"If you don't want people to take your stuff out of context, then stop using shit examples to make a contestable claims."
Congratulations, you have just demonstrated why Scott needed to put Ns up like Christmas ornaments around the words.
"How very dare you trample on my toes about something I think is peachy!" is what your comment sounds like to me. He's not saying "gayness bad", he's saying "if you're looking for biological bases only, these two things are not that distinct in which has and which hasn't one".
And you demonstrate precisely the politicised angle which drives these decisions and why the pure biological factors only approach is not going to fly.
In a world where there are methods to avoid women getting pregnant, pedophilia could have enormous fitness advantages, because it's possible to have children specifically for the purpose of abusing them.
"Pedophillia has no evolutionary fitness advantage"
How do you know? Why are men of all ages attracted to a narrow band of female age range, while women can be attracted to an older age range? The evopsych story there is fertility versus proven provider.
The younger the girl is when the man has sex with her, the likelier to be at the peak of fertility, he can be sure that the children are his as he is the most likely to be her first/main sexual partner, and the longer span of reproductive years she will have. That this gets knocked about so that some paedophiles are attracted to children too young to be past puberty doesn't matter, if there are hebephiles who like girls of twelve upwards, then there's a lot of reproductive advantage there.
Men who like young boys (ephebophiles) are no worse off for evolutionary fitness advantage, in re: the gay uncle theory, than the gay uncle who likes them a bit older. And the classical instances of gay uncles are indeed men who like them young, not men in same-age steady relationships. Paederasty has been the model of male same-sex relationships, not thirty or forty year old men living in quasi-wedded bliss. Then you go on to get married and have kids as your duty to society, even if you prefer fucking twinks. So long as you do the social role of propagating the family, you can sleep with boys and have that be tolerated or accepted.
>Pedophillia has no evolutionary fitness advantage
>How do you know?
What matters is the amount of offspring a female can give a man over the long-term not her current fertility. A 30yo woman is over half way through her reproductive lifspan while an 8yo girl has all of her fertile years ahead of her. Even though an ancestral man would have to wait some years for his 8yo wife to reach reproductive age he could still potentially get double the amount of offspring out of her than a 30yo wife.
It would have made more biological sense for ancestral men to chase after 8yo girls than 30yo women and we see this happening in modern primitive foragers. In a lot of these primitive societies it's normal for men to marry little girls before puberty and these little virgin girls are more sought after and highly prized than the adult women who have already had children.
A certain amount of pedophilic attraction does make evolutionary sense for men. But don't expect evolutionary psychologists and psychiatrists to be objective about this. Attraction to minors is just about the biggest taboo in the West at the moment and the official position is that it must be completely abnormal and can't possibily be evolutionarily adaptive!
Also, being smaller and weaker than the man is one of the markers of femaleness -- it's common, though obviously not present in every male -female pairing. Seems to me that responsiveness to smallness and weakness may be some of what drives pedophilia in males. As a woman, I have no trouble understanding feeling tempted to have a sexual relationship that would do harm to someone. But even if you surgically removed my entire conscience I don't think I'd want to have sex with children. They're just not sexy to me. They too small, and just in the wrong category -- they way, say, parakeets are.
Generally speking though, it seems like pedophiles are explicitly attracted only to pre-pubescent girls (true pedophilkes here) It's not, "attracted to girls when they are pre pubescent nd then continue to be sexually attracted to them as they age".
My guess would be it is mre that sexual imprinting is very flexible, and the one thing we know to be a cause for pedophilia is to be sexually molested pre-pubescently.
Yes, and we don't know how big a part being molested as a child plays in someone's becoming a pedophile. It's very hard to get data, because a LOT of people are sexually abused as kids and never tell anyone, including earnest researchers. So if we find that say 20% of pedophiles were sexually abused as kids, we don't really know whether that percent is higher than baseline. Also at least one study found that pedophiles frequently lie about being as abused as kids, in hopes of being seen more kindly. So I think it's entirely possible that sexual attraction to children comes into being the same way all the other kinks do. It's just a very unfortunate kink to have, because you can't enact it without harming a child, and the whole world hates you.
And I don't think we really understand much about where kinks come from. My impression from reading about kinks and talking to kinksters is that it's mostly not imprinting. Adults into BDSM have vivid memories of BDSM-like experiences they had -- spankings they got or witnessed, movie scenes where somebody was tied up, etc -- but what they say about the events isn't that the event caused them to develop an interest in BDSM They say that it was the first time they became aware that BDSM-type interactions were fascinating and thrilling to them.
No one said the pedophile was acting out his urges, let alone on his own kin... Anyway how are any of my childless brothers different from each other, regardless of their sexual leanings?
Total genetic similarility is irrelevant. We're talking about whether a particular trait gets passed on by means of the genes that code for it being replicated. If a gene codes for a trait that reduces that's gene's replication (i.e. not having kids due to being gay), then it will be selected against.
If any of your siblings lack the gene that makes them (occasionally) infertile, their non-infertility genes will be selected for and come to dominate the following generations.
One could also argue that the paedophile has a *greater* incentive than the gay uncle for his siblings to have lots of children and to help those children thrive. Maybe Uncle Virtuous MAP doesn't act on his impulses, but he's 'very good with children' and is always around to babysit and help out, whereas Uncle Gay is spending all his resources on attracting boy toys and splurging on roosters and hoops to impress them:
The problem is that there are so many 'just-so' stories around evolutionary psychology that we don't know that the gay uncle/gay aunt theory is anything close to reality. In some cultures the mother's brother is very important in the family, but that doesn't mean that the uncle is himself gay.
Trying is the word, indeed. How many samples of real-world Gay Uncles do we have, where they invest time and money into their siblings' children?
If gay men today want kids, they can (if they can afford it) go the IVF and surrogacy route. So there is no bar (except money) to having their own biological offspring and investing in them, not in the nieces/nephews.
Yes, there's the traditional trope of the family dancing attendance on a rich, childless, elderly relative in hopes of getting favourable treatment in the will, but Rich Bachelor Uncle or Spinster Aunt need not be gay. They could as well be widow or widower, or their own kids died young.
The basic argument I'm seeing in the comments is that "homosexuality must have some evolutionary advantage or why would it persist?" and the Gay Uncle theory is an attempt to fit a suit of clothes for evolutionary advantage.
Well, by the same token, paedophilia must have some evolutionary advantage, or why would it persist? But homosexuality good, paedophilia bad, is the reaction there. *That* is why there can't be a pure objective science-based psychology manual, no matter what the hopes and wishes are.
This is a confused view of evolution. Reproductive fitness is the limit of the drunkards' walk. Things can happen that happen (in an evolutionary setting of the hunte gatherers) rarely enough that they dont negatively impac fitness. Maybe in post agriclutre society with endocrine disurptoes they happen more freqiently.
"Because of its genetic basis, there is strong evidence to imply that it is positively selected for,"
But the "genetic basis" for homosexuality is very weak! Heritability estimates are lower than most behavioral traits. The classic old ironyis that views on gay marriage are literally more heritable than being gay itself is!
Scott is a lot more respected than WatchMeDoMakeupOnTikTok lady number 12055, so people will take his comparison more seriously than a tiktok trend, and I think it would be wise to consider the effects of expanding a harmful platform carefully.
Doxxing is distinctly awful &, whaddya know, can threaten the safety of the person doxxed and individuals around them including minors. It's weird that no one takes it seriously as an issue. Meanwhile, other topics about threatening the safety of minors cause people to absolutely lose their marbles. Strange.
>(Especially the blindness to the fluidity of sexuality, how many "gay" men have had children? Turns out you can hit both ways!)
Homosexuals are not bisexuals. I have never felt attraction to a woman. I probably never will. Lord knows I spent years trying to turn myself straight in my teens and early 20s, drenching myself in self-loathing in the process, before finally ripping the bandaid off and learning to just accept myself for what I am.
Yes, some strictly homosexual men marry women and have children within those relationships, but this is largely due to societal factors that are dying out in WEIRD societies. Trust me, there are no strictly homosexual men "hitting both ways".
I find the idea that everyone is bisexual deep down to be a common error that's obviously false. I see it a lot from bisexuals, unsurprisingly, but I also see it a lot from a certain type of politically liberal heterosexual.
Regarding the whole " everyone is bisexual deep down" argument...here's what I think. I think sexuality is a spectrum. Many people are on either end of the spectrum (straight/gay), while a select few are in the middle (bisexual). However, I actually think that a lot of people are mostly straight/gay, but not exactly. Like...I think that many straight men can recognize when they see another guy who's hot, even if they would never fuck them.
So...while I don't think that everyone is bisexual, I do think that a...moderately high percentage of people might not be perfectly straight or gay. But hey! That's just my guess, I could be completely wrong.
> and there have been many investigations into the ways that gay or lesbian aunts and uncles may help overall biological fitness of families within indigenious cultures.
But having a 'make gay babies gene' wouldn't be passed on, even if your siblings kids were more likely to survive. Their kids success is irrelevant, because those kids aren't the ones carrying the 'have gay babies' gene, so it can't be selected for! Even if it benefits the group overall, on the individual level, whoever has the most fertile offspring determine the genetic landscape of that population, and having non-gay kids (and the genes for this) makes having more fertile offspring much more likely.
>This also meshes well with the observation that humans are one of the few species that survive past menopause - there is an evolved preference for supporting the children of those in your immediate family. Their reproductive success is reproductive success for your genes as well!
This is completely different. Your kids have your genes, and being monopausal on net balance is likely to increase the rate YOUR genes propagate, hence your genes for eventually having menopause are passed on!
If your helping other people's kids, even those related to, it's not your genes being passed on, and if we're talking about a trait that makes you different than your family members (i.e. 'having gay babies' gene), then the gene for this trait won't be passed on, because them having fertile offspring is precisely because they lack this gene.
It doesn't matter if it benefits the group, no individual is evolutionarily incentivized to have infertile kids, because the genes cannot be passed on. And it doesn't even matter if you're strongly genetically related to your siblings. If you're the one with the gay babies gene and they're not, your gay babies gene doesn't get passed on. Even if a majority of your genes are tied up in that of your group, the specific trait of having gay babies cannot be passed on in this way.
>and evolutionarily ignorant!
This is a dumb thing to say.
You're the one positing a magical form of evolution where genes that code for not having your genes propagate are somehow being propagated more than the genes which don't code for this. This is magical thinking.
