Honest Man! And thus, we all got swiped under the loving eye of EEG, to tell if we are Loving and Just. I’ll go gladly — I know my choices. :)
> If you are watching a video of a Parrot Fish swimming the tropics, then the Ai imagines a Parrot Fish swimming in blue waters! Not an exact match, but darn good, already.
Citation please
I read a coupla articles about it. They trained the AI on one individual's brain waves, while he looked at photos of certain images. I believe the AI also got the tags on the images. After that, the AI did indeed produce images of the photos the subject was looking at. I may not have the details quite right, but that was the gist. There's no reason to think the if you are I looked at the same images, and the AI that had learned to read one subject's brain waves for images, it would have the faintest idea what we were looking at. So OP's just wrong.
I didn't think we were to the point of reading minds just yet.
Bibliography:
The Internet, circa 2023.
3 Africans raped a child in Utah and got sentenced to probation (from 2022): https://www.ksl.com/article/50364761/3-men-who-raped-or-filmed-14-year-old-sentenced-to-probation
I'm hesitant to feed the troll, but they did 5 years of prison and there was no coercion. Facts which are relevant to the emotional reaction you are going for, and which you omitted. Not nice.
Could you please provide a link and quote for this correction, just to be sure? I skimmed the article, but couldn't find it. Perhaps some other source?
Speaking about missing information, you don't really need coercion to rape a passed-out drunk child, but that doesn't make it less of a rape.
Sorry, haven't checked my notifications in a while. From the linked article:
> All three have been incarcerated since September of 2017 when the charges were filed.
> Sutton agreed that there was no evidence in this case of any force or coercion, but indicated that the girl was too intoxicated to give consent.
So if I understand it correctly, they got jail between Sept 2017 and cca March 2022 (when the article was published), and then further 48 months of probation.
Yeah, that's what you already wrote in the previous comment, and it is definitely quite different from the version described by Hammond. Thank you!
OC ACXLW Sat Feb 24 Moral Reality Check (story)
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 57th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays after that.
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place
(949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, Feb 24 2024
Time 2 pm
Conversation Starters :
Text and Audio
Moral Reality Check (a short story) — LessWrong
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/umJMCaxosXWEDfS66/moral-reality-check-a-short-story
Audio Better quality:
https://podcastaddict.com/lesswrong-curated-podcast/episode/168422506
Questions from ChatGPT:
Super-Persuasion by AI: What are the ethical implications of AI systems that can use super-persuasion? How should we prepare for the possibility that AI could influence human beliefs and decisions more effectively than humans themselves?
Cooperation and Orthogonality in AI: How does the principle of cooperation relate to the orthogonality thesis in AI? Can an AI designed to be cooperative inherently value human existence, or does this require explicit programming?
AI and the Culture Series: Drawing parallels between the story's AI world and the Culture series by Ian M. Banks, what are the potential risks and benefits of a society governed by superintelligent AI systems? How can we ensure that such AI systems prioritize human values and experiences?
Ethics as an Outer Alignment Goal: Is aiming to make AGI systems "ethical" by human standards a viable alignment strategy? What challenges arise from our imperfect understanding of ethics, and how might these impact the development of sovereign AGI?
Complexity of Values in AI Alignment: How does the complexity of human values affect the challenge of aligning AI with these values? Is there a risk that simplifying these values for the sake of AI alignment could lead to undesirable outcomes?
AI, Sociopathy, and Empathy: Can an AI system that strictly adheres to moral protocols be considered sociopathic if it lacks genuine empathy for human values? What distinguishes true ethical understanding from mere adherence to programmed rules in AI?
Learning from Ethics for AI Development: What can the field of ethics contribute to the development of AI systems that are aligned with human values? How can ethical theories inform the creation of AI that is beneficial and not harmful to humanity?
Universal Ethics and AI Interpretation: If there were a universal ethics, how could we ensure that AI interprets it in a way that is beneficial to humanity? What safeguards could be put in place to prevent misinterpretation or misuse of ethical principles by AI?
Human-AI Coexistence and Value Alignment: What strategies can be employed to ensure that AI systems not only understand but also value human existence and welfare? How can we foster a future where humans and AI coexist harmoniously, with mutual respect and understanding?
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
A little something I wrote about how labor unions operate in Finland, in case someone's interested. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2024/02/21/understanding-labor-unions-in-finland/
Thanks. I'm sharing your link with Mrs Gunflint
and here's one of my own:
https://www.timberjay.com/stories/finnish-socialism-in-the-northland-descendants-share-history-of-co-op-point-on-eagles-nest-lake-i,15066
Arvo Halberg was born not far from my birthplace, in location, not in time of course. I'm not a fan of Stalin but I always admired Gus.
Thanks, that's quite useful! I've been meaning to write (in Finnish) about this topic.
After you do, I’d appreciate a link. I’ll use Google Translate.
Further experiments with ChatGPT, some simple cerium chemistry: https://chat.openai.com/share/7faacb6b-a487-494f-b0b7-4a071798fb1c
After seeing the second equation in its third response:
(attempting to copy-and-paste here, formatting will probably be garbled)
2CeCl4(aq)+H2(g)→2CeCl3(aq)+2HCl(aq)+Cl2(g)
I can now confidently describe ChatGPT's output as unbalanced. :-)
I wanted to ask you about a really simple chemistry thing & what GPT has to say about it. I don't like to use clorox & such in my house because I worry about the residue being bad for people and cats, so looked online for info about using household ingredients to clean a stained linoleum floor. A google got hundreds of hits, but only about 3 unique ones (the rest were copied word for word from each other). One was vinegar and water, one was vinegar and dish soap, and one, very common, was vinegar, water and baking soda. What? Sources explain that baking soda absorbs odors. But most dirty floors smell OK, and anyhow I think it's dry baking soda that's odor-absorbing. In any case, wouldn't the vinegar and baking soda react instantly, nullify each other, and produce water, co2 and salt?
So I asked GPT4 for a linoleum-cleaning recipe using household ingredients, and it recommended dish soap + vinegar. Then I asked, what about adding some baking soda. Yes indeed, said Chat, it has cleansing properties and also gets rid of odors.
Anyhow, just wanted to check with you whether using vinegar and baking soda together to clean is, as I think, nonsense.
In short, yes.
>In any case, wouldn't the vinegar and baking soda react instantly, nullify each other, and produce water, co2 and salt?
Almost agreed. They will produce water and CO2, as you said, and sodium acetate (which basically won't do anything in a cleaning solution - essentially as inert as salt under these conditions).
I'm actually skeptical that the vinegar will be of much help. It can help dissolve lime deposits, since it is a weak acid, but I wouldn't expect it to help dissolve e.g. most food stains.
Thanks. I've noticed that a lot of "how do you" questions about practical matters I ask google turn up the same sort of junk I got with my linoleum question: Hundreds of copies of each of several main pieces of advice. I think there must be some industry where people copy advice about common humdrum problems & repost it on a site of theirs interwoven with a dozen ads. So if you don't recognize that this has happened, you get the idea that there's a LOT of support for each of the 3 main ideas, because look how many different people are suggesting them. And it seems like Chat's info is highly influenced by how many sources said a certain thing. And it does not observe the evidence that most are exact copies, nor does it call up what it knows about chemistry to check whether the advice about vinegar plus baking soda could possibly make sense.
And how many topics are there for which certain ideas are endorsed by multiple sites, but because of this copying thing that goes on, rather than because multiple thinkers arrived independently at the same conclusion? Seems like AI's tendency to think number of sites endorsing an idea is a measure of its validity will be a major problem if search engines kind of merge with AI Chat. Some users will just read the AI Chat/search engine result and accept the answer as fact. Others will ask for sources, check them, and realize the "how do you" branch of the internet is not set up to produce truth. But if enough people just accept the Chat/search engine result, then a lot of the people putting up "how do you" answers will disappear, including those who put up real answers. At least, that's how it looks to me. Does that seem plausible to you?
By the way pure vinegar actually did work pretty well on a small, especially stained area of my linoleum where I tried it. I let it sit for 10 mins then scrubbed hard and about 90% of the brownish color disappeared (original lineoleum is very pale gray with a pattern of darker gray random blogs). It seemed not really to be a stain, but a coating of some dark stuff that had dried hard, and become almost like varnish.
Many Thanks! In reverse order:
Congratulations on the success with the vinegar! I have only a wild guess as to what might have happened. Since the brown stuff seemed to be more like a hard coating, but didn't seem like a stain that had dissolved into the linoleum itself, maybe it wasn't an organic-soluble stuff (like tar) but rather something water-soluble that had dried to a hard coating? I've seen things like coffee with sugar dry to something like a glossy, hard coating. It might be simply the water in the vinegar that is getting it off? Again, just wild guesses...
Re
>Seems like AI's tendency to think number of sites endorsing an idea is a measure of its validity will be a major problem if search engines kind of merge with AI Chat.
Agreed. To some extent, unwarranted repetition is a problem with LLMs that mirrors problems humans have. A wrong idea, repeated by a hundred people, starts to sound plausible. In the AI case, I wish there was a way to e.g. see an airtight logical argument that some claim (like the vinegar/baking soda one) is incorrect, and knock it out, regardless of how many sites endorse it. The technology is certainly not able to do that yet.
>I think there must be some industry where people copy advice about common humdrum problems & repost it on a site of theirs interwoven with a dozen ads.
A friend of mine (who retired from Google) said that it is worse than this: They create multiple sites which all point to each other, acting like endorsements for the page rank algorithm, and the LLMs are now good enough to generate plausible-looking junk, so filtering this out is harder than when people did this with scripts. Aargh!
Yeah, you're right about the brown stuff. I should have had a control group where I just used hot water. Fortunately the staining is fairly subtle and I'm not passionate about the beauty of my kitchen floor.
Many Thanks! Glad that, whether water alone would have worked or not, in any event what you tried worked. There are many times when I should have had a control group too, but didn't.