I'm not saying I agree with the axioms before the math, but redo your math friend. If a family has five kids, with one that doesn't reproduce and four that do, and each of the four kids shares a random 50% of their genes with the one that doesn't, that's a pretty decent chance that the four kids will pass on the genes the other has.
The ones that don't have gay babies genes are the ones that will pass on their non-gay-baby genes
It doesn't matter if you share a lot of genes with them. If they don't specifically have the gay baby gene, the gayness-as-reproduction-strategy- cannot possibly be passed on. Infertility CANNOT BE SELECTED FOR regardless of how much it benefits the group, because by definition the genes specifically for that mating strategy cannot propagate, and people without infertility genes, even if they share most of your other genes, will domiante future generations
> If your helping other people's kids, even those related to, it's not your genes being passed on
People who are related to you by blood (likely) share genes with you. This is what matters for evolutionary pressures. The percentage of shared genes is (likely) lower than with your own children but this is just difference in degree.
but humans evolved in groups. if one group survives because of its complex dynamics when others peroish, those duynamics are passed on- its an overlooked harder to measure aspect of evolution in social species where individuals cant survive withot the group.
Those dynamics cannot possibly be passed on. Genes are what gets passed on, and if the genes giving rise to this dynamic (having gay babies) have no vehicle by which they can be passed on, the dynamic dies after one generation.
It doesn't matter if it benefits the whole group. Evolution acts on individuals because individuals are the vehicles of genes. Any individual in a group who has more fertile offspring than the rest of the group will dominate future generations, and individuals without gay baby genes will be more fertile. Infertility cannot, cannot, cannot be selected for. Sharing 50% of your genes without your siblings isn't enough. If the people whose genes make up subsequent generations aren't the ones having infertile kids (which they necessarily won't be), having infertile kids is not a trait that gets selected for.
All kinds of things *could* benefit groups but that do not emerge as stable reproductive strategies because they are genetically self-stultifying. It may benefit the group to not have kids, but people with genes to have more kids are the ones whose genes get passed on, therefore the strategy has to die.
Again though, you're not thinking about how groups as a whole could become extinct losing out to other groups who have evolved more useful dynamics.
In that case, whatever fluctuations of evolution in the group arent reproduced, whereas groups where fluctuations that resulted in group with better dynamics relative to the local environment do go on.
Failed groups dont show up in the fossil record.
Its kind of like how if one evolves a culture that is outcompeted by other cultures , not only the culture dies off at the small group level but the evolution of members of said group which result in the culture also dies off.
At any rate, my argument if for group evolution, not that this is the cause of homosexuality specifically. Things can happen that arent beneficial in an evolutionary sense as long as they happen rarely enough that it doesnt hurt the fitness of genes. It is likely that homosexuality is a combination of genetic susceptibility and hormone exposure.
if such cases were rare enough, but the genes that made one prone had potential benefits for some other reason, in large scale socities where there was more exposure to conditions that created homosexuality of transgender or whatever you would see more manifestation.
Its well known that genetic diseases where the genes other different circumstances of different configurations can proliferate and last even though they are obviously non adaptive.
It doesn't matter how related you are in general. The specific genes for 'infertility' need to be passed down, otherwise the strategy has no way to propogate
if any of your siblings/cousin etc don't have genes for gay babies, their non-gay-baby genes will dominate future generations
But this strategy does (at least potentially) have a way to propagate. If there is some gene/allene that raises the probability of homosexuality in men and then those gay men would help their relatives, some of whom might be carrying the same gene, more than otherwise, then that may mean that gene is evolutionarily favored.
Were you perhaps thinking that the claim was that there would be a dominant allene that would cause homosexuality with 100% probability? I don't think the hypothesis was that extreme (and even in that case it likely wouldn't cause homosexuality in both sexes). Of course, I don't know if there's any evidence for this kind of hypothesis but at least it's not an illogical proposition.
but in a situation where groups are competing, groups with more succesful dynamics woould outcompete those with less successful dyanmics, and that would be very hard to calculate since you cant look at the range of ehat group dynamics allowed one group to surviuve while another perished.
First of all, I already explained why having gay kids doesn't help the group during times of hardship, because any resource benefit is delayed a full generation. And if gay people using resources is fine because they help raise their siblings kids, then why does it suddenly stop being fine a full generation later? Not only does it change from one generation to the next, it changes at a point even further removed from the initial stress that 'necessitated' having infertile offsrping!
Second, it doesn't matter how successful a group is. For a mating strategy to propogate, the genes for that trait specifically need to be passed on.
It doesn't matter if having infertile children benefits the group. Genes for infertile children will necessarily be selected against, which means genes for infertile children cannot be passed on. Even if your infertile children benefit the group, other members of the group who don't have the genes for infertile children are the ones will pass on their non-infertility genes, and 'having fertile children' genes will be the only thing inherited by future generations (other than through mutation).
For a trait to be selected for, the genes that code for that trait specifically need to be selected for.
Benefitting the group does NOT allow infertility genes to be passed on. There is literally no possible way that infertility can be selected for. Your infertility genes die out and the most fertile of your group will have their genes dominate future generations, meaning infertility as mating strategy MUST die out.
See? This is the entire attitude and argument in a nutshell. "Comparing homosexuality and paedophilia? But that is so wrong, everyone knows gayness is great and natural and beautiful and kiddly-fiddling is wrong and bad and terrible!"
Biology doesn't care. If a twist of the genes one way gets a result, it'll twist genes into all kinds of shapes. And some of those shapes have more in common than we might be comfortable with. Being exclusively gay so you never have any kind of sex with the opposite sex means no reproduction. Being exclusively paedophilic so that you never have any kind of sex with adult members means no reproduction (until we get into the area of 27 year old men fucking 9 year old girls and knocking them up, which is wrong and bad and terrible but evolution does not care because baby).
Biology does not have a moral judgement about good or bad, ethical or unethical, moral or immoral. Biology judges on "life? more life? continuing life?"
The political angles around "we used to think gay bad but now we think gay good" have nothing to do with biology.
Have you read "the goodness paradox", I think you'd like it. Humans domesticated themselves, and one of the traits that goes along with domestication (less aggressive behavior.) is increased sex... I mean who doesn't remember the dog trying to hump every human leg it saw. (I guess most of our dogs are 'fixed' these days?)
No, I haven't and on your recommendation (I think this is the third?) I don't want to. Your obsession with humping sounds like you need a dose of bromides, or a course of psychotherapy. Obsession is a sign of mental problems.
Oh sorry, please excuse me I didn't mean to offend. The book is not about sex, it's about violence, and this idea that humans self domesticated themselves to reduce reactive violence, but still have (perhaps increased?) proactive violence.
The inquiry for truth is valuable even if victim-cosplayers and special pleaders might complain about it.
Our society's current moral framework excessively valorizes victimhood. A saner society would devalue or ignore it. Instead we celebrate it.
I am an unapologetic gay man. But I don't care about PC and I find this sort of thing tiresome.
It'd MAYBE be one thing if this were being blared into the front page of Big Newspaper circa 1985. But it's not. This is a community of mature adults, I'd like to think. No one reading ACX is going to go on a gay panic rage fueled crime spree.
I think it's abhorrent and deeply unethical for a doctor or ethicist to impose their view on how a person should be over that person's own judgement. If someone wants to change their sexuality or anything else about themselves, they should obviously be free to attempt that because it's nobody else's business.
You still need some criteria for what mental states qualify as a problem. For instance, right now whether your behavior impacts your ability to maintain a job is a factor we'll consider in whether your mental status constitutes having a mental disorder. It's part of your overall global functioning. If you're just independently wealthy with people hired to manage your wealth, consider yourself lucky.
My area involves people with cognitive disabilities. Because of this, I'm especially sensitive to how surrounding economic conditions are an important variable in what it means to be able to maintain employment given how you think and behave. Macroeconomic conditions, employer attitudes, government regulations, etc. all matter a lot.
There's no brain scan you're ever going to be able to give someone that will tell you someone has a disorder that makes them have difficulty maintaining gainful employment separate from the prevailing economic conditions and culture. Disqualifying traits for employers aren't objective, for example. They're dependent on social context.
If your point is that mental disorders are to be treated as a social problem first and suggest involuntary treatment as a go to, then yes, you are disregarding the mentally ill person as a person. There is no way around that.
No - treating mental health primarily as a social problem when considering an individual and treating it primarily to make others feel better around them is disregarding them as an individual.
Well, you can give them meds and prevent them from killing themselves. You can structure their day, ensure that they get enough sleep, get good nutrition, get some sunlight, do some productive work (weeding a garden, building something). There are people who argue not implausibly that some fraction of at least modest depression can be effectively treated by behavior modification. But if the patient lacks sufficient clarity of purpose and motivation -- which is typically the case in depression -- then inducing therapeutic behavior modification by external force might be the kindest and fastest approach in the end.
The same argument is made in the case of alcohol and drug abuse, hence the common preference in the judicial system for coercing offenders with a drug and alcohol problem into inpatient treatment by offering them jail as the only alternative.
I know several people who avoid seeking help, despite being depressed, sometimes suicidally so, because they fear involuntary commitment. Necessarily, if someone like this goes on to kill themselves, they'll be recorded as a suicide that didn't seek help in the system. This isn't necessarily saying involuntary institutionalization is a bad thing in every instance, but if it prevents people who want care from getting care because they fear this mortifying ordeal, it needs to either not happen or be so closely controlled so as to not substantively prevent people from getting help.
I was struggling to write a response to your drugs and alcohol comment but cannot come up with the necessary evidentiary backing to respond - it's a complicated thing. For alcohol specifically, the people being threatened with jail or some form of rehab (12 steps options being cheap) have probably committed some alcohol related crime, like drunk driving. If rehab is the acceptable alternative, why is jail on the table? Not trying to pretend society is a coherent or cohesive thing, but why is "We can either rehabilitate you or punish you" even a choice? If someone's behavior is so dangerous that they find themselves in this situation, shouldn't they go to a jail that aims to rehabilitate? Either/or is a bad solution.
Sure, either choice is going to have collateral damage. That's the nature of the real world. The question is are more people saved by forceful intervention or by avoiding it? I don't have a good answer to that question, but I'm a priori doubtful that either extreme is an optimal solution.
I will say two events tended to push me towards the side of intervention, though. The first is when I read a long story in the Atlantic, I think, many years ago, which reported on a detailed study someone had done of people who had attempted suicide from the Golden Gate bridge. (This was in the context of the endless debate at the time about installing a suicide barrier, the usual objection being "it won't do anything, because if people can't kill themselves from the bridge they'll just do it some other way.") Astonishingly (to me), it turned out almost none of the people who jumped and survived ever even attempted suicide again. A significant number of them took their survival as the affirming miracle that it was, and turned their lives around. One quote from a survivor really stuck with me: "I realized in the moment that I jumped that everything I had thought was insoluble and unbearable in my life could be solved -- except for the fact of my having just jumped." The conclusion of the report was that at least in this particular subset of people, preventing them from killing themselves *on that attempt* could very likely prevent them from doing it at all -- it was a momentary impulse, and if thwarted by force, would *not* necessarily cause them to just find other means. (This is also, I believe, the logic by which people who urge gun control believe fewer guns, even legal guns, would cut down on gun suicides, which is most of them, because if people don't have a gun at hand, they will not, contrary to the opposive argument, just go out and buy a rope.)
The second thing is that I had a good friend some years ago who actually did this thing, he jumped from the Bridge. (He was not one of the rare survivors.) It has definitely occured to me that had he been prevented *on that day* from carrying out his impulse, he might ultimately have been saved. He was just the kind of person who would get carried away by an impulse, but, if prevented from acting on it, reconsider and be more reasonable. It happened in many small things, and then one day, it happend in the biggest thing of all. When people say to me "well, we should just respect his agency, it was his choice to make, et cetera" I tend to hostility. He liked his life, mostly. He was usually happy, but not always, and sometimes dreadfully unhappy. He had good friends, he could hold down a job, and he had a future.
But he also had a disease inside his head that made him sometimes do stupid shit, like go off his meds, not tell anyone, and sit around in a dark apartment until some demon told him to go end it. Abandoning him to that demon seems inhuman to me. I believe in the famous Donne quote[1], we *are* our brothers' keeper, and we let people like my friend down, all the time.
I don't even necessarily believe it's because we venerate free choice so high, as we often say. I think in many more cases the real reason is squalid and unworthy: it's because the mentally ill can be incredibly exhausting, and we just secretly want to wash our hands of them.
Yes, people in the justice system who are compelled into rehab necessary have some punishment hanging over their heads, usually for some minor crime -- petty theft, assault and/or battery, robbery. It's a choice because (1) the system is overwhelmed with cases, and they try to clear their caselog with deals if they possibly can, and if it's clear a drug or alcohol problem is underlying, they think it's worthwhile to try to kill two birds with one stone: put the offender in what amounts to a closely-monitored parole setting *and* try to ensure he doesn't come back, and (2) most judges are actually fairly human people who are trying to help the miserable wretch in front of them straighten out his life. You probably have to be a first-time offender, without a record -- certainly not violent -- and it helps to be young, so the court quails before screwing up your life for a very long time with a criminal record and jail time.
I don't want to romanticize it, however. There is also substantial corruption with the system, and sometimes the treatment programs are abusive and exist just to bleed insurance companies for cash, and sometimes the connection between the court and the program is corrupt. It's a human system, and necessarily imperfect, with dark corners and squalor.
I wrote my comment with the understanding that suicide is often impulsive - when we remove certain convenient methods of suicide, the rate drops and doesn't recover. I believe one of these was a kind of coal fired stove, but it's been years since I read the article and I think I'd have trouble finding it now, so forgive the lack of source. I think there's kind of an error in assuming that giving caregivers the ability to involuntarily institutionalize others they suspect (for what might be very good reasons) of being about to attempt suicide - plenty of people have some level of suicidal ideation constantly for months or years, but picking out the specific moment the impulse strikes me as difficult, if not borderline impossible for a caregiver. I think a preferable solution would be to remove more convenient methods of suicide as a society - netting under bridges and tall, hard to climb fences around rooftops - similar to what you hint at with guns (I certainly don't want to turn this into a gun control debate, this is thorny enough without introducing something else highly contentious).
Shortly - we should not abandon people suffering from depression and suicidal ideation to their demons, but we shouldn't inadvertently aid their demons in attempting to help in a way that causes unnecessary harm. Unfortunately, I think we're also rapidly approaching a point in this debate where even the most measured solutions will have casualties - some from what I fear, which is the folk who cannot seek help from fear of internment, and some from the other direction, folk who could use internment to hold through the worst impulse but are not interned, and then are no longer here.
I think one reason to support free choice as much as possible, even with depression and suicide, is to recognize that we value other human beings as human beings, not just creatures we need to prevent from doing bad things to themselves because otherwise we would feel bad. Other people matter not just because we care about them, but because they have inherent value as individuals with agency, and carrying the threat of internment in anything but the most severe and immediate cases is diminishing them as people. It's easy to think "Oh, I don't matter as a person who makes decisions, just someone who needs to stay alive so that others won't be sad."
As for drug and alcohol addiction - I don't think I have much to add to your points. I would prefer these be treated as social and health problems rather than legal problems, but I would also prefer that petty crimes of other sorts be treated the same way. I'm sorry for not giving this the detail I gave the other topic - there's too much to get out and it's a big enough topic all on its own.
I'm not sure that I disagree, and if so by how much, but I do want to observe that you are talking coercion in either case. Either you coerce people who are mentally healthy -- e.g. by constraining the tools they can own and use, like guns, or by ruining the view from the Bridge, or compelling people to fork over more in taxes to construct suicide barriers -- or you coerce people who are mentally unhealthy. There's no getting around the fact that there is no social solution at all (short of exhortation and prayer) that doesn't involve constraining *somebody*. I don't think it's a sufficient argument that certain kinds of constraint constrain people in ways that aren't readily legible, or that if we spread the burden out among a million people it's a priori better than if it's borne by a few on the other side. These approaches are evasions of responsibility, and do not face the problem squarely.
As I said, I don't have a good answer. I study physical law, because that is amenable to mathematical certainty. This kind of stuff is not, and there's a good reason I did not aspire to a career in it. I'm just arguing for unflinching clarity in recognizing the issues at stake, and the costs in either direction.
I think we can also theorize that survival and prosperity of a group or population MAY be enhanced by a % of homosexuality and evolution of a group could favor that.
You can theorize all sorts of dumb things. The math of genetic group selection doesn't work out, because of variance within groups vs variance between groups (cultural group selection is a different story).
> And who's to say that there aren't child-rearing and social hierarchy benefits to having population subsets (including grannies) who are not competing for offspring?
Homosexuals are not notable for devoting greater effort for the raising of children. Grannies are grandmothers, as in they have already reproduced and are now devoting their energies for raising the fitness of their existing descendants rather than creating more.
Who said I'm just talking about post-industrial societies? Where is there any evidence in any society of males devoting themselves to child-rearing rather than mating? There are societies in sub-Saharan Africa where a mother will receive more help from her brother than her husband when it comes to raising a child... because in those societies men take many wives to benefit from their labor without expecting sexual fidelity, and thus the maternal uncle can be more confident he's actually related. But those uncles still don't prioritize helping raise their sister's children over pursuing mating opportunities for themselves.
Male chimpanzees don't devote much effort to the raising of children. Henrich's "The Secret of Our Success"* discusses the novel development of fatherhood in one of its chapters.
I think your point would be right on a narrow conception of politics on which it has to do only with elections and parties. But it’s very natural to characterize the French Revolution and liberation theology and Extinction Rebellion as political movements, along with anything that determines how we collectively live as a society.
You should read Szasz. He goes much deeper in the books, talks about how people take on different roles and narratives in a bid to get things from other people. It's very interesting.
On the other hand, if gene editing of the kind you describe were to become widely available, I'd expect most parents to edit their offspring to be bisexual. It's the most mathematically advantageous orientation, and with wide availability I'd expect any latent social stigma to disappear.
The strategy doesn't disappear, it's just altered a bit (specifically, you want to maximise E(genes passed down), which is something like E(biological offspring)*E(percentage of genes not engineered in grandkids by kids)*(percent of genes not engineered in kid by parent)). Of course, at that point you're talking about the sky falling in a few generations because you just summoned Shub-Niggurath at full power, as Scott pointed out in Meditations on Moloch.
There are some surveys asking gay people how they rate their life satisfaction or how happy they are, and in big liberal cities gay people were just as happy as straight people.
And in American Samoa and Samoa there have historically been non-binary people and I believe when researchers asked them they were just as happy as cis people.
So I think we can reach a stage where we have Trans people be as happy as cis people. And for gay people I think we have basically already reached this point.
>And in American Samoa and Samoa there have historically been non-binary people and I believe when researchers asked them they were just as happy as cis people.
I recall that anthropological research in Samoa where all that originates (starting with "Coming of Age in Samoa" by Margaret Mead, 1928) is argued as a controversial by the sort of people who would argue it is controversial. And it is argued as established non-controversial science by the sort of people who argue would that. I have resigned into "whatever", as I don't have time nor interest to become an anthropologist.
Mead’s particular claims are controversial, but I don’t think it’s controversial that gender relations in Samoa are *different* from those of Kansas or Sweden.
In general, I think there's just a huge cultural layer of sexual and gender stuff going on in every society. Stuff as simple as whether marrying your first cousin is common, acceptable, or taboo, and as complicated as what gender roles look like in your society and to what extent there's any flexibility in them.
Trans people are unhappy with their physical body, almost by definition. I think sci fi medical tech could make transition sufficiently complete and painless as to make trans people as happy as cis people, but I don't think any amount of purely social change can get there - fundamentally, gender dysphoria has a component that's independent of other people and would continue to exist on a desert island, IIUC
Some genes that are correleted with autism are also correlated with highter intelligence. Would you prioritise gene editing in favour of highter intelligence or against autism?
I also wonder about it and it would be wonderful to get an answer but for what it's worth I was reading "The Neurotic Personality of Our Time" by Karen Horney (from 1937) and it was implied there that homosexuality is a result of pathological develompent but I wouldn't say it was impiled it was "bad".
I don’t think psychoanalysts are taking a moral stance on homosexuality, but I do suspect they still believe it is caused by pathological development rather than having a ~~genetic~~ biological component, ie nurture rather than nature.
FWIW, I suspect that it *does* have a strong genetic component. But that that's not dominant. Also that in small, highly-related groups (e.g. tribes) it was advantageous to the group. So it was fostered by kin selection.