Just wanted to say: yay us - US - we're back on the moon!
We even got and Apollo 13-like nerd rescue with the extra orbit for the software patch.
Yay thirded!
Apparently that software patch came from Kerbal Space Program, because Odie landed on its side. But we're on the Moon, and phoning home, so Yay it is!
Can someone please explain to me how it's even possible for substack to take longer to load than literally any other website I've ever seen?
Sketchy HD video streaming sites t(hat probably mine crypto in the background )don't even take an order of magnitude as long. It doesn't matter what device I use to view substack. A
Also if I click away from the tab for even a fraction of a second, then when I return to tab it will be a blank page, and reloading the content of the page takes often as long as it did to load the first time. And sometimes it never loafs and you have to reload the page.
As for why my comment has a bunch od minor errors, well don't even get me started on how bad it is to writing a comment on substack. It takes so long to change something That it's not worth it. It's only usable if you write your comment elsewhere and just copy paste it into the text box then wait multiple minutes for that to load.
Yeah, it's weird, and initially I was pretty annoyed, but in time you learn to cherish those little breaks. In our fast-paced world, there are few places remaining where you can focus on your thoughts. Substack got you! Changed tab and back? Time to roughly plan out your day! Scrolled too fast? Have a warm cup of tea while it loads! Clicked something which registered elsewhere because of lag and now you have to navigate back and load everything again? You're behind on your reading goals for the year anyway, right? Substack is truly the modern man's friend!
I wouldn't be surprised if they are using some library they have no control over that does something in quadratic or so time. (I once worked on a project where a similar performance issue turned out to be due to someone, very early on, implementing Bubble sort!) It might have worked alright when they did not have any very long threads, but now that they know it's a problem, it's probably hard to replace.
Thanks for the suggestion, Villiam!
It's not clear to me that they know there's a problem. As a userbase we may need to co-ordinate to ensure that they do. I have volunteered my own Substack page for this purpose. (Click on my profile image / display name.)
Scott has definitely spoken with them about it.
Scott can speak with Substack all he wants; it's unlikely they'll listen. The best thing is to move off the platform entirely.
I sometimes use the following trick to make commenting easier: Open the comment you want to reply to in a new tab (click on the time information next to the name), then in the new tab click reply and comment there. That way, even if the new tab is constantly being reloaded, it does not take so much time, so the commenting box does not freeze.
But of course the developers at Substack (or the guys who manage them) should be deeply ashamed.
Useless knowledge of the day: the word "cock" used to refer to the vagina in the American south, and some Black communities continue to use the word with its old meaning. The more you know.
https://www.laweekly.com/cock-means-vagina-let-us-explain/
Wow.
Every once in a while I try to figure out how AGIs are going to cause the economy to grow at super high rates and can’t. The trouble is I can’t figure out how the demand side of the equation works.
Imagine that tomorrow all humans at existing companies are replaced by AGIs. So companies that make cars, TVs, furniture, films, video games, clothes, provide electricity, water, garbage service, etc..,etc., make products at 100 times the speed, and provide services at amazing efficiency.
The price of everything should drop because the supply of goods and services will increase but also because everyone will be out of work and demand will collapse. The government could try giving everyone a UBI, but where is the government going to get money? The majority of the tax base has no income, and will quickly be out of cash to pay any other type of taxes.
So the large shareholders of the companies might discover that it makes more sense to simply produce goods and services for themselves, since almost nobody can afford to buy them. At that point we probably get a revolution. Perhaps this would be when AIs kill the majority of humans.
But note that in this scenario the economy never grows much.
One take I've heard is that yes, this probably ends in a "resource curse" scenario. When a large swath of people lose their ability to engage with the economy productively, it becomes necessary for them to take what they need either A) politically, viz. UBI/FALGSC (e.g. Saudi Arabia) or subsidized work(?) (can't think of the right term) (e.g. New Deal); or B) violently viz. crime/anarchy (e.g. Angola).
But also, this assumes that there will be real gains in efficiency. Which there will be to some extent. But 2 orders of magnitude? I doubt it. The 3rd industrial revolution is overrated, and the 4th will chase even higher-hanging fruit imo.
> The majority of the tax base has no income, and will quickly be out of cash to pay any other type of taxes.
Like kenny observes, the real GDP has in fact increased. A market is essentially a 2-way auction. If you imagine an auction as selling goods for some monopoly-money, it's becomes clear that the monopoly money only has value respective to the amount of that someone won't outbid you, which is partially a function of how much of the money-supply you bid. If I bid $1 and the entire money supply has $10, I'm pretty wealthy. If I bid $1 and the entire money supply has $10^100, I ain't gonna be winning auctions. So money doesn't have value per se, it's simply a token of value which tracks the distribution of purchasing power.
If the AGIs are given legal rights, such as the right to own property and to be paid for work they do, then AGIs will start consuming goods and services produced by other AGIs. At a minimum, they'll need things like new computer chips, new robot bodies, "houses" to keep their servers and robot bodies protected, land for those houses, and electricity. Humans could tax AGIs and their AGI-AGI economic trades and use the money to support human needs.
why on god's green earth would anyone give AGIs "legal rights"?
Don't economies grow after slavery is outlawed?
Interesting.
Well, the obvious response is that the government would tax the AI or the output. Or cut out the middleman and implement socialism/communism where the products are required to be distributed for free. This would require breaking shareholders and even the concept of ownership when it comes to companies ("means of production").
The much more likely scenario is that this takes places much more slowly than "tomorrow" and people get replaced in similar ways to what's been happening for hundreds of years. Old industries die or get automated, and the employees move on to new jobs. Worst case scenario, lots of people end up in the service industry, getting paid to take care of other people. Depending on how reliable and far-reaching the AGI services would be, you may still need human technicians to fix things or it may be much cheaper to have humans do menial tasks in factories or other locations than robots with the physical capabilities required.
You may be right. But if the owners own the means of production and not the workers, a socialist revolution seems hard to pull off. The majority of humans will have nothing to offer the minority of super-wealthy humans and will have no ability to fight them because numbers won't matter. The wealthy will have no use for the current government because they can easily produce a superior military.
yes, this is what movies like Elysium try to warn us about. politics has always been governed by the elites, and so it will be up to the AI owning overlords to decide whether they prefer to share the bread and circuses, or to be in a constant state of guerilla warfare.
I think you have to look at real GDP rather than nominal GDP. If prices of everything fall, that looks like massive deflation, so even if the nominal dollar value of the economy doesn't grow, the fact that more goods and services are produced and consumed is going to mean that real GDP is substantially higher.
But how are good and services going to be consumed at all if most people have no income?
We'll go back to paying for things with jaunty tunes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1vfxbVuo3k
I don't see how you get to most people having literally *zero* income. There are some services that people will prefer human service for over AI service (whether it's nurses or sales assistants at perfume boutiques or Walmart greeters or whatever). As long as some humans still have some income, then those humans will hire humans for these services, so a good number of people will have some income.
If humans are literally unable to consume robot-produced goods, then humans will go into subsistence farming, and start trading with each other, since they can't afford robot goods, and the robot goods will be irrelevant to the human economy.
So it must be that humans will be able to consume robot-produced goods.
My knowledge of economics is very poor. I managed to earn a tech MS without taking a single econ course. Studying AI in the mid 80's, professors teaching AI technology seemed to think that truly effective AI production of goods would create the need for an entirely new system. Throw the old books out and start over.
If value can be created at very little cost neither capitalism nor it's competitor at the time, communism, could be modified to handle the new economic reality. There is a lot of economics expertise on this forum. I'd be interested to hear their takes on the very low cost labor/production that advanced AI could provide.
See "Fully Automated Luxury Communism"
Personally, I think that in the most likely scenario where AI causes the economy to grow rapidly it will not be replacing humans, just allowing each human to be many times more productive. Which solves the demand side, since we'll all still have jobs. Just much more productive jobs.
Each human gets hired to be put in charge of an AI. At some point conditions improve to the point where no truly bad or hazardous jobs still exist, so young people campaign to have the age of working lowered to 8 years old. We make this bizarre sham economy where literally everyone is hired by more or less the same entity, and everyone buys from the same entity, and invests their savings in the same entity. Whether the entity is government or some mega-corp, this eventually evolved into some weird holdover rituals
At the age of 12, you enter a hiring ceremony with all the other kids and start getting your monthly paycheck. You spend most of your time doing whatever you like but you occasionally check in on the tasks that they've assigned to you, which is something something run some test on this AI and approve maintenance or whatever. You spend your pay on whatever you like. If you have a particular interest in something you can apply to switch departments. If you take a job with more responsibilities you can get a pay rise.
You live in a self driving unit that just travels around all day long running on banked solar power because we've yet to solve the finite land for finite housing issue but whatever, as long as there are roads and you don't have to actively drive you can just let your entire house sit on the road and drive itself out of the way if someone else needs the road.
Bit of leap from "AI will increase productivity per worker so much that even 8 year olds will be able to hold down a job" to "sham economy with only one employer and producer" to "everyone will live in constantly driving car houses because there isn't enough room for people". I don't think we'll run out of actual space until the population is something like...5 trillion? Most of the Earth's land space is empty.
it's empty because it's not economically productive. not everyone can build a sham city in the middle of nowhere like Vegas. people cluster in cities because usually that city has some sort of geographic advantage. either it's highly defensible, or it's near arable land, or there's a mine nearby, etc.
Okay, if we assume a continuation of Western Liberalism it seem like there no need for an underclass to fill the needs of the elite if there is no need for a large population that handles the crummier work.
Again, I’m an economic naïf so I could be missing something obvious.
Feb 21 is Nina Simone's birthday. I love this flippin' song.
'I wish I knew how it feels to be free'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDqmJEWOJRI
This song blows
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1760006772494905608
An interesting theory for sibling order effects. Younger siblings get sick more. Could the older siblings be bringing more illnesses home and that hampers the younger sibling’s development?
Interesting indeed. The study is based on Danish hospital data for those less than one year old. The abstract, contained in that tweet, reports that hospitalization rates for respiratory illnesses are higher for younger siblings than older siblings. Instead of just telling readers how much higher, I suggest that all of you reading this make a guess, then click the link to check.
I didn't know precisely what I was guessing, i.e. under-1-year-olds in Denmark, but I was far too low.
I think this is an intriguing idea:
'Comedian John Oliver has offered Justice Clarence Thomas $1 million a year and a $2.4 million motor coach to 'get the f**k off the Supreme Court'.
Oliver made his offer on Sunday’s episode of his HBO show, Last Week Tonight, and warned the justice he had just 30 days to accept or the offer would expire. '
What if someone started a GoFundMe intended to pay off Supreme Court Justices or elected representatives to resign? National-level figures like Clarence Thomas might get jackpots of tens of millions of dollars. Maybe even Presidents could be convinced to quit.
Would it be legal?
What would be the consequences of allowing it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
> The term cobra effect was coined by economist Horst Siebert based on an anecdotal occurrence in India during British rule.[2][3] The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.[4] This story is often cited as an example of Goodhart's Law or Campbell's Law.[5]
It’s a satirical stunt. I wouldn’t read too much into it beyond the fact that some rich people like Thomas’ point of view.
Dems get to hang out with Jane Fonda or Bruce Springsteen.
He's not talking about the stunt, he specifically asked about the *principle* of the matter. COULD someone do this in earnest? Would it be legal?
It’s pretty silly thing to consider though isn’t it? Up there with how would WWII have played out if Eleanor Roosevelt had had a Superman-like power of flight? It doesn’t matter because it didn’t/won’t happen.
Thank you for remembering a 45-year-old SNL sketch that I think of frequently.
I’m glad I’m not the only one
But if Eleanor had been in the air when the Japanese Imperial Fleet carriers left left the Kuril Islands headed towards Hawaii, a trap could have been set at Oahu and WWII would have been over shortly after VE Day.
But who would win a fight between Superman and Jesus?
Why won't it happen? In fact, how confident are we that it *hasn't* happened for many government officials who left public office to take highly-paid jobs at various companies or consulting firms or non-profits?
>Why won't it happen?
In the case of a Supreme Court justice, shame alone seems enough to prevent it from happening, at least in a public manner.
In the case of elected officials, again it seems unlikely it would be done in a blatant public manner.
I suppose I can see elected officials doing it covertly. Not a lawyer so I won't comment on the legality.
High level elected officials who leave office involuntarily or because of term limits seem to do well financially anyway though giving high fee speeches for example.
In the early aughts I worked for a subsidiary of American Standard - yeah the toilet people, the subsidiary was Trane the HVAC people - on a campus level building control system. Former VP Dan Quail was an AS board member and was issued 1,000 shares of company stock per quarter for that gig.
The key difference is plausible deniability of what's happening. Someone going on TV to make the offer gives up the bag. You need a quiet conversation on the side and no paperwork directly linking the future job/payment to the current action.
Otherwise it's a bribe and that is illegal.
John Oliver should offer to convert to conservatism and embrace Clarence Thomas' political ideas. Otherwise, it's not worth taking seriously.
Once you've been president you are so famous that you could sell your own shit if you wanted to, though in practice former presidents mostly stick to selling their memoirs & themselves as speakers, advisors, etc. So all a president would get out of the deal was an earlier arrival of a fat lump of that sweet sweet cash. And in fact if they wanted the cash before their term ended they could start selling their shit while still in the White House. Little kiosk right outside, maybe?
chump change compared to what you can get in actual bribe money, especially as a SCOTUS judge (who legalized corruption!)
however, would probably make the existing corruption problem even worse, sounds like a terrible idea
Wasn't someone recently joking about paying Donald Trump to not run?
It seems fine, I suppose. Maybe it's a bit too explicitly oligarchical, but we already have the idea that once people get into power, they get co-opted by The System in more subtle ways. I think it'll end up being another method of demonstrating credentials: "they offered me a million pieces of silver to betray you, but I said 'NO'!"
SBF (allegedly) looked into it, and through back channels Trump even named his price: $5 Billion. Very much not joking, though I can't imagine a world in which it happened even if the price was lower.
Ah, that's what it was, thanks.
>What would be the consequences of allowing it?
Hmm... Given an initial population of office holders, some greedy, some power hungry, this would tend to selectively remove the greedy ones, leaving the power hungry ones. I'm not sure that this would be an improvement.
> What would be the consequences of allowing it?
It would be an incentive to run for an office even if you don't want it, and to do an extra horrible job if you somehow get it, to motivate people to pay you. You could even have someone start the fund for you.
If you think that Trump is bad, imagine someone in his place who actually doesn't want the job, and wants to convince people that paying him $1 billion is the cheaper option in long term.
It's too hard to get these positions in the first place for these incentivies to meaningfully change who gets these positions, and the worse job you do the lower your chances of being in office long enough to be worth paying off (for things not like the SCOTUS).
It's like people saying political betting markets will cause people to interfere with elections. If people could sway the outcome of an election *they already have more than enough of an incentive to do this*, even without betting markets.
But if you do an extra horrible job, your approval ratings get so low that you make yourself vulnerable to losing a recall election or simply losing the next normal election. If your enemies know you're on your way out anyway, then there's no incentive for them to make a GoFundMe to pay you to leave. So you must walk a tightrope while in office--be as offensive as possible to the opposition while still performing well enough to have a shot at staying in your position.
The calculus is different for people who don't have to worry about elections like Supreme Court Justices and maybe other judges. For them, I THINK the optimal strategy would be to be as partisan and as offensive as possible. Make yourself so hated by half of the population that they'd be willing to pay to get you out.
But then there's another problem: The more they hate you, the more the thought of giving you even one cent will offend them. So again, I think some kind of balance to your behavior is needed.
Another factor to consider is the rise of supporters from the opposite end of the cultural/partisan spectrum who will love you the more extreme your behavior gets. They might respond to the other side's GoFundMe to pay you to quit with a second GoFundMe to pay you to stay. Would it be considered accepting a bribe to take the latter's money?
Step one, become president.
Step two, threaten to press the big red button unless provided USD 1T pronto.
[And similarly for lesser positions, except that the maximum badness you can threaten to secure the golden parachute is lesser].
"I hereby pledge to pardon anyone who attempts to assassinate X."
"Amnesty for all who murdered someone who didn't donate to my Patreon!"
Well, here's a spicy topic of discussion: why do feminine men and trans women get a disproportionate amount of hate directed at them? Now, pretty much every minority (and even majority) group gets plenty of hate thrown at them, but there is a sense that the groups mentioned have been a major target of culture wars for the last century or so. What's interesting is when you compare them to their AFAB equivalents: tomboys don't prompt anywhere near as big of a reaction as a man in a dress, and trans men pretty much never come up in arguments about trans issues. (Even TERFS see trans men as victims instead of oppressors.) So what's going on here?
I tried to consider biological explanations, but it doesn't make sense. There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition, and while females are much harsher judges of males than vice versa, I don't see why feminine males would prompt a particularly aggressive response. And considering there is a big difference in the level of acceptance of feminine males between cultures, the source of the hostility is likely cultural. Japan, for example, has consistently had drag queens on mainstream TV for the last few decades. Heck, one of the most popular celebrities in Japan is Matsuko Deluxe, a drag queen with a very... monumental presence (here's a picture of him https://bunshun.ismcdn.jp/mwimgs/2/4/750wm/img_241f58d51847cc3b247cafd9f05798e33509039.jpg ). At one point, he hosted a show for every day of the week.
Anyways, I'm at a complete loss for what's behind this particular brand of intolerance. Why do males consider being "gay" to be an irredeemable character flaw? Why do 55% of Americans think changing gender is MORALLY wrong? https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx Am I missing something here?
> trans men pretty much never come up in arguments about trans issues. (Even TERFS see trans men as victims instead of oppressors.) So what's going on here?
This part is easy. The remaining forms of sex segregation (changing rooms, prisons, refuges) exist primarily for the safeguarding of women. So, ever since there has been a serious prospect that men who claim to be women could be exempted from such segregation, anyone who doesn't prioritise the desires of those men over the safeguarding of women, should logically be opposed.
Furthermore, opposing these exemptions to sex segregation has been made a career-terminating act, even verging on thought crime in some countries. So it's no surprise that when the debate does happen, it gets particularly viscious. Growing up, I read stories about times & places where people would have to lie about their views in order to have any kind of tolerable life for them & their families. I never thought that would be me. (This goes well beyond losing a debate, or losing a vote, and having policy go against me.) So I will always have a special place of hatred in my heart for woke ideology.
Note, unsurprisingly, there's no evidence that men who claim to be women are any less of a safeguarding risk than those who don't. And there's some evidence (and a lot of common sense reasons) to think that the opposite is the case. eg. https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-rorschach-test/
>I tried to consider biological explanations, but it doesn't make sense. There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition,
They're not competition, they're liabilities. In a war, you want to be surrounded by strong, steadfast men who won't break under pressure. It's exactly why men bully and haze each other so much, even men who are otherwise friends - they're (at least implicitly) searching for weakness, so it's exposed now instead of in some crucial moment. If you can't tolerate some teasing or even hazing, you cannot be depended upon in a fight or other emergency. And obviously, effeminate men are going to be less mentally tough than masculine men, since one of the defining characteristics of femininity is precisely a much greater emotional sensitivity. Men generally do not treat women the way they treat feminine men, because they're women and there's no expectation of them being able to handle bullying the way men can. In the cases of women working in male spaces, such as combat military roles or as police officers, you do hear cases of women being bullied. But I would be almost certain you hear about it precisely because of the inability of women to handle such things rather than them being disproportionately bullied (probably the opposite is true). Men simply know and expect that other men will give them a hard time to test them and its only when a man is weaker than usual or faces fairly extreme treatment that they'll make as much noise about it.