OTOH, I also suspect that most people have a strong tendency towards homosexuality. There have been studies that indicated that more women than men were homosexual, and men have been known to be focused on .... well, I even heard of one case that was focused on tailpipes, though I'm not sure whether it was automobile or motorcycle. That *CAN'T* have been the "genetically intended target"...but it also can't be anything that he would have chosen rationally (if "rational choice" means anything in this area).
It's *not* "nurture rather than nature", but rather a feedback system involving BOTH nurture and nature, and with a huge helping of random chance.
There's evidence to suggest that women are more sexually-ambivalent ('bisexual') than men, yes, but the vast majority of women still self-identify as heterosexual. Literally one anecdotal case of a man screwing a tailpipe doesn't prove anything about men as a class (honestly, isn't the lesswrong/rationalist crowd supposed to understand statistics?)
Ignoring tailpipes (which can get painfully hot), why the fcuk do we care about sexual preferences, at all? The urge to classify and to try to explain people's sexual preferences seems pathological to me. Is the need to categorize people in the sexual preference categories genetic or learned? I suspect that it's learned, because many pre-modern societies didn't make a big deal about it (though some did). But the need to lump things or people into binary categories seems to hardwired into our brains, and once we start doing it for one set of categories we can't seem to unlearn it.
So guys group themselves into the "I like gals" groups and the "I like guys" groups, and socially they tend to isolate themselves from each other. And the gals who like gals want to hang with gals who like gals while the gals who like guys tend also isolate themselves (but I think less so than the guys). And anyone who likes both are given the hairy eyeball because they don't fit into those predefined categories. And because of our pathological need to lump people into sexual preference categories we build all sorts of stereotypes about the people we place in those categories—many of which tend deindividualize or worse dehumanize people in those categories.
Back in the 80s I remember seeing an interview with Robert Reed (who played the dad in the Brady Bunch) on some daytime talk show. He had at some point publicly came out as gay (even though I guess he was pretty open about the way he swung with the Brady Bunch actors and crew). Anyway, he seemed to have regrets—even though he didn't specifically say that—about proclaiming himself gay because he said he was now the "gay actor" in the Brady Bunch, rather than the actor who played the dad in the Brady bunch—and he felt the label eclipsed his talents. Meanwhile, Jody Foster kept mum about her sexual preferences until the rumor mongers forced her to admit it. Why the obsession with Jody Foster's sexual preferences? Why the need to pigeonhole her? It all seems rather pathological to me, but I don't write the DSM...
I'm not sure why we care about sexual preferences either, but I have the sense that we're wired to care. Certainly nature wants us to be aware who is a possible mate, so of course that pushes us in the direction of being alert to the sexual interests of the opposite gender. I believe -- but am embarrassed to say I do not know for sure -- that most cultures make rules about sex and that these rules are taken pretty seriously. It may be that we are driven to make rules about sex because we sense its power and make rules to try to keep order. Many murders, suicides and plenty of crimes are motivated by sexual ambition, sexual jealousy, sexual loss and humiliation. Also, we seem to feel sexual repugnance as easily as we feel sexual desire. Sex acts that do not seem hot and luscious often seem grotesque and repugnant to us. There's not a lot of in between. And that kind of seems like wiring to me too. So while I agree with you that for us, in our era, it's really not important how somebody gets off and who they like to do it with, I think we are wired to care.
Because sexual desire and romantic attraction are some of, if not the most, powerful motivators of human activity (generally speaking), with some of the most powerful intuitions, taboos, and disgust reactions surrounding it; and sexual reproduction is how humanity carries on from generation to generation. It's literally at the core of who we are, how we relate to each other, how we organize our societies, and how we reproduce.
LOL. "Doomscrolling" is a prevalent issue right now, so it's not just sexuality classifications. People are actively hurting themselves over all flavors of "must read how a thing has been described and classified." Apparently in-home cooking appliance classifications is the latest trend.
Yes, and almost all men self-identify as heterosexual. But there's LOTS of variation. IIRC Kinsey used a 9 level scale to figure the degree of homosexuality, but I think that's still wrong, because it's one dimensional.
P.S.: What the guy with a tailpipe fixation proved is that people can fixate as unreasonably as a gosling. They usually don't, but there's no reason to believe that that guy was extremely out of the ordinary except for the particular object class that he fixated on. Possibly because we delay the fixation until much later in life than a gosling. (Though there seems to be *something* about motorcycles and flashy tailpipes that is fairly widely considered sexual signaling.)
A Swedish twin study put the contribution of genetics at 1/3 for gays and 1/6 for lesbians (with shared environment having no effect and non-shared environment making up the rest).
So it's certainly a factor, but it's also the smaller factor.
To my knowledge twin/sibling studies indicate that homosexuality is around 30% genetic, but "non-genetic" is not necessarily the same thing as "produced by nurture"- environmental influences can be congenital and/or random (e.g, produced by random hormone fluctuations in the womb, intestinal flora, role models, or whatever.)
I'm personally willing to take the stance that, yes, in fact, homosexuality is a biological disorder. It's just incurable, and so long as the individual in question avoids spreading dangerous STDs or screaming for the family to be abolished, it's a harmless disorder. Like having a version of OCD that just compels you to always put on red shoes in the morning, or something.
Likewise... yes, gender dysphoria is a disorder of some kind. If, e.g, a biological male wishes to live and pass as a woman, then depending on how you look at it you're either looking at a man with a psychological problem or a woman with a physiological problem- either way, it's a disorder. If there wasn't a disorder of development, they wouldn't have dysphoria!
Technically, no, but the idea that humans should cease reproducing and/or cease taking responsibility for looking after their offspring is an idea so close to promoting your own society's extinction that I would consider it tantamount to calling for violence.
Would you consider heterosexual non-breeders to be perpetrating a violent act? Or are non-breeders with non-standard sexual preferences or identities the only ones perpetrating violence by not reproducing?
In case you haven't noticed, there's currently no shortage of people on the planet. I don't know whether homosexuality and transsexuality is becoming more common, but if it is I'd wonder if possibly that's nature's way of limiting population growth. It's certainly more humane than killing off a bunch of people via starvation and plagues.
What pushes you towards seeing homosexuality as a biological disorder rather than as a biological variant, in the same category as red hair or left-handedness?
I believe Scott explained it fairly succinctly in the original article, but to reiterate: healthy organisms normally gravitate toward sexual partners they can actually reproduce with.
(Same-sex sexual acts are not that uncommon within the animal kingdom on a sporadic basis, but a stable lifelong attraction to the same sex is actually very rare: it is only documented in humans and male domestic sheep. There's a theory this might be a consequence of self-domestication.)
Well, you and also Scott if he said what you think he did, would need to define quite clearly what you mean by healthy. What are the criteria by which you judge an organ, an entire body or a behavior to be healthy? You mention that homosexuality is rare among other species. Is that how you define a healthy behavior -- one that occurs as frequently among animals as it does in our species?
Here's the thing: I think ourt species is wired to have strong reactions to the sexual habits of other people. My observation is that most people do, and also I think it makes sense that we would have strong reactions. We are social animals, and the way sexual relationships play out can have both very good and very bad consequences for society: It can lead to lasting bonds between sexual partners, and of course it produces children and then the tribe also has the extra stability that comes from having bonded family groups. But sexual ambition, jealousy and disappointment also lead to conflict and misery, and of course that's bad for the tribe. In my experience, a lot of people's objection to homosexuality comes down to their having a very strong EWWWW reaction to certain sex acts and/or to picturing any sex acts at all happening between members of the same sex. I'm inclined to think we're wired to react that way to sexual acts that are a bit different from those we enjoy. So if you find yourself viscerally convinced that homosexuality is unhealthy, you might try on the idea that your EWWW is interfering with fairminded thought.
Nature is replete with healthy organisms that do not gravitate toward sexual partners they can actually reproduce with. Kin selection is such a successful strategy that haplodiploidy has evolved at least 10 separate times, and it's entirely plausible that evolution selects for a certain amount of "take care of your sister's kids instead of having kids yourself."
I think whether you see it as a disorder or not depends on the context in which you're thinking about it.
First, you might think in terms of individual well-being. In 2022 USA, being gay is not a huge impediment to living a good life. But in 2022 Iran or 1922 USA, it's a substantial impediment to living a good life. At an individual quality-of-life level, whether being gay is something terrible that wrecks your life and so you'd really like to be cured of depends on your environment and culture.
If we're thinking about evolution, then it's a disorder to the extent it decreases the inclusive fitness of the genes of the gay person. It seems almost inevitable that being gay decreases your fitness in most contexts (when you get a chance for some extracurricular action, do you go for the kind that *can* leave an extra kid or the kind that *can't*?). But this isn't a moral evaluation or anything, it's just how we can think about evolutionary forces. To the extent homosexuality is genetic, it's kind-of a puzzle, since it seems like it must decrease the number of offspring you leave behind.
If we're thinking in moral terms, then it depends on our moral code. If you believe that homosexual behavior or desires are terrible, wicked, sick, etc., then you're going to see homosexuality as a disorder needing treatment, much like we'd see pedophiles. People with a different moral code will see things differently. And since we don't all agree on moral codes, you can easily end up with people in our society who desperately do not want to be gay, and would like some kind of therapy or something that would turn them straight. I gather this doesn't work too well, but it's not crazy that someone who is convinced that wanting to sleep with dudes makes them an evil person doomed to eternal hellfire would like some help with that.
What does “dysfunction” mean? If it’s about something biological not functioning in the evolutionarily normative way, then it might be a dysfunction, just like ability to shift time zones frequently without experiencing jet lag.
Likely yes, because it would likely be generating more heat than usual too. You might have a setup where excess heat generation isn't as much of a problem as the benefit gained by the excess speed, just as someone with a job that involves a lot of international travel might have a setup where the unstable sleep cycle is beneficial, but in the environment both of these systems were developed, they likely ended up with particular normative behavior because the downsides were worse and the upsides were much less.
It depends on the software you are trying to run. For example, some old videogames expect your computer to process at a certain speed and become unplayably fast in modern computers. Modern games don't have that limitation anymore.
In this analogy, a computer operating too quickly is the dysfunction, CPU/framerate throttling was the treatment and videogames are society.