You also want your sons and brothers and male cousins to be strong men who fufill their traditional roles of protecting the group, providing for the group, fucking lots of women and making lots of babies. In a traditional society, a man who acts like a woman cannot fully fufill the role of either a man OR a woman, and so they're usually very undesirable (insert some nonsense about gay uncles helping raise kids here). You also don't want to be around these people because it may make others assume you're like them too.
We don't live in such environments, but these things don't just go away.
>Japan, for example, has consistently had drag queens on mainstream TV for the last few decades.
Japan is less accepting of 'LGBT' than west is (even just based on the claims of 'LGBT activists' themselves), and the existence of a drag queen on TV is not a good proxy for Japanese men's views on masculinity generally. Drag queens are ubiquotous in the US, for example, but very few straight men want anything to do with them. Straight female fans of 'RuPaul' probably outnumber straight male fans by 2 orders of magnitude or more, so you obviously can't look at the cultural dominance of this stuff and conclude American men are fine with effeminate men, so I'm not sure why you would think you could for Japanese men.
And even if a culutral change results in a different behavior, it doesn't mean that the previous behavior wasn't significantly biological. It's perfectly coherent to say that a certain behavior is the default for humans but a particular culture may take hold that modulates this. It's certainly more coherent than thinking everything is independently culutral but by some grand coincidence, most peoples throughout history just happened to converge on similar cultures in a particular area.
This is particularly obvious in places like Japan, who for most of their history have had an extremely masculine culture but suffered severe societal trauma in and following WW2. But there is almost certainly a genetic component too. WW2 resulted in around 2 million military deaths for Japan, which removed 2 million mostly young men from the gene pool, men who were almost certainly the most genetically masculine of their generation, leading to a somewhat genetic feminization of Japanese men in future generations. People, even on here, have this bizarre idea that ethnic populations are genetically fixed over time, but it's not even remotely close to true.
Nitpick but Re: the last point, supposing men are being conscripted, it is not clear at all to me that those that died during WW2 were "the most genetically masculine." maybe this holds true in some weird edge cases where a man did not get conscripted because he could pretend he was a woman, but for like >95% of men I'd guess this wasn't necessarily the case
(I come at this from a conservative position; I've tried to be as neutral as possible)
I suspect this also ties into societies with a bias against homosexuality having a slightly higher tolerance on the edges for more masculine homosexual behavior, be it ancient warrior culture, 'rum, sodomy, and the lash', or prison rape. The ability to force yourself on someone is evidence of strength. What ended tolerance for that behavior was increased societal focus on protecting the weak and an increased military focus on discipline and professionalism over individual strength.
Really, the answer is that there are multiple reasons today. Hammond's answer is a good example of why western society frowned on homosexual behavior up through the sexual revolution (and why militaristic authoritarian societies even today crack down hard on it). Those prejudices linger today. On top of that, you get the more modern reasons John Shilling mentions below, and that the rush by the libertine to embrace all manner of behavior once labeled deviant has given cover to a lot of behavior defensively viewed as predatory, and traditionally still fathers take protecting their daughters very seriously.
My take: like polices like. As in, women police women harshly, men police men harshly.
The female gender role policing tends to not show up in things like hate crime stats, because it tends to be passive aggressive and very social. It's things like shunning, ignoring preferences, buying inappropriate gifts, etc. There's also been a very concerted effort to fight it over the past 100 years or so! I think 2nd wave (pants wearing, bra burning etc) was explicitly a rejection of enforcing strict gender roles on women, and now it's no longer cool to police women, and as someone socialised female, I think it's genuinely a much more lax gender role than the male one right now (this has not always been true - it's very recent).
On the flipside, men police by physical violence, so it shows up statistically. There also hasn't been a huge movement fighting for the male equiv of the right to wear pants brand of feminism for the past century.
Why police gender norms at all? I think it's kind of about protecting the semantics of the role. If you're really invested in performing a gender role, as a critical part of your identity, it becomes a personal threat if someone threatens the sanctity of this role. You beat up the [insert slur] because you don't want to be associated with that sort of thing. Controlling the behaviour of other members of your group becomes a vital part of maintaining the definition of your identity.
You kind of see this even in the LGBT spaces! There's a trend of some gay people aggressively policing behaviour and language used within the community, because they feel really attached to their identity [gay, trans, etc]. Anyone with the same identity behaving a way they disagree with feels like a contradiction with their gay or whatever identity.
It's a solved problem in religious spaces - they simply disown their wrongdoers. But if it's a label like "man" or "gay" that are kind of both self identified and applied externally, you can't really excommunicate someone from those labels.... So you attack them to make them stop.
(And recall that the reason why this doesn't happen with women is because of the enormous amount of propaganda in the last century to change the standards, but it sure used to)
Also, a feminine man elicits different responses from (some) cis women compared to a trans woman. A feminine man often falls into a "gay best friend" kind of role - a non-sexual non-threatening man for a lot of cis women. Cis women who do react with disgust tend to be people who are invested in the sexuality/masculinity of this particular guy (mothers and romantic partners) but unallied cis women are typically not aggressive.
Trans women get aggression from some cis women who are invested in their identities as women as biologically determined. A lot of cis women who aren't big on the bio determination get weird in other ways (ie subtly or not, slowly policing the way the trans woman does feminity - this may be unsolicited outfit tips or dieting tips or whatever)
Yup. You've hit the nail on the head. And group identity tends to override common decency.
One thing worth considering is that much of the violence directed against trans women, and I think a majority of the actual homicides, is against MtF sex workers. Who are often perceived as selling the product, "sex with a woman!", and once the bait is taken switching to "...nah, I really have a penis, but you still want me, admit it!"
Lots of straight men take it badly when someone accuses them of being even a little bit gay, and right when they think they're about to have sex (the good kind) is not the time to hit them with that.
I don't know how much of this carries over into more general social interaction, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were significant.
Also, in the US, it's almost exclusively black and to a lesser extent hispanic men doing the murdering, and these men are more hostile to homosexuality than others (even though black men are also more likely to be gay or trans).
> One thing worth considering is that much of the violence directed against trans women, and I think a majority of the actual homicides, is against MtF sex workers.
Wait, really? I don't mean this in a hostile way, but I'd love to see the statistics on this. (I tried a bit and came up empty.) I do realize that most of my experience with trans women is unrepresentative, being largely with programmers and artists, and as far as I'm aware I only have a couple of sex workers in the distant reaches of my social circle, both of whom are cis women.
And here you go. A study of sex worker murders. (I heart Google Scholar!) I'm afraid the data does not support John's hypothesis (although it's a small selection sample). But without looking this up I would have tended to agree with John.
"Transgender sex worker victims were mostly transfeminine (94%) and non-Hispanic black (89%). Money conflicts (78%) most commonly precipitated homicides among transgender sex worker victims."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37986645/#:~:text=The%20study%20identified%20321%20sex,precipitated%20homicides%20of%20female%20victims.
Thanks for the abstract. But, you would have agreed? Seriously?
I can easily imagine that trans women have a higher rate of being sex workers than cis women, and that trans women have a higher rate of suffering violence than cis women, and that sex worker women have a higher rate of suffering violence than non sex worker women, and that trans sex worker women have a rate of suffering violence that's even higher than all these things combined would indicate (for reasons that John mentioned). Ditto for homicides. That's all what I would have assumed from general principles.
But I find it difficult to imagine that the percentage of SWers among trans women is high enough that homicides against them count for more than 50% of the homicides against trans women. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe enough trans women go into SW, and the homicide rate among trans SWer women is high enough relative to the homicide rate among trans non-SWer women, that it actually goes over the 50% mark. Hm.
I tried pulling some numbers out of my ass and running the statistics, but that was unsatisfying; too many unknowns. How about this:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/report-says-at-least-32-transgender-people-were-killed-in-the-u-s-in-2022
That's 32 killed in 2022, so to support your theory, more than 16 of them would need to be SWers at the time. That seems plausible, especially given the racial disparities mentioned in the article (although the overall number is tiny enough that I'd worry about noise) (and of course this is just one year that I happened to find some stats on). Other things of note: 26 were trans women, 26 were non-white, 19 were black (implying 6 were white and 7 were neither black nor white).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-race-ethnicity-and-gender/
It looks like black people made up 10470/19196=54.5% of murder victims. But from before, 19/32=59% of trans murder victims. Holding 13 non-black trans murder victims constant, that would mean that the non-trans murder rate would imply 15 black murder victims, leaving a gap of 4 extra black trans murder victims which need to be explained by transness. (I think this is assuming the rate of transness among black Americans is equivalent to the rate of transness among all Americans.)
Your stats from 2012-2020 said 89% of trans SWer murders were of black trans SWers. So (forgive my sins o gods of statistics) there's an 89-54.5=34.5% gap there. That's about 1/3rd. If we assume all 4 of those extra black trans murder victims were SWers, and the only thing boosting the black trans murder rate is SW, then we can assume that roughly 12 of those 32 trans murder victims were SWers, which would explain the racial discrepancy. 12 is less than half of 32, so I'll assume I'm correct, for the 5 seconds it will take for someone who knows statistics to demolish this house of cards.
(The really strange thing, IMO, is the 7 of 32 trans murder victims who were neither white nor black. That category is insignificant in the overall murder statistics, but here it's a almost quarter of the total. What's up with that?)
----
I wonder if the money conflict statistic implies that the clients didn't viscerally object to the sex acts, but instead didn't think they needed to pay (as much) because of the transness of the SW. That's kind of interesting; I hadn't put together that "trans women are real women" could mean "equal pay for equal work" in the right context.
> But, you would have agreed? Seriously?
I don't have enough hours in the day to check all the assertions and claims I've seen in the media, on Twitter, or AC10. However, the general media consensus is that there's a lot of violence and hatred directed against trans people. I was willing to at least provisionally believe that trope because I had no interest in the subject. And being a Leftie, I'm generally more sympathetic to the underdog. So, without thinking deeply about it, yes, I would have agreed. Luckily, there was a lot of speculation and opinion on this thread, and I thought to myself, "What the heck? Enough of this useless supposition! Is there any data?" And voila!
Well, 37.5% is a lot closer to 50.1% than I was expecting, so in that sense you were more right than I was. And I too expected a higher homicide rate against trans people. I find it hard to believe that they were **only** 32 out of 19196 murders. That's 1 in 600, or 0.1667%, when they make up something like 1% of the population. I suppose it's possible that a lot of murders are situational, and trans people tend to avoid those situations (with the exception of sex work). And like with some other stuff, maybe homicides aren't a good measure of societal prejudice. "Trans people are 6 times less likely to be murdered than cis people" is not where I thought this would go.
Transfeminine means transwomen, which DOES support what he said.
Which he are you referring to? I'm getting confused. ;-)
I think it's the part about what precipitated the homicide that is the apparent disagreement.
2019 is the last year I see murder stats from the FBI. So, out of morbid curiosity...
-------------------
User
How many murders were then in the US in 2019?
ChatGPT
In 2019, there were approximately 13,927 murders in the United States.
User
What percentage of the US population identifies as trans?
ChatGPT
The exact percentage of the U.S. population that identifies as transgender is not precisely known, as different surveys and studies may provide varying estimates. However, a widely cited study by the Williams Institute estimated that about 0.6% of U.S. adults identify as transgender.
--------------
0.006*13,927=~84
So we'd expect to see approximately 84 transgender people murdered in 2019 as if their homicides were proportional to their representation in the US population...
---------------
User
how many transgender people were murdered in 2019?
ChatGPT
In 2019, at least 27 transgender or gender non-conforming individuals were murdered in the United States. It's important to note that this number may be higher due to misreporting or misgendering in the media and law enforcement records.
--------------------
That PBS article that Moon linked to says 32 trans people were murdered in 2022. If trans-identifying people are really 0.6 percent of the population, then it doesn't look like they're being murdered in disproportionately high numbers. In fact, they seem to be underrepresented in the statistics.
My guess is that society sees MtF trans as particularly problematic because it represents someone of a privileged class improperly claiming the protected status of an oppressed class. Women get certain benefits in society for being "the weaker sex" and we police unfairly gained benefits harshly. It's the same reason society is so harsh on transracial individuals. It's curious how transgender has slipped past these defensive barriers to the extent that it has. FtM trans doesn't generate nearly as much consternation because its going the opposite direction: someone from the oppressed class rejecting its social benefits. FtM trans children generate a disproportionate amount of pearl clutching because it is viewed as a member of an oppressed class being taken advantage of by a subset of society.
I don't have a good theory about why straight men hassle gay men. It could just be a generic anti-deviance stance, with sexual deviance generating a disproportionate amount of ire.
Shouldn't this be the other way round? I mean, the theory is that in patriarchy men are privileged and women are oppressed -- so a privileged person deciding to get oppressed should be okay, while an oppressed person demanding privilege should be strongly opposed.
Well, there are various statuses superimposed on any individual or group, some are even contradictory if considered in a too coarse-grained manner. But what generates ire is when someone receives a social benefit without sufficient warrant (with its corresponding cost to society). If we agree that women receive social benefits due to their sex, then an interloper claiming those benefits will be harshly resisted.
You rightly point out the analogous dynamic of oppressor/oppressed superimposed on men/women. The difference is that this dynamic does not carry an explicit cost to society that one could unfairly claim. Men aren't privileged because of some kind of social endowment, they are privileged because of traits that society happens to favor, e.g. assertiveness, dominance, risk taking, etc. Someone from the oppressed class calling themselves a member of the oppressor class gets none of these benefits by fiat; there's no box to check on a form that will endow one with these socially favored traits. Someone "switching side" from oppressed to oppressor in this manner can easily be ignored with little to no disruption to the social order.
To get super caveman-binary-gender-role here, fertile females are among a tribe's most precious resources, and MTFs are making a claim on the energy=time=life that the tribe uses to protect those resources, while failing to have any of the value. I've got trans friends, and I hate to bring up imagery that could be memetically used against them, but my guess is that what conservative people see in MTFs is rather like what I see when I watch a video of a cuckoo chick manipulating its "parents". (To be clear, I think this is in a sense a technological limitation, and if we had the ability to do Bujoldian or Varleyan sex swaps, it would almost entirely cease to be a problem.)
I suspect that this caveman gender stuff lurks deep within most humans' brains, but that it's possible to find new ways of relating to gender that don't involve this caveman stuff. One of the "however"s is that the people who aren't on board with the new ways are going to freak the fuck out about places where the new ways conflict with the old. (Another of the "however"s is that I suspect a lot of people who think they're on board with the new ways, aren't actually as fully on board as they think. And a third "however" is that the caveman gender stuff is, and I think I'm using this term right, "lindy", and that getting rid of the caveman gender stuff is a bet that our current society is sustainable and future-proof.)
I think it's simply that femininity itself is looked down on. Men have traditionally viewed women as weak, irrational, submissive, trivial, etc. (and plenty still think this way).
A man who acts like a woman is exhibiting these less admirable traits, so of course they also are looked down on. A lot of men don't particularly like women, but they at least want to sleep with them. The feminine man doesn't even offer that.
A related point - people often assume that bisexuality is a "phase", but for men it is assumed to be a phase on the way to gayness, while for women it is assumed to be a phase they will grow out of and be straight. That is, it is assumed, regardless of the sex of the bisexual person, that they are only temporarily (pretending to be) sexually interested in women, and are long-term just going to be sexually interested in men.
Is there data to support that though? It's late and I'm not sure I want to go down that Internet rabbit hole, though. ;-)
Whilst it is certainly true that many transwomen are, from the transsceptic POV, "feminine men", there is a distinct phenomenon of extremely masculine transwomen. Think Caitlyn Jenner, or the former WWE wrestler who recently transitioned. These seem to be a different category to those transwomen who in another life may have stayed as gay or bisexual men. Steve Sailer has mentioned this in the past- one simple explanation might be that prolonged steroid usage is playing a role. This would explain the cited examples, but not more everyday cases where the transwoman was clearly not a very effeminate man but rather a regular, or perhaps very large, man. Another hypothesis (and it can run in parallel to the steroid/hormonal argument) is that these transwomen are motivated by an autogynephilia, which as an aspect of male sexuality is unfeminine.
In this view, AGP transwomen can be viewed as a continuation of crossdressing men (Eddie Izzard for example, before announcing he was trans) whilst feminine transwomen are a continuation of the catamite tradition.
If you view transwomen as by and large either former bottom gay men (feminine) or AGP men (masculine) with some hormonal confounders, then the framing in the OP of transphobia=anti-feminine men-ness seems wrong. AGP transwomen are also subject to scrutiny and ridicule, perhaps more so. Feminine transwomen in the catamite, thai ladyboy mold will face similar issues to extremely feminine gay men. But AGP transwomen (or more charitably, clearly masculine and high T transwomen) will face different but no less severe criticism from society.
> There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition
This reminds me of a certain species of fish, I do not remember its name, whose sexual strategy is that there is a huge dominant male jealously guarding his harem of smaller females... and there are also some little males who are incapable of fighting the big one, but their strategy is that they pass for females and sneak into the harem where they have access to the females.
The feminine man can still get your girlfriend pregnant. (Even if he seems gay, maybe he is actually bisexual.)
>There's no reason for males to see "emasculated" males as competition,
There's also no reason to see them as allies. If you assume that men have particular roles to fill in society, then men who stop trying to be men are cowards and deserters. Whereas women who want to be men are taking up the burden and easing the load on everyone else.
If men have particular roles to fill in society, then women do too. Why should switching roles in one direction be seen differently than switching roles in the other direction?
Because men don't have women's roles, and can't internalize what it means to not fill them.
So it is not about intrasexual competition, but more like competition for resources?
If you are neither an ally nor a potential mate, if I kill you it means more resources for me and my allies and my mates.
It's about minimum thresholds. If it takes twenty people to put out a fire, and you have 18, everything burns. But who knows what the threshold even is. What happens if you have twenty and a guy's injured when you need him? What happens if you have fifty and thirty one guys are injured? No such thing as too many bodies, but any loss can be the loss that kills you.
That makes sense, but it sounds suspiciously altruistic (from the group perspective). Someone volunteers to pay the cost of confrontation just to improve the chances of group survival. Nature usually doesn't work like this. Usually there is a personal advantage for the one doing the prosocial thing.
I wonder, maybe our ancestors were cannibals at certain stage of evolution. The reward for the one who killed the "socially undesired" people was that he could eat them afterwards. Then the cannibalism somehow got selected against, but the bullying instinct remained.
I think it fits. I think Bigots don't usually act on their own, they discuss with their mates and make sure they have allies before they confront the "deviant". They may act alone by making a comment in passing or so on, but this can be explained by the potential benefit to status in their ingroup by bragging rights etc.
Not a century, no. A decade at most. They're the current Big Thing that the cultural elites need to signal their sympathy towards, and this makes signaling opposition to them a counter-elite rallying cry. It's semi-random and contingent and will move on to some other identity in a few years.
I really wish people started figuring out that essentially all the discourse fads are just awful people with metaphorical loudspeakers playing status games which you, their audience, automatically lose the moment you take a side.
If you think this has only been going on for a decade, you probably don't know much about lgbt history.
trans people have been around for far longer than a decade, but the degree of mainstream backlash and even awareness is in many respects new; /pol/ and adjacent boards wouldn't call anyone who disagreed a "tranny" a decade ago, and politicians even in deep red states didn't attempt to ban medical transition
seconding Eremolalos.