Well, I think the short answer is "no" (since psychoanalysts are probably liberal about such things, and I understand even some early psychoanalysts were), but the question is what one means by dysfunction. I think psychoanalysts think that a lot of behavior or personality is the result of early adaptations that might not make sense in later life, but when do they become dysfunctions? I mean, if all men treat women based partly on their childhood relationships with their mothers, all men are at least a bit crazy (since these women aren't their mothers), but for some of them it works out and for others it doesn't.
I get the impression that psychoanalysts (and a lot of therapists) don't like the DSM style diagnostic system, which is based on somatic medicine and divides mental health problems into discrete disease states.
Most of what I know about contemporary psychoanalysis is based on reading Nancy McWilliams's books (psychoanalyst and professor at Rutgers). They are quite good if one is interested in the subject.
ISTM as an outsider to the field like the need to medicalize everything and make a diagnosis in order to get psychiatric treatment covered by insurance or Medicare or Medicaid warps the hell out of diagnostic criteria.
I think it varies. There are a lot of subschools of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts tend to be artistic, literary and politically liberal. I'm sure these leanings push them in the direction of thinking homosexuality is not a dysfunction, and psychoanalytic theory is so vague and so independent of empirical tests that I'm sure it's possible to adjust one's personal version of psychoanalytic theory to make it consistent with all kinds of ideas that are driven by political leanings, wutz kool at the moment, etc.
I suspect nothing will actually stop the NYT taking you out of context. You’ll probably just get something stupider about the Ns being a dog whistle: “Scott Alexander drops N bombs in article comparing pedophilia to homosexuality.”
I hope it does cause any readers who see it out of context to go back to the original article because its funny as hell.
But also, the idea Scott is writing about is extremely taboo, even in context. People aren't ready for it. We have too much cultural and religious thinking that elevates fatalism, determinism and what's 'natural' as justification for who we are supposed to be.
I just think that is silly and counter-productive. If someone wants to quote this in a hostile way, he or she could simply say that the author is aware of how bad it sounds and so wrote the most objectionable parts in a sort of code with the idea that it would dissuade quotation. But translated back into ordinary English it reads as follows: [insert the text without the extraneous letters]. With that explanation there would be no journalistic problem with quoting the real sentences being communicated without regard to any added characters.
>"You’ll probably just get something stupider about the Ns being a dog whistle: “Scott Alexander drops N bombs in article comparing pedophilia to homosexuality.”
huh. That group seems.. pretty intense. Is ir generally just a "hate rationalism cause its not hard left" thing?
I think there are probably valid crtiqiues of tendencies and ideas that are common to x-rationalist circles andI'm sure there are some sketchy individuals, but they seem like, really really intensely angry that rationalism is a thing.
I personally feel like... so what. We know there are people who are going to permute everything through their political tribal lens.
Why should we care anymore that the NYT will do it then that some Muslim will think "these people dont believe Allah is the one true God so they are all evil followers of Satan?"
Yes, this has always been a weird thing about "Born this Way" moral arguments. Each of us is born with certain tendencies we want very much to transcend, some of which would be immoral to indulge. You can't sidestep ethics with appeals to biology.
I believe the reference is to Crowley's Thelema ("'Do what thou wilt' shall be the whole of the Law"), which is literally a Satanic philosophy*. So I think that addition breaks the intended meaning.
*Crowley renamed himself Aleister in order that his name add up to 666, and claimed the title "Master Therion" - "Therion" means "beast" and also adds up to 666.
Sorry, but Crowley's philosophy was NOT Satanic. It was, however, definitely non-christian. And he was making things up as he went along (allegedly with "spiritual" inspiration). If you want Satanic look up Anton Lavey. I found Crowley's philosophy an incoherent mix of anarchism and authoritarianism. This is probably because he drew on multiple sources, including Hinduism.
That said, he *did* work to present an image of a Satanist, but that was pure PR.
I interpret "born this way" as an appeal to the same cultural sympathies that helped race relations make real gains in the late 20th century. Homosexuality is at the very least more mutable than race, so your point is taken. But positively affirming the ethics of homosexuality wasn't a winning strategy when progress was being pushed for. I'm not surprised "born this way" got as much traction as it did.
Plus, this isn't like anger issues or nail biting or some objectively bad thing. If someone likes the way they are and they aren't hurting anyone, why change?
People are born unvaxxed and their rights are very restricted if they don't take vaccine. One could say the unvaxxed help virus circulate, but this is at best, probabilistic. Similarly, a great host of diseases are more effictively spread by homosexual men than by heterosexual contacts, due to e.g. alternating passive and active roles (not possible in heterosexuals), greater desire to engage in group sex, etc.etc.
No I don't. Most virus-friendly way is to insert penis into anus (and probability of passing infection is depedant on direction), and women lack the former. Dildos, ropes etc. don't change that.
People generally think of "harm" in diffeent ways; direct harm or social harm. Both traditionall moral conservatives and progressives have ideas of "social harm" whereas libertarians tend to foucs on "direct harm".
As an example, there are places where people are not allowed to do things on their own prpoerty. The libertarian view says "the thing this person does on their property doesnt cause me any harm." The social ethical view says "this person lowers my properrty values thus brings me harm" or "brings down the neoghborhood" or some such.
So sexual behavior that is consensual doesnt cause any type of direct harm- the "harm" you're talking about is a 'social" harm, i.e., some forms of sex increase the risk of disease transimision which has negative effects on cost to society etc.
But generally the people who think of "harm" are thinking in two very distinct ways.
Furthermore, the reality is most people in our cultural spheres think of bpth but draw the lines differently- the have their own ideas of what is personal autonomy versus social harm.
I literally just wrote a 1000 words on how WRONG this claim is in the recent “when do we get political backlashes” thread! To avoid you having to refer back to that, let me cut an paste:
I think that at least part of the answer requires an *honest* understanding of why the "losing" side is against whatever the issue is. Such honesty is, of course, not exactly common...
In the case of gay rights, I think the explanation is pretty simple. The issue of gayness (being honest now, as opposed to the usual story) I think was primarily viewed by its opponents as set of anti-bourgeois values and morals. And why wouldn't it have been so? In the late 60s/early 70s gayness presented as an all-party all-the-time lifestyle built on endless drugs, zero personal responsibility, and destruction of the family:
The infamous 1972 Gay Men’s Liberation demands looked to most people like a demand for legalized pedophilia and does the usual political yutting thing of throwing in multiple demands that have zero to do with gayness but an awful lot to do with making themselves unpopular with most of America.
Read the above document. THAT is what most people thought they were protecting America from in the 1970s, and who can blame them...
What happened in, I guess the 90s, is that a smart enough group of gay people managed to wrest control of the agenda away from these lunatics and worked hard to ensure that the ONLY issue on the table was gayness. Not gayness and how the military sucks. No gayness and how the family should be abolished. Not gayness and drug legalization. NO OTHER CRAP except gayness and laws related to that. And it turns out that, big fscking surprise, Americans did not have a problem with gayness per se, once it was stripped of the lunacy.
To the extent that other agendas like "racism" or "sexism" win without backlash, it would be by following the same agenda. But it appears that both of these are in too deep in terms of having defined a totalizing world view that is anti-bourgeois and anti most of what Americans support (including such basics as decency, honesty, truth, and rationality).
In a sense I think you have the story backwards. Both race and sex got most of what was reasonable in the late 60s and early 70s, but were not content to take the win and build on that; they created a backlash by refusing to take yes for an answer.
Gay rights stand out as being a rare case in history where common sense prevailed, where the winning group was content to accept its winnings, shut up, and stop fighting. If gay marriage had immediately been followed by other items on that 1972 agenda ("Americans remain as homophobic as ever, until they are willing to destroy that most homophobic and repressive institution of all, the family!!!") yes, there would have been, and would continue to be, massive backlash.
More generally, if Y is a more extreme request than X...
...if you actually want Y, bundle X with Y.
...if you actually want X, unbundle Y from X.
This reminds me of a warning to be careful about people for whom your goals are only a mean to achieve their goals. Wasn't obvious why you should care. Even if they care about your goals instrumentally, they will still help you achieve them, right? But one possible problem is they might bundle your requests with their specific requests, because they do not care if it decreases the probability of your requests succeeding, as long as it increases the chance of their requests.
But... if Y is much more prominent than X, then you might want to bundle X temporarily in order to raise it up the prominence ladder to the point that it can stand alone (at which point you unbundle it).
There is a great deal to this. But it misses an important part of the history, which is why the GLF were so radical in the 1970s.
The Mattachine Society had been asking for gay rights on a "just gayness" basis from the 1950s and getting absolutely nowhere. By allying with all these other radical groups, the GLF were able to get gayness onto the radical agenda - if the GLF is demanding an end to the Vietnam war, then supporters of the end of the Vietnam war would be more favourably inclined to the GLF.
What happened afterwards is not so much what you have as the 1990s, but that the existing moderate pro-gay groups (from the Mattachines to the Gay Rights National Lobby of the 1970s to the Human Rights Campaign since 1980) were able to get traction in a way that they hadn't until the late sixties/early seventies - because they got traction in opposition to the GLF and other radicals.
This is a pretty common thing: there are both radical and moderate supporters of a cause, the moderates are unable to bring initial attention to that cause, while the radicals can bring that attention. But it's the moderates who get the cause actually implemented.
There are still plenty of radical anti-family gay activists. It's just that HRC has nothing to do with them and the media largely doesn't report on them.
I'm not too familiar with this, but I do wonder if age played a role - lots of people are anti-family in their youth, then change their mind as they get older. I'm sure there are some people who stick with their convictions, but it wouldn't surprise me if many of the people who were in the GLF ended up becoming more moderate supporters a couple of decades later.
Absolutely. Also many GLFers were just gay people who were angry and "weren't going to take it any more" (as that generation put it) - they didn't endorse the whole agenda, and certainly didn't endorse the linkages that GLF had created. But they endorsed the radical noisy tactics of the GLF, and radical noisy tactics tend to be organised by radical people who are usually keen on multiple radical things and support whatever the current broad radical agenda is.
There are always two issues - why things happened as they did in the past, and what is the relevance to today. I was more concerned with the relevance to today aspect, along with clarifying the history.
Relevance to today is that we see the same over and over again. Consider, for example, BLM.
Let's consider one way BLM could have played out.
BLM advocates could have said "police violence is a problem for all Americans, let's all work together to try to ensure that it is tracked, that it is punished where appropriate, that it is reduced". The slogan could have been, I don't know, All Lives Matter...
But of course that was the path not followed, and people who tried to go down this path, that police violence is a problem no matter what the circumstances were accused of being racist and scorned.