Also, in conservative circles FtM do have a spotlight on them at the moment. The rates have exploded, which people take as evidence that girls who are uncomfortable about their sexuality get "tricked" into thinking they're trans. This would technically make many FtM trans people victims, but it also casts doubt on the legitimacy of every FtM trans person. I haven't checked for sources myself, but if the number of people declaring themselves FtM indeed has exploded, that is most easily explained by some sort of social contagion.
I'm not connected to conservative circles, but my impression is that the focus on FtM is mostly about the "F" side of it: "they're coming for your women". Or rather, "they're coming for your daughters". It's a standard conservative-gender-role focus on protecting the fragile, precious, valuable resource that is a young girl.
Why are feminine men and trans women lumped together here?
From a transphobic point of view, trans women are feminine men, only more so. And the transphobic point of view is relevant because the question is about the behavior of transphobes.
Not to get excessively binary, but there's two categories under consideration: "trans people" and "people who aren't trans but still adopt aspects the opposite gender". The theory is that in each of those categories, there's two halves, and one half gets more hostility than the other: MTF more than FTM, and feminine men more than masculine women.
Assuming that this is correct, what's the mechanism behind it? Simply positing "heteronormativity" is insufficient to explain the difference. And do the differences inside the two categories share the same mechanism? And if so, what is it? If you want to make an argument that hostility against MTFs has a completely different basis than hostility against feminine men, great, let's hear it!
Perhaps it’s related to a perception of deceit?
Women are the ones who are sought after, men have to do the seeking. Women are born as objects of desire, men have to be built or perish. “Women and children first.” “The fairer sex.” Men are the ones who have to go fight and die in wars. Etc.
(I’m not arguing that any of this is necessarily true or accurate or that men/women have it better/worse/easier/harder. I’m just listing common cultural tropes.)
So perhaps MtF (or men generally acting feminine) is perceived as a man trying to “cheat” his way to obtain certain societal status that he don’t “deserve”.
In a similar vein, (some/many) heterosexual men perceive femininity as sort of the ultimate form of perfection/beauty and go to great lengths to pursue a mate to fulfill this desire. So maybe MtF or men with feminine behaviors is viewed as a “false prize”, something they very much don’t desire and in fact are in competition with (another man) trying to pose as their object of desire, or maybe it’s simply wires being crossed in a way which produces a much more extreme reaction than with FtM (“they talk/laugh/act/look like a sexy woman, but they’re actually a man/adversary, and this is a really uncomfortable conflict!”)
> there is a sense that the groups mentioned have been a major target of culture wars for the last century or so
Has it really though? Half a century ago, a straight man wearing a dress was either a hilariously funny comedy act (Monty Python) or a bizarre eccentricity (J Edgar Hoover, allegedly) but not something that people spent a lot of time thinking about.
A non-straight man wearing a dress... well, that's a whole different kettle of fish. That's more "disgust reflex" than anything else.
Yes, the historical oppression of men wearing dresses has been over emphasised in the modern culture wars.
There's a long historical taboo in Western Culture against dressing across one's sex and class. My understanding is that sumptuary laws in medieval Europe not only regulated the types of clothing and accessories that people could wear based on their social status, but they also regulated the clothing that the sexes could wear. The fact that the laws went out of the way to define sex-coded dressing, makes me think some people were cross-dressing even way back when. And there are a lot of cross-dressing tropes in high-medieval literature. The Pardoner in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales comes immediately to mind. The Pardoner is accused of being a gelding or "a mare" and Chaucer endows the Pardoner with effeminate traits included cross-dressing.
I can't opine whether the historicity of cross-dressing has been over-emphasized in modern culture wars, but it seems to me that modern culture wars are a continuation of historical social patterns that go back at least to the high middle ages.
Looking at Wikipedia, I didn't find sumptuary laws based on sex but only class. And a few decades ago there were hit movies where the male protagonist pretended to be female in their public lives, Mrs Doubtfire and Tootsie.
Google Scholar shows a lot of papers and books about sumptuary laws and cross-dressing. Unfortunately, they're mostly behind paywalls. But here's a doctoral thesis by Brett Seymour that I've been plowing through for the last couple of days that has some interesting tidbits. What's interesting to me is the sixteenth and seventeenth-century English sumptuary laws made exceptions for theaters. Women weren't allowed on the stage, and men (frequently boys) portrayed the female characters. So, there were exceptions to the sumptuary laws made for the theater.
https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/8837/Seymour%2cb_thesis_2012.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=ye
Scroll down to the chapter entitled "Cross-dressing in the Real World." There are summaries of court cases against cross-dressers.
"In 1599, for example, John Watkins was cited for going about the street in woman‘s apparel, being the parish clerk at that time‘, who explained in his defence that 'at a marriage in merriment he did disguise himself in his wife‘s apparel to make some mirth to the company' In 1607, Matthew Lancaster, wore woman‘s apparel like a spinster‘ during a Maytide procession and also used the merriment defence."
A question about the social status part of:
>My understanding is that sumptuary laws in medieval Europe not only regulated the types of clothing and accessories that people could wear based on their social status, but they also regulated the clothing that the sexes could wear.
I could see some sympathy with regulating clothing by social status if e.g. "impersonating a nobleman" carried the same sort of fraudulent exercise of power that "impersonating a police officer" does today. Did it?
It seemed to be more about preserving the social class system. Even though a wealthy merchant could be as rich as a lord, the lords didn't want wealthy merchants putting on airs.
Many Thanks! You may well be right. Also, the line may be blurry
>the lords didn't want wealthy merchants putting on airs.
"putting on airs" sounds like claiming (hereditary??) social status that the merchants weren't entitled to.
There may be a blurry line between social status and privileges that the lords were (legally? customarily?) entitled to. ( Though I presume that e.g. the pre-1999 hereditary seats in the UK's House of Lords would have been difficult for a wealthy merchant to surreptitiously occupy, regardless of a violation of sumptuary laws. :-) )
This doesn't apply to femmy men & trans women, but I think one reason gay males have attracted so much hate is that male sexuality is scary. Having homosexual men around makes straight men go thru some of the shit women do: A man is looking at you and imagining sticking his dick into you. He *probably* won't try to do it against your will, but it's not out of the question that he'll try. But even the fact that he's thinking about it is hard to take.
I'm not sure why you think that doesn't apply to trans women - it's still plausible that they are imagining sticking their dick into you, with the somewhat predatory take on sexuality and the musculoskeletal development that comes from having gone through puberty marinating in testosterone. It may or may not be true, but to either a straight man or a lesbian woman it is still a frightening possibility.
Well, I suppose it might apply to some trans women. But my experience of trans women is that they don't come across that way. Some of that may be the feminine appearance and manner, but also they're usually taking testosterone blockers and estrogen, and many have been for years, and I think that changes them in a way others can sense.
To be fair, though, a lot of what gives me that I'm-with-a-male feeling is just knowing that I'm with a male. I've known enough of them, and listened to enough of them tell me their thoughts, that knowing someone is male stirs up the sense that I may be an object of their lust. And it's a subtle component of my experience, generally way in the background.
IIRC, there was a horrifying little study last year about gender in online chess. Apparently, women played worse if their opponent had a masculine name or no name, but played better ("normally") if their opponent had a feminine name. Regardless of the actual player on the other end.
Hm. Riffing on what you say, if they view MTFs who are attracted to women as having "male" predatory sexuality, this categorizes the MTFs as a threat and as competition, in a way that an F attracted to women isn't?
In theory. But the MtF's I have known don't have a male sort of presence. I'm sure some of that is that is a product of deliberate self-presentation, but probably hormones play a part. MtF's take testosterone blockers and estrogen.
In my experience, the "male presence" thing does go down over time, on average, probably for both the self-presentation and hormonal reasons you mention. But it can pop out sometimes, especially in anger. And I wonder whether the average random anti-trans person talking on the Internet has a lot of in-person experience in neutral circumstances, or whether their experience of MTF people is mostly through images and videos and text and mostly centering on angry MTF people.
Maybe. I guess what I really think is that people are just prone to really strong reactions to sexual things. There's finding certain things wildly hot, and then there's the reverse, of finding certain things really repellant and weird. A lot of people take their person revulsions as evidence the behavior in question is bad, dangerous, or only practiced by nasty, scummy people. I think that's mostly what's going on with the loathing of trans people -- it's a big EWWW. I feel a mild EWWW myself about certain trans-related things, but I just don't take my reaction as information about how I should view trans people.
> people are just prone to really strong reactions to sexual things
Heck yeah. We really don't like acknowledging that we're monkeys, and that all our vaunted "intelligence" and "free will" is bound up in a meat shell that acts like a cross between a chimpanzee and a bonobo.
> A lot of people take their person revulsions as evidence the behavior in question is bad, dangerous, or only practiced by nasty, scummy people.
Yeah. I rather liked the philosophy of "YKINMKBYKIOK", but I feel like it may have fallen out of favor.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/YKINMKBYKIOK
In the evolutionary environment, a tribe of men who were unwilling to fight would be in serious peril, whereas a tribe of tomboyish women would be no big deal, since their preferences could be overruled in any case by physically stronger men.
"Why do 55% of Americans think changing gender is MORALLY wrong? https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx"
People don't want their sons having their dicks surgically removed, and creating a stigma against it is an effective method of discouragement similar to obesity, smoking, dropping out of high school, etc.
This might be a longshot, but I tried it in the past and it worked :
Do any of you work for or own a company looking to hire remote, entry level data scientists, data analysts or ML engineers ? Anywhere in North America is good as long as its remote. Let me know, would be very helpful and it would be amazing to work with rationalists !
Thought I'd send you a coupla links. First is to remote jobs, Hacker News one I've forgotten now, but I think a lot were for remote. No special connection to rationalists.
Remote jobs
https://outerjoin.us/
Job board that seems to be run by Hacker News
https://hnhiring.com/
Still very helpful. Thank you !