Now how should one interpret this? *I* interpret it (and I think most Americans agree with me) that the real goal here, for the activists, is not police violence, it is "ways to make whitey feel guilty". And so anything that solves the police violence problem but does not make whitey feel guilty (and hell, maybe reduces the salience of some aspect of white guilt) is not a path to be pursued. Leninist "heighten the contradictions" as opposed to liberal "solve the problem as much as possible".
The gay case is interesting because it shows (again IMHO) just how reasonable Americans are when a reasonable case is presented to them. BLM, for example, could have chosen to go down that path. They did not, and I believe they deliberately chose not to go down that path, fully aware of (and desirous of) the consequences.
I guess I understand it differently - that if radicals don't go out and piss a lot of people off, then there's no way that moderates get the political opportunity to achieve something.
I think a large part of the difference between us is that I see this as a battle between two groups (of radicals and moderates or Leninists and liberals or whatever you want to call them) where one is better at getting attention and the other is better at converting that attention into effective action - while you see it as a tactical choice by a more homogenous group of people.
To me, you can't stop the radicals being idiots. Sometimes you have to publicly scold them, sometimes you have to just ignore them and concentrate on doing sensible things, sometimes you have to protect them from an overreaction from the other side. But you're not going to stop there being people who want whatever it is that they want.
What it is that they want is a separate question. I think they are themselves a very varied group, some want white people to feel guilty, some want to abolish the police, some want to abolish the entire concept of enforcing laws, some want to bring the revolution, whether that be an authoritarian communist one or a chaotic anarchist one - and some are just angry at the police for beating up and killing black people and want to express their rage and haven't really got as far as wanting a specific solution.
One of the things I've learned about politics from thirty-something years in various political organisations is that everything is factional, and every statement, every policy, every manifesto, every slogan is the result of negotiations between factions and usually reflects much more the internal dynamics of those factions than it does have anything to do with intent on how people outside will think about it. The ability of any political leader to prioritise how the mass of people on the outside will consider what you are saying/doing/proposing over the internal factional dynamics is what generally makes for effective political leadership, and it's a rare talent - you have to both know what will be effective messaging and policy and also be able to win the internal faction fight to let you use it.
You're right that you can't stop stupid. But you don't have to valorize it!
We have enough experience from history to know how these things work out.
The Whigs gave us 1688, the Jacobins gave us 1789. The progressives and the Fabian Society gave us Social Democracy, communists gave us the USSR. MLK gave us the passage of the civil rights laws, Malcolm X gave us the backlash that persists.
I don't see why society (broadly understood) is making excuses for why these people are "valuable", let alone treating them as heroes. They are dividers, not uniters, and I reject the very premise that they "accelerate" change; instead they create precisely the environment where change is not possible until catastrophe.
("These people" is not left or right; it refers broadly to people of the "my way or the highway persuasion", people who are unwilling to accept either compromise or allies with only limited overlapping aims. These people are poison to the entire project of politics because they are conceptually opposed to the compromise that is the essence of politics, and enjoy the act of burning down the world by labelling as enemies anyone who is not 100% committed to every detail of their current ideology [which can, of course, turn on a dime. There's a reason the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was a touchstone for identifying the type, or why tankie is such an effective [and accurate...] insult.])
Black Lives Matter was specifically focused on the problem of police misconduct as it relates to its disproportionate impact on black people. This isn't to dismiss the issue of police misconduct and subsequent impunity generally, but to to focus attention specifically on racial discrimination. It's an assertion that the rights and well being of black people matter too. Responding to this with, "well, all lives matter" at best misses the point, and more nefariously was adopted by people as a counter-slogan meant to actively dismiss and mock their concerns.
There is no indication that american blacks are disproportionately impacted by 'police misconduct' once the frequency of black crime rates are controlled for. (They're somewhat more more likely to be subject to use-of-force when arrested but actually less likely to be killed during arrest, relative to whites, and unarmed men of any race in the US are more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by police.)
practically speaking as an anti-poloice activist, I do se the point that prior to BLM there was an increasing consensus from americans of all stripes the police wer out of control and had to be reigned in, whereas BLM practically ahd the effect of making it more of a tribal racial issue that probably increased racism (a racist who sees an american or a human have their rights violated might start to have more sympathy when they think "that could happen to me or smeone I carr about"- by making it a "this only happens to black people and not white people" (which isnt true, though true proportionally) the movement was hurt and more people supported the police and became more racist.
This was my practical observation, and I think part of the reason was you had people sort of attach other political agendas to the poice reform movement which were less palatable, i.e., the "woke" agenda, as the practical organization of BLM groups became domiated by these politics and there were cases for example where libertarian police reformers were explicitly harrassed and kicked out of blm groups for being opposed to the police bot not supporting the broader poltiical agenda.
As someone who was long an anti-police activist, I was personally quite willing to let the racial issue "take the lead" so to speak but this often wasnt enough and people who wanted to support the caiuse were harrased for not agreeing with seperte politival issues.
I agree that the normalisation of gays and lesbians played a big role in their public acceptance. Obviously opinions will differ within any movement, but from what I've heard gay marriage was initially a controversial proposal within the movement - the more radical members didn't even want it and had other concerns, while the more pragmatic saw it as too far out of the Overton window. The idea of gays and lesbians wanting to marry probably did change people's opinions on the movement, challenging some previous preconceptions of who they were and what they wanted - in many ways it's a very conservative demand to make!
"Gay rights stand out as being a rare case in history where common sense prevailed, where the winning group was content to accept its winnings, shut up, and stop fighting"
It sure doesn't seem like it. What about the "rainbow bombardment" of our children these days? Not content to have each person do their own thing in their own bedrooms (which I think 99.99% of us are all in favour of), we are now trying to force the teaching of homosexuality and transsexuality as equally biologically normal and equally morally valid as heterosexuality... in public schools... to six-year-olds... apparently to make sure that no one feels bad about themselves...
Given that, as Scott mentions above, there is little evidence so far to support a wholly genetic or congenital cause for homosexuality, this means it's cause must be at least partly sociocultural. This does not mean it is a choice, just that some genetics, together with an unchosen set of environmental factors seem to be the most likely cause. And if homosexuality is even partly decided by sociocultural factors, parents should be free to not wish that lifestyle to be encouraged in their children (as atheists might wish, in a public school, to not have religion taught to their children, or vegetarians might not wish for their children to be taught to eat meat).
So if the gay movement had stopped at the achievement of being treated with respect in doing what they want to do in the privacy of their own homes, that would have been great and everybody would have been happy with that. But that hasn't happened. There is not an episode of any new Disney series which goes by where my young children don't get homosexual themes explicitly thrown in their face. It has become an ideology which must be imposed...
This is correct, but I think it doesn't quite get to the real point.
As I get older, I keep getting more convinced that the relevant dueling values are between 'sex is for entertainment' and 'sex is for reproduction'. There's always been tension between the two, or at least for as long as the 'oldest profession' has been in business, and I don't think any society can claim to be entirely one side or the other. Neither can claim to be totally correct, but there is enough fundamental behavioral truth to them that neither is wrong. As such, there are strong reasons 'sex is for reproduction' has stayed around, most of which are probably associated with unchanging truth that sex is an act which may have life-long consequences for everyone involved, and treating it casually is a recipe for potential tragedy.
The LGBT community is a focal point for the underlying entertainment/reproduction debate in that basing your identity around who you want to have sex with implicitly assumes 'sex is for entertainment'. The government weighing in on this via the schools thus firmly puts a massive finger on one side of the scales. What this has generated is people that were told 'sex is entertainment' and when hit with the natural consequences supporting 'sex is reproduction' (or just the internal contradictions in 'sex is entertainment') they push even harder.
That is fine, but I just want to say that 'entertainment' isn't the right word for me. Sex as an itch that must be scratched, is closer, but still not quite right.
I agree with this. The biggest problem with LGBT activism isn't the bad behaviour of a minority of gay men with respect to STDs and borderline-pedophilia (though that's not a trivial problem.)
The biggest problem is that destigmatising LGBT lifestyles means that your wider society has to collectively pretend that having children isn't the healthy and normative thing to do (something that gay men, lesbians and transsexuals intrinsically have a harder time with), and/or pretend that there's nothing special about the nuclear family (as if stable pair-bonding or the protective instinct of biological parents was irrelevant to childrens' safety.)
Equality is nihilism. The only way we can all have equal value is if nothing we do matters.
>having children isn't the healthy and normative thing to do
>there's nothing special about the nuclear family
Yes and yes. Both are things people get pressured into just because. People should be free to choose the type of family, including the number of children, based on whatever works for them, and not because their parents demand grandchildren or something like that.
"There is little evidence so far to support a wholly genetic or congenital cause for homosexuality, this means it's cause must be at least partly sociocultural"
Twin or sibling studies don't rule out congenital causes, and 'environment' doesn't necessarily mean 'sociocultural factors'- it could just mean random hormone fluctuations in the womb, for example.
With that said, I broadly agree that the "lunatics" name99 refers to don't appear to have disappeared anywhere and it certainly doesn't look like their 60s/70s PR tactics were purely instrumental.
Leaving aside transsexuality for a moment, since most people have a harder time with that one, it seems like homosexuality /is/ equally biologically normal and morally valid as heterosexuality. Not as common perhaps, but neither is being left handed vs right, which was once persecuted more than homosexuality.
We're teaching six-year-old kids in public schools about sex /already/, often by government mandate, so everyone's faux-shock about this issue is pretty ridiculous (or insidious). Acknowledging the fact that some people like to have sex with others of the same sex is /not/ advocating for children to start doing so, any more than teaching them about sex is advocating for them to start.
Just like teaching that many people believe in different religions is not the same as advocating or preaching religion, and explaining how it's perfectly fine that some people eat meat is not the same as forcing vegetarian children to eat it.
You seem to think that people want children to be forced or argued or even encouraged into homosexuality, which has never been on any school's agenda, and no advocate would tell you is an actual goal, it's just a weird strawman conservatives are madly fighting against.
People just want to be acknowledged for who they are and not stigmatized while they aren't hurting anyone. Which is /absolutely/ a thing that six-year-olds should be taught in all arenas, which includes sex, since we're already teaching them about that anyways.
"Leaving aside transsexuality for a moment, since most people have a harder time with that one, it seems like homosexuality /is/ equally biologically normal and morally valid as heterosexuality."
I'm not sure why I'm being notified for this remark, but... again, as Scott explained fairly clearly in the original article, that's probably not true. Biologically speaking homosexuality and pedophilia are likely to be both be "sexual targeting errors", and can be considered maladaptive insofar as they reduce the reproductive fitness of the host.
The main counter-arguments don't add up. (Kin selection isn't supported empirically. And although homosexuality is more common than would be expected given the fitness penalty, you could easily say the same for colour-blindness or endometriosis. We don't have to *persecute* people for being colour-blind, but at the same time nobody bends over backwards to explain how colour-blindness must be 'normal'.)
Huh, all I can say to that is we are working from different meanings of the word "normal" here. I think that if we treated homosexuality the same way we treated my slight color-blindness (which is extremely common and, in my usage of the word at least, super-duper normal), then that would be fine.
There's basically no stigma associated with most common-but-mildly-maladaptive traits, as you mention, and that seems like it fits the fairly colloquial meaning of normal I'm familiar with at least. No bending-over-backwards required. No one is trying to say it's /ideal/, it's just perfectly normal. Replace with "common and acceptable" if you like.
If I had an A/B selector for my own child, I wouldn't choose homosexuality, since dating and relationships are hard enough as it is without that wrinkle. But since no-one has that selector, I certainly want my child growing up in a culture that thinks it's perfectly fine, just in case that's how he turns out, through no choice on anyone's part.
And, for what it's worth, language does have power, and classifying that group of people as "abnormal" does not seem to lend itself to creating that culture, despite it being true for some meanings of the complicated word normal. I would love to see the negative connotation taken away from the concept of "abnormal", but that's a dumb hill I certainly don't want to die on.
As to the morally valid part, I assume we both believe there is a vast gulf between pedophelia and homosexuality on that score.
yeah, reading that dcoument it mostly sounds reasonable to me. Now, I dont support forcing people not to discriminate, but i think they shouldnt, and the rest sounds fine.
If someone likes the way they are, and they aren’t hurting anyone, then why does it matter whether they were born the way they are, or they chose to be this way, or it happened in some way other than genetics or free choice?
It turns out that a lot of people aren’t convinced by that question, so “born this way” is a rhetorically effective move. But it is morally problematic because it conditions acceptance on an empirical claim that could easily be false, rather than on a better moral theory.
I think partly this is an arguments-as-soldiers thing. It was historically easier to argue for gay rights by framing homosexuality as something you were born with, rather like race. And at least some arguments for widespread societal acceptance of homosexuality would be undermined by arguments that homosexuality is heavily affected by environment and social pressure. But neither of those tell us that the born-this-way explanation is correct or incorrect.
Seems like most of it is easily solved by just accepting that "born this way" is really just a stand-in for "didn't choose this", which is the reality. Either way, the same acceptance should apply.
I think the "Born this way" argument is more a counter-argument against people who shout homosexuality is unnatural. The default opinion is that any behavior is morally neutral; you have to argue why a behavior is morally wrong. "Born this Way" are counter-arguments to homosexuality being wrong; not an argument that homosexuality is right.
Without supporting the sexually conservative viewpoint I'd like to take a minute to explain the notion of Natural Law because the "Born this way" argument consistently uses a strawman of the Natural Law position.
Natural Law was a moral movement that influenced the Sophists and other ancient Greek philosophical groups and was basically adopted by early Christian apologists who wanted to use the hip lingo of their day. The terms of Natural Law are not used with perfect consistency, but the question of whether something was 'natural' or not never had to do with whether or not that thing was found in nature. So the constant litany of examples of this or that behavior being 'natural' because someone found an animal doing it are missing the point, either accidentally or deliberately.
Natural Law is an attempt to construct a system of ethics which is higher than convention or the status quo, and can therefore be used to criticize the status quo.
If you find animals defecating next to their drinking water, this is not proof that getting poop in your drinking water is 'natural.' However if you find proof that defecating near drinking water spreads disease in humans and makes them sick then you can argue that allowing poop in the drinking water is 'against nature.' And you can still make that argument even if the king himself or a majority vote or a thousand-year-tradition has determined the position of the outhouse.
Your framing of Natural Law doesn't seem to make as much sense at first blush. Specifically, it seems like you'd have to assert that getting sick is against nature (can I use "unnatural" here? Not sure...). But getting sick and being sick seems like a very natural thing for humans to do from time to time.
It is "natural" for people to get sick in the sense that getting sick is a thing that happens.
It is "not natural" to be sick because a living things "natural" state is to be well: the only way we recognize a difference between sickness and health is that sickness is an abnormality that is different from the "natural" functioning of an organism.
Natural in this sense means "According to somethings nature" and not "the oppisite of artificial." So, for instance, a dog "naturally" has four legs because part of the nature of a dog is that it is a four legged animal. The fact that some dogs are born with two or three legs doesn't change the fact dogs are "naturally" four legged.
Well, then apparently it's either not natural to be a ginger, or completely natural to be gay, as these two things have about the same prevalence in the human population.
Whether something is natural or not in this scheme has nothing to do with frequency but is about whether it is in line with the Teleology of the species.
"It is "not natural" to be sick because a living things "natural" state is to be well"
Is it, though? I would bet that a large majority of living animals at any given time is suffering from at least one significant injury or disease. Organisms that are completely healthy must be a rarity in nature.
That is, unless you interpret "natural state" to mean "best possible state", in which case "natural" becomes just a synonym of "good", and Natural Law degenerates into a tautology.
You will indeed better understand "natural law" if you interpret "natural" to be "best possible state", although that goes a smidge too far in the other direction.
A dog is "naturally" a creature with four legs, eyes, nose, digestive system, waggy tail, etc. If the dog gets cancer and his digestive system is blocked and no longer functions he has moved away from his "natural" state into an "unnatural" one. One way we know this is that the purpose of the digestive system is to turn food into nutrients that the body needs, and if cancer is blocking his intestines so that the food cannot pass and the nutrients cannot be absorbed then the digestive system is being frustrated in accomplishing it's "natural function".
Actions that make you sick might be said by some to be opposed by nature. Getting sick would generally be a negative *consequence* of an action, not an action itself.
I'm not saying that Natural Law is a good or coherent system or a rigorous system, especially as the ancients conceived of it. I'm saying that people keep going back to trying to define 'Natural' (a term of art with a distinctly non-modern meaning, in context) as 'that which is commonly observed' rather than 'according to an intended higher purpose' (Catholic) or "that which avoids harmful consequences." (more sophist/pagan)
If someone wanted to make a natural law argument in favor of same sex relationships it's not enough to say "bonobos are often observed having same sex relationships so such relationships are natural." You'd have to argue that such relationships were *purposeful* or *adaptive.* Which you could do. People argue that same sex relationships in bonobos help diffuse tension and promote bonding, for example.
In which case you'd need to consider the molecular machinery of a rotating flagellum on some single-celled organism as possible prior art, along with hip joints, and that one type of flea which uses interlocking gears to ensure symmetrical leg motion when jumping.
My impression is that the majority of people break under torture. If one person is being tortured into giving up the location of the rebel base, and another person isn't, then the torture is really the most morally important fact here. I don't think it's fair to say "everyone faces temptations to give up rebel bases, I don't know why you [who are being tortured] couldn't resist them like I [who am not being tortured] did." This is true even if the second person is being tortured in some kind of incredibly weak way (like being in a room 5 degrees warmer than is comfortable) such that there is no clear yes-being-tortured vs. not-being-tortured distinction.
I also don't think this metaphor depends on "literally everyone breaks under torture" to work. If one in a billion people can avoid breaking, does the metaphor still hold? One in a thousand? One in ten?
I thought that's what moral heroism is. People who eat meat enjoy eating meat, but if you think not eating meat is ethically positive despite losing out on eating meat, then you're doing something good. You still might have the same desire, but you choose not to act on it. If someone has a very strong desire, as in desiring to stop being tortured, it would still be ethical for them to not erm, give up the rebel base.
Based on Israel's and America's experiences dropping torture from police interrogation, I would say: torture reliably makes people *talkative* but doesn't reliably make them *honest.*
You don't get more *honesty* by using force, just more *verbosity*. Your captives remain perfectly aware that they can lie to you, and continue to lie, no matter how much you beat them, as long as they think you've no way to tell the truth.
That might work *if* you've taken the right guy in the first place. If the suspect actually doesn't know where the body is, your scenario plays just the same, until you find the body by sheer accident or the prisoner dies from the torture.
I can absolutely guarantee that you will get my debit card PIN code out of me through _very_ brief torture. Presumably this holds true for virtually everyone else as well.
This seems trivially true. Muggers exist and work from the theory that *threatening* bodily harm is a great way to get people to hand over their wallets. People could try to lie and say that they don't have one, or whatever, but mugging is very successful anyway.
I think society has developed some kind of need to pretend that torture doesn't work because a society where torture is an option is a society where torture is overused and we're dealing with a lot of traumatized people. I think the alternative is a society that toughens up and a wide range of petty tortures (getting punched, someone screaming at you, etc.) are ineffective for most people. This appears to be the norm in prior generations, maybe up until the 80s or 90s.
Of course, these previous generations were less psychologically healthy in other ways, so there's some give and take involved.
Yeah, this is weird. We can all agree that torture is at the very least _almost_ always wrong, and the problem is _that_ it often works - if it didn't, it would be far less of a problem, after all, as there'd be no point.
Current society seems to have this bizarre idea that evil things also don't work, and you're wicked for suggesting they might, as though efficiency and moral quality were the same thing.
Meh, current society seems more like it's (correctly) arguing against a policy that allows torture, and will, via some motivated cognition, take any ammunition they can get. The story of humanity. I think most people would agree that mugging is effective.
Still, torture for actually usueful purposes (i.e. not some random civilian's PIN #) is probably only effective in some pretty specific types of situations, and cases where it's the best (not just the most expedient) option are surely vanishingly rare and nearly impossible to correctly identify.
In Stalin's Russia, about 1 in 50 condemned officials resisted all torture and refused to sign the confessions drawn up for them.
So "1 in 50" is my guess for how many people completely resist even pretend cooperation with their torturers.
For "reveal the rebel base" or "kill your own mother while I watch" scenarios, where the cooperation is much less superficial than "sign this confession," I'd expect a higher number.
I think this probably depends entirely on how painful the torture is vs. how bad doing what they want would be, and how much the victim believes in their cause. I'm reluctant to put any generic numbers on it.