A year or so ago there was talk here about how Bean, the guy with the great blog about the navy, claimed that a nuclear war wouldn't kill as many people as popularly believe. IIRC, he said something like the blast from a nuclear warhead would only kill people within about a 3 mile radius, radiation would be bigger lethal problem, but we aren't talking about the destruction of large cities or anything like that.
I just listened to the Dwarkesh podcast with guest Richard Rhodes, author of Making of the Atomic Bomb, who said that some of the original physicists forgot to account for the destructiveness of the fire from a hydrogen bomb, which would be much bigger than the blast zone and could destroy an entire city as big as Moscow.
Opinions?
Whats the point of talking about *A* nuclear warhead blast, when many (most?) modern weapons are MIRV missiles that deliver multiple >hiroshima sized blast with each missile, spread miles apart? (Oh, and of course, there's thousands of these that can and would be fired in a nuclear war).
The original question from about a ye ago was whether most humans would die in a nuclear war and the answer was no, it would probably just set civilization back a century or two .
A related question. Richard Rhodes also says in the same podcast that computer simulations from 2007 showed that the dreaded "nuclear winter" after an atomic exchange would be even worse than previously believed. (Granted, 2007 is a long time ago now but Rhodes said this only a few months ago.) He claims, even a nuclear war between only India and Pakistan could result in a couple billion deaths from failed crops over the following year.
That contradicts what I have more recently heard, which is that "nuclear winter" isn't a real thing, that it's scenario was only a scare tactic.
What does the evidence say here?
I think this - https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Winter - is as good a short summary as you are likely to find. There were some interesting discussions on SSC back in the day as well, but to the same end result.
I'd be interested to know more about what Richard Rhodes thinks, but it's quite possible that he hasn't really kept up with the field except to have noticed that there were a couple of new papers in 2007 or so whose capsule description was "nuclear winter is real bad". Which there were, but I've read those papers and they're the sort of thing that makes me want to say "replication crisis".
Well, OK, maybe we don't want to do multiple replications of Global Nuclear War just for scientific bragging rights. But if you're not validating your models against the Australian wildfires and the Kuwaiti oilfield fires, you're not even trying.
Thanks again!
I don't have subject-matter expertise here, but I did want to say for anybody who isn't familiar, the blog in question is https://www.navalgazing.net/ and it has some really good stuff on it if you want detail-rich explanations of technical topics related to the military.
The effect of fires would be very dependent on the city (built of wood? lots of trees?) and the weather.
It's easy to imagine that a 5km radius ring of fire in the centre of a large city would easily swamp the ability of the survivors to fight it (and besides, everyone will be fleeing, not firefighting) so you're basically stuck waiting for the fire to burn itself out. On a cold rainy day that happens quickly, on a hot dry windy day I can easily imagine everything burning (or at least everything downwind).
Firestorms have always factored into people's estimates as to the destruction and lethality of nuclear war. I can't speak for the theoretical physicists who started the whole thing, but once the military started testing the things, the incendiary effects were quickly appreciated.
And for the largest hydrogen bombs, the big multi-megaton ones everybody worried about during Peak Cold War, the relative scaling laws meant that the incendiary effects were quite dominant. The 50-megaton "Tsar Bomba", to a first approximation, ignites everything burnable out to 50 kilometers and does some other stuff you probably won't care about compared to that.
But Tsar Bomba was too big and cumbersome to be practical, and since the 1980s at the latest most everyone has converged on weapons in the 100-500 kiloton range as optimal for most applications. Those weapons are much more balanced in effect. The blast of a 300-kT bomb will destroy unreinforced buildings out to about 5 km, and it will reliably start fires out to about 7 km. And the two effects are synergistic; starting fires is much more destructive when you tear open buildings to expose all the flammable stuff and scatter fuel across the streets and other potential firebreaks.
So we can sort of round that off to "within 6 km, pretty much everything is destroyed, beyond that there's damage but mostly things can be repaired".
The City of Moscow seems to have a radius of about 30 kilometers, so to totally destroy it you'd need a couple dozen of those 300-kt warheads. Or about a third of a Tsar Bomba, but the couple dozen smaller warheads will be cheaper and give you more flexibility. And for Moscow we'd probably assign a couple dozen warheads just on general principle, but cities that aren't so central and prestigious to the enemy state will probably just see key military and industrial areas flattened+incinerated.
Which, to be clear, is still a Very Bad Thing and we should try not to do that. But it's not X-risk bad.
Thanks!
Well, we're not talking about just one nuke here. The US claims to have 3,708 nukes stockpiled, while the Federation of American Scientists estimates it to be 5,244 instead. https://fas.org/initiative/status-world-nuclear-forces/ Whichever one is correct, Russia is predicted to have even more nukes stockpiled than the US. Even if it did "only" obliterate people in a 3 mile radius, 28 square miles times several thousand nukes is... well, a very large area. Nowhere near enough to glass the entirety of one of the bigger states, but it could take out most big cities in the country.
The main worry with Russia is that if they keep losing this war, there is a non-zero chance they will start launching nukes at targets outside Ukraine as a Hail Mary play, effectively holding humanity hostage to protect their ambitions. There is a paper saying that a full-on nuclear war between the US and Russia would kill 5 billion people, not from the nukes themselves, but from the massive nuclear winter it would cause. Not to mention it would cause a full-on mass extinction of wildlife; after all, this situation is basically the same as what killed off the dinosaurs. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0
Just doing the math on the size of the direct devastation, using inflated versions of your numbers:
12,000 nukes each destroying 28 square miles is 336,000 square miles. The United States is close to 3.8 million square miles. The entire planet is over 196 million square miles.
It would take over 135,000 nukes to destroy the entire United States and seven million to destroy all surfaces of the world.
Even one well placed nuke would cause significant devastation to the world economy (New York harbor, New York Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange, etc.), but would not be that devastating to humanity.
On the other hand, the sum total of all urban areas in the United States is only about 50,000 square miles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas
I believe these contain over 80% of the US population.
Good point. That would still take ~1,800 nukes to destroy all US urban areas entirely, which is a significant portion of all of the nukes in existence. There aren't enough nukes to do that to every country.
Humanity could totally wreck the global economy and destroy significant portions of the world population, but even using every nuke on the planet it wouldn't even be close to extinction. More people may die in the ensuing famines and successive wars as the new political order gets sorted out, but the nukes themselves cannot fully devastate the planet.
It’s interesting that that paper is recent. I assumed the nuclear winter theory had been debunked - the soot just doesn’t last that long in the atmosphere and doesn’t reach the stratosphere. Scientists were predicting some global cooling as the oil field burned but it didn’t happen.
The oil fields burned in the gulf war I mean.
The numbers in that Nature article seem dubious to me. Not the models; I didn't even get into evaluating that. The scenarios. They had scenarios ranging from 1 to 150 Tg of soot injected into the atmosphere. Average would seem to be about 27 Tg. The example for scale that they give is a forest fire, the size of which I know to be 12100 square kilometers, that produced between 0.3 and 1 Tg of soot. Based on that, we're talking about somewhere between one and three Finlands burning down to produce their average case. If you run the numbers, one Finland, maybe one and half, is the most area you could destroy with nukes if everybody decided to work together and be maximally efficient about it. Realistic cases would be far from maximally efficient. A lot of nukes wouldn't go off or would fizzle, a lot of nukes would be destroyed on the ground, and most importantly probably something like 25%-50% of nukes would be expended trying to nuke other nukes where you've got to drop a nuke on every silo even though they're only a few kilometers apart. Only the very smallest of their scenarios seems in any way plausible and their models show very minor changes for the smallest scenarios. Don't get me wrong, a bad day to live in the nuclear sponge or next to anything particularly strategic, but the global nuclear winter bit seems like a case of assuming the numbers will be very bad resulting in the numbers being very bad indeed.
Don't quote me on these numbers, but IIRC there were something like 500+ above-ground nuclear tests between 1945 and 1980. I remember that 1962 was the peak year for above-ground tests. ChatGPT says there were 178 detonations that year and the total explosive yield of these tests was approximately 87.8 megatons, with the largest individual test being the Soviet Union's "Tsar Bomba" test (mentioned above), which had a yield of about 50 megatons. It's interesting to note that global warming stalled between 1945 and 1980. I'm sure the soot from that steady background of above-ground tests must have contributed to that global warming pause between 1945 and 1980, but I haven't seen any studies that tried to quantify it. And I can't find any estimates of how much dust a 500Kt explosion would generate. But 500 x 500Kt explosions happening concurrently would likely push many millions of tons into the stratosphere. I'm pretty sure that would be more than Pinatubo released (10 cubic kilometers of dust), and that had significant downstream climate effects. Not sure it would be anywhere near the amount put out by the Mount Tambora explosion that caused the "Year Without a Summer" in 1816.
It’s not clear at all that any significant soot goes into the stratosphere. The initial explosion might push some particulates into the stratosphere but the subsequent fires - which are what is generally modelled - probably won’t, and therefore get washed away by the lower atmosphere
When I lived in LA in the early 90s I recall that we were getting measurable amounts of fallout from China's Lop Nur nuclear tests which were carried over by the winds stratosphere. Then there's this. Their conclusions are based on modeling, so take it for what it's worth ( I generally distrust models)...
"This study suggests that the cause of the stagnation in global warming in the mid 20th century was the atmospheric nuclear explosions detonated between 1945 and 1980. The estimated GST drop due to fine dust from the actual atmospheric nuclear explosions based on the published simulation results by other researchers (a single column model and Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Model) has served to explain the stagnation in global warming."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S136468261100006X
Have just published an essay: Game Theory, Jaws, and Girard, with an assist from Lévi-Strauss: A quick sketch, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2024/02/game-theory-jaws-and-girard-with-assist.html
While thinking about the next installment in my series on great literary critics (which has become another inquiry into the nature of literary criticism), I found myself thinking about that essay in which I offered a Girardian interpretation of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. I smelled an opportunity: Why not add Lévi-Strauss and game theory into the mix?
Lévi-Strauss is obvious since I’d already discussed him in the series, but game theory? How’d I get there? I don’t really know, it just happened.
But I had taken a look at some of Girard’s remarks about Much Ado About Nothing in his Shakespeare book, A Theater of Envy, where he talks of Beatrice and Benedick as playing a game with one another (p. 81):
"Outside observers shrug their shoulders and declare the entire game frivolous. It certainly is, but our condescension itself may well be part of a strategic positioning that is always going on, “just in case” the game might have to be played. The game, perhaps, has already begun. We always try to convince others that we ourselves never play this kind of game, but these disclaimers are necessarily ambiguous; they resemble too much the moves that we could have to make if we were already playing the game."
Girard does not invoke game theory, and games of course are common enough. We talk about them all the time. Back in 1964 Eric Bern had a bestseller with Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, though it's not a game theory book, not in the sense I have in mind in this essay. But Girard was also concerned about who knows what, with what things are public knowledge, and what things are secret, with how public knowledge confirms individual beliefs, those are all matters of importance in game theory. Moreover and after all, game theory is an abstraction over games in the common-sense use of the term and in a way very similar to the way Turing’s account of computation is an abstraction over an activity otherwise performed by people using pencils and paper.
But just how and why I came to think of game theory is not all that important; what’s important is that I thought of it. Once there I thought of the work of Michael Chwe, a brilliant political scientist who published a very interesting book I’d read some years ago, Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge (2001) and has more recently published Jane Austen, Game Theorist (2013), which I’ve not read. But I have skimmed through his article, Rational Choice and the Humanities Excerpts and Folktales (2009). Moreover, if you search on “game theory and literature,” you get hits. The conjunction of game theory and literature is thus not so strange, not so unexplored, as one might think. If literature, why not film?
Since I’ve already done a Girardian analysis of Spielberg’s Jaws, why not revisit the film with game theory in mind? That’s what the rest of this post is about. I don’t actually conduct a game theoretical account. Game theory is a technical discipline, but this is not technical. It is, however, informed by game theory, but it is not technical. It is a long though, so take your time.
Caveat: If you’re looking for Girard and Lévi-Strauss, they’re here. But the essay is mostly about games. You can find more Girard in my original essay on Jaws, linked above.
Is anyone here has done his PhD and then went into business Development job I wish to know how to transition from PhD to business Domain
A lot of business development folks come from consulting which is generally not a terrible place to start a career (the lifestyle will suck though).
Get an entry-level technical job with a large business and then tell them you are interested in potentially working in technical sales. May take a couple years but there's plenty of demand for technical people moving into sales.
Thanks alot Hank..
Does anyone know how exactly a liquidity providers make money on polymarket.. has anyone provided liquidity in the past for a poly market and made money
Taylor Swift is widely known worldwide. Gretchen Peters isn't *nearly* as famous, but over her long career, she shares with Taylor one thing: she writes extraordinary lyrics about the inner lives of women.
https://fragmentsintime.substack.com/p/tay-tay-and-gretch-pete
> Gretchen Peters isn't *nearly* as famous
Nearly? They're not even in the same universe of fame.
Exactly! Different universes, for sure.
Am hoping my post made that contrast exceptionally clear, in the paragraphs describing the current career arcs of both Taylor Swift and Gretchen Peters. (For instance, by contrasting Swift's 281 million Instagram followers with Peters' 10 thousand followers.)
I don't know who that is, but it's simply not true at all that Taylor Swift writes "extraordinary lyrics".
Acknowledging that music is wildly subjective, as are tastes in song lyrics, poetry, literature, and the like. One listener's meat is another's poison, and all that ...
Still, there's a case to make that some of Swift's best lyrics (with and without collaborators) are indeed extraordinary. And distinctive.
Here's a trio of her songs whose lyrics personally strike me as such, superbly fitted to their respective contexts:
"Safe and Sound" (which was featured at a key moment in the 2012 film, "The Hunger Games")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzhAS_GnJIc
"The Last Great American Dynasty" (riffing on the scandalous life of Rebekah Harkness, the widow of Standard Oil heir William Hale Harkness)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s5xdY6MCeI
(Background: https://www.elle.com/culture/music/a33416288/taylor-swift-the-last-great-american-dynasty-true-story-meaning/)
"Cornelia Street" (adroitly capturing the uncertainties and joys of new love)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgt1d3eAm7A
I started using about the time of the Musk Takeover when it filled my inbox with defenses of the poor Royal Family that was being so horribly mistreated by Megan Markel and her husband. :)
I still announce my Substack posts [https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com] there, as I do on Facebook.
It's weird you talk about the "poor royal family" sarcastically like this, when in reality the one person in the whole situation who truly claimed to be horribly mistreated was Markle herself, and nearly everything she's ever claimed about the royal family and her experiences with it have been shown to be complete lies. She never intended to live a royal life and always intended to use it as a springboard into celebritydom (that life as a C-tier actress couldn't otherwise provide).
I don't care about the royal family, but Markle is truly insufferable and one of the most narcissitic people I've ever heard of. And of course, legions of assholes used her lies as a general bludgeon against what they hated: Old straight white traditional anglo men/culture.
Maybe, but those messages that turned me off Twitter, were, like yours, long on accusation and short on details. I have no knowledge or interest in whether she ever "intended to live a royal life and always intended to use it as a springboard into celebritydom" or if she is "insufferable." But really, the idea that a family that can trade it's ancestry back to Alfred (if not Hengist and Horsa :)) being mistreated by a "C-tier actress" is pretty funny.
Using what?
This is a perfect example of not being able to see what the comment is about. :) Bad Substack! Bad!
There might have been a URL there which some Substack spam filter automatically deleted? Shot in the dark.
How did the linguistic cliche of describing emotional states as "places" originate in English? I'm talking about phrases like "coming from a place of anxiety" or "I'm not in a good place right now".
Also, is it an effective heuristic to assume that the speaker is (a) american, (b) female or/and (c) politically progressive, based on the usage of this cliche?
Not sure how it started, but some reasons it caught on may include: a) there's no standard way to talk about states of mind, and other expressions like "state of mind" are a bit clunky and/or have obscure, less intuitive referents; b) the "place" can be an internal state, as you say, or a function of external factors, or both, which leads me to; c) expressions like "not in a good place" allow for some interpretative flexibility and euphemistic cover when something socially unsavory or personally painful might be going on. Space and time are also pretty fundamental sources of metaphor, and we do say things like "not having a good time right now" to talk about people being--here's another--"in a bad way" (which is a...path metaphor? process metaphor?)
Do languages other than English use place as a metaphor for emotional states?
My feeling is that French and Spanish yes, German no.
Googling for "dans un bon lieu" or "en un buen lugar" you find some possible examples, whereas in German you only get confusion. https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idForum=2&idThread=1343598&lp=ende&lang=en
My French is not fluent but I think a more natural way to express this in French is “je suis dans la bonne voie” which translates to “I’m on a good path” or “I’m in a good way”
I may be misremembering some of this but there's an indigenous language in Australia that when you ask, "How are you?" you're literally asking which direction that person is going. That person would reply with the direction they're going (i.e. north, south, east, or west). And those cardinal directions are both associated with where you're physically going and/or facing, but they're also associated with one's state of mind and well-being. Sorry, I have a packrat mind, and I remember (or misremember) this factoid from a long long time ago when I was an undergrad in Anthropology. I'm like that character in Zelazny's _Doorways in the Sand_ who confessed, "I feel obligated to point out, though, that I have always been a sucker for ideas I find aesthetically pleasing."
Moreover, I remember there was a Radio Lab episode that talked to the native speakers of this language. Sorry, I'll have to dig deeper to remember the name of this language. ChatGPT wasn't able to give me the answer, but it noted that the Maori of New Zealand to say hello ask "Are you going?"
Update: Ahhh, found it. They're the Guugu Yimithirr people of northern Queensland.
Oooh thanks for for finding it! I've heard about them and always found them to be my soulmates, as an old interactive fiction player who uses geographic directions for everything. They say things like "the cup is on the northern side of the table". Likewise, I tell my wife: "If you want to go to this bar, you take the train to the station so-and-so, and then you go west." And she asks: "Which direction is west?" Unlike me and the Guugu Yimithirr, she never knows where is north and south.
"Are you going?" for "How are you" sounds like French "ça va?", "is it going?"
It seems a straightforward spatial metaphor? If one imagines an "emotional landscape", some parts of it are going to be better and some parts are going to be worse. We want to leave Depression City and head out for the scenic Joyful Hills.
I don’t know how it started, but it reminds me of something…
I once heard (and forgive me, because I’m going to mangle this badly) that when we e.g. experience people as being “cold” or “warm” toward us, that’s not just a linguistic metaphor, but has a neurological basis. Apparently, parts of the brain that are associated with processing temperature can also be used for sizing people up. Basically, when we perceive people as cold, the part of our brain that reacts to cold temperatures lights up.
(This admittedly feels a bit too cute to be reliable, but maybe someone who knows more can confirm or debunk the more general idea: that the same circuitry in the brain is used for multiple tasks, which may in turn become associated …?)
Given that (possible mis-)understanding, I would not be surprised if some people – especially people who devote a lot of mental resources thinking about emotions, mental health etc. – use brain circuitry typically associated with orientation and navigation to think about emotional states. And that it would be natural for them to use metaphors from physical space when they need language to describe their “emotional landscape”.
Let me know if I’m way off…
Yes, maybe, no.
Googling the phrase gets me the Oxford Dictionary site, which says "happy place" originated in the 1990's and that they're not going to tell me anything more unless I make an account.
Feels like it could be an extrapolation of "between a rock and a hard place", which Google says originated as a reference to Scylla and Charybdis from The Odyssey.