> Is torture helpful in getting people to be more honest and not just make things up? Moderately opposed evidence.
Torture as a threat ("tell me what I want to know or I'll continue to torture you") doesn't shield against people making things up (presumably, to stop the torture at least for a while).
I wonder if the following was tried: 1) assign tortured person cognitively demanding task (like a video game), automatically give them (more or less intense) electric shocks if they don't perform well enough. 2) while they're playing, ask the questions.
Lying is cognitively taxing, so it might be ~impossible if torture-game's difficulty is set properly for a given person (but make it too difficult, and they might not be able to tell you even the truth).
Compulsive liars will lie more easily in this scenario. People who have to stop and think through their lies will struggle to lie. This is the same theory that goes into interrogation using loud noises, bright lights, people yelling at them, etc.
The confessions almost always included confirmation of false accusations against others, and the balance between «those we will kill no matter what» and «are you an enemy of the people that you let the now-known crimes of X slide?» in the works of the system is probably still unknown (and from some evidence prisoners seemed to err on the side of the latter), so the difference with «reveal the base» is less in superficiality and more in the risk for captors to be lead into a literal minefield.
But doesn't context matter to the sample? A condemned official in the USSR in 1935 would know that there are zero even theoretical limits on what the secret police can do to him, etc. Russia had zero cultural history of anything but totalitarian government, etc. His situation is hopeless -- complete resistance is basically "suicide by cop" -- and everybody knows it. So only the most truly stubborn and/or pain-resistant and/or suicidal individuals would stick with complete resistance.
Whereas someone in a different cultural/historical context but in the same sort of room with the same sort of investigators demanding at him to give up the info -- say a Brit or an American -- might not be as completely convinced that the situation is hopeless. They might keep demanding a lawyer no matter how many times they're told by the interrogators that nobody knows where they are, they have no rights, etc. Just because they grew up with a different baseline expectation -- however unrealistic it may be in the moment -- than a 1930s Russian did.
It doesn't seem clear that the resistance rate in Stalin's USSR would map into other less-extreme cultural contexts, in other words.
> would know that there are zero even theoretical limits on what the secret police can do to him
Most likely many of them did believe (usually mistakenly) that police still tries to keep the investigation in some contact with reality.
> Russia had zero cultural history of anything but totalitarian government
No recent history of non-absolutist government, yes (short fluke was quite clearly a fluke…). However if we are talking about court system, Russia had half a century history of a trial by jury system where lawyers openly argued for jury nullification with nonnegligible chances of success. It was clear, of course, that Bolshevik court system was willing to just kill for «interests of revolution» reasons; however early red terror did include announcing who and why, for some values of «why», is persecuted. Switching to the mode where it is OK for an accusation to be beyond forgery and all the way into absurdist prose was a change many missed…
> complete resistance is basically "suicide by cop"
Some did not know, some had no chance to survive either way, though…
(Not sure what fraction of people initially destined for a non-lifelong prison term refused to sign a confession and still got a non-lifelong prison term, that probably also has happened)
> They might keep demanding a lawyer no matter how many times they're told by the interrogators that nobody knows where they are, they have no rights, etc.
Those might break at the stage where interrogators start torturing their relatives before their eyes (which the 1930's USSR political police have done at least in some cases — not sure how often things reached that stage).
Was this a case of "you will be shot anyway", or did they have a chance of survival if they held out against the torture? This makes a giant difference, after all.
Note that torture was applied not only to those they planned to shoot, but also to those they planned to imprison. I wouldn't exclude existence of circumstances where the confession reduced the eventual prison term, and existence of other circumstances where it made the sentence harsher. (Of course what the people under torture believed themselves about this is hard to establish…)
I've heard it claimed (can't vouch for this, though) that a weird legalism was in place, where convictions often required proof (which was difficult and annoying, especially when someone was innocent) or a confession (much easier!). So the confession might not have been just window-dressing.
Not dissimilar from some *actual* witch trials, come to think of it.
I would make the point that the religious conservative perspective doesn’t exactly excuse heterosexuals from needing to resist sexual temptation.
Nor for that matter are people excused from resisting the temptation to commit other sins, regardless of how much they naturally want to. If you happen to be born with a particularly bad temper, too bad, Thou Still Shalt Not Murder.
The crucial issue you are leaving out is that the socially conservative viewpoint gives heterosexuals an outlet for their sex drive - arguably the second strongest human drive after pure survival - and none for homosexuals who are supposed to glory in their suffering or something.
Many would argue that regarding a sexual relationship–or any human relationship–primarily as the outlet for a drive gets you off to a bad start in terms of moral thinking
I mean, sort of. But the reality of marriage is not exactly that you have a willing and available partner to satisfy you at any moment. It’s not exactly uncommon for married people to cheat, or fantasise, or watch porn, or masturbate, etc. Marriage is in no way an end to sexual temptation.
Everyone knows what it’s like to be horny. Everyone thinks it is bad to fail to control those urges in some circumstances (e.g. in the middle of the grocery aisle, or if you happen to be sexually attracted to children). There is some disagreement on the correct range of those circumstances.
I don't think anyone would disagree that it's harder for an obligate pedophile to avoid raping a child than it is for man who sexually is as vanilla as store brand ice cream. One is metaphorically being tortured to a significant degree, while the other isn't being tortured at all. Certainly if the pedophile resists temptation he is acting in a far more praiseworthy fashion than the straight man is for refraining from molesting toddlers. By the same token, if the pedophile gives in to temptation we can't really say the straight man is significantly morally superior to him, since the straight man had no temptation at all.
None of that changes the fact that *its wrong to rape kids*, and it certainly doesn't make it okay to rape them because you were born with a strong desire to do so.
This sounds a bit asymmetric to me. Resisting a unique temptation is a virtue, but failing to resist a unique temptation is not a lack of virtue?
Imagine, hypothetically, that people can be split into two groups A and B. Each group has a set of 100 temptations, completely different from the 100 temptations of the other group. Oh, and the group A contains 90% or 99% or 99.9% of humanity, and the group B only contains 10% or 1% or 0.1% of humanity. By that logic, only the group A can be judged morally?
Also, the sets of temptations are not completely incomparable. The straight man can also feel a temptation to have sex with people he can't (non-consenting adults, his neighbor's wife, etc.), so I would say that yes, if he resists all these temptations, that makes him morally superior to someone who has one extra temptation in the same category and doesn't resist it. Like, a success rate 10/10 is better in some sense than 10/11, even if the denominators are different.
EDIT: For the record, I do not care that much about the praise/blame framework; I am only using it to respond to your argument. I care more about consequences, and the world is unfair in this regard -- some people accidentally get into situations where their actions have more serious consequences than the actions of others.
It's not that resisting a unique temptation is a virtue, but that resisting a powerful temptation is more praiseworthy (if you don't like that word, maybe substitute "morally excellent") than resisting a weak temptation. By the same token, failing to resist a powerful temptation is less blameworthy than failing to resist a weak one.
For the sake of example, lets say that moderation in drinking alcohol is virtuous, and that drunkenness is a vice. I personally find it very easy not to be a drunk because I hate the taste of alcohol and don't particularly enjoy the sensations drunkenness brings. It is praiseworthy that I have consistently avoided getting wasted, but not very praiseworthy. It wasn't very hard to do. In comparison if we considered an alcoholic who is trying to reform their temptation to drink to excess is going to be very strong. If he manages to resist that temptation for a month then he has done a far more morally praiseworthy thing than I have. Similarly, if I end up downing a bottle of whisky tomorrow and get so drunk that I stagger home and yell at my wife and kids then I deserve more blame than if the alcoholic does the same: I literally have no temptation to do so, so if I decide to do so on a lark that's a pretty terrible thing to do.
A better way of looking at it is what the two scenarios tell us about the character of the people involved. The fact that I am not a drunk (or that I don't rape kids!) does not tell you very much about my character because I'm not tempted to do either of those things. If an alcoholic avoids getting drunk than that tells you a lot about his character: that he's the kind of man who can resist strong temptation in order to pursue virtue.
> Certainly if the pedophile resists temptation he is acting in a far more praiseworthy fashion than the straight man is for refraining from molesting toddlers.
About as praiseworthy as incels refraining from rape.
> My impression is that the majority of people break under torture.
This doesn't mean they tell the truth, though. Hollywood interrogations about rebel bases are wrong on this part. People go from saying what they want to saying whatever syllables will make the pain stop. It's like conversations with GPT (which is trained by rewarding/punishing responses based on how fluent and plausible they sound to some random person on fiverr.com). You get plausible-sounding syllables out. There may or may not be some relation to truth in there, but there is no way to tell. Worse, if what is true sounds complex or implausible, it certainly won't be in there, because it won't help make the pain stop. The process does not result in truth, because the thing it rewards is plausibility, and there is no way to make it reward truth instead unless you already know what the truth is and thus don't need to bother.
This is why actual interrogation techniques involve building rapport instead.
It's also how "conversion therapy" and the like fail. If you torture someone enough, yes, eventually they will break and hide deep in the closet. This doesn't actually change what they feel, though; merely what they present to you.
I mean, the literal Hollywood interrogation about the literal rebel base just plain failed; Leia didn't say anything. Tarkin's threat to blow up Alderaan - which wasn't torture - did get her to talk, but she lied (and Tarkin's own lie that he'd spare Alderaan precluded trying again).
You can't sidestep ethics with "born this way" arguments, but if gay feelings mostly aren't spread by social contagion, typically aren't something youth are "groomed into", then straight people have less reason to perceive uncloseted gay people as a threat to their own sexual formation.
It's easier to get along with someone you merely have a moral disagreement with than with someone you perceive as a moral threat.
What exactly do you mean by "describes homosexuality in vivid detail?" Do you mean "vivid descriptions of gay sex," or do you mean "vivid descriptions of two characters in a romantic relationship, who are the same gender?"
I'm not aware of any children's books in the former category, and I don't see any reason why the second category should be banished to the sex-ed class. (Every book with a romantic subplot describes heterosexual relationships in vivid detail, but I have yet to hear that Cinderella should be restricted to sex-ed class.)
>I have never understood why not talking about what you're sexually into amounts to making you feel isolated or alone, even to a teenager, but I understand there are arguments to be made in this claim's favor.
It's not "not talking about it" per se, it's the fact that it's unacceptable for them to talk about it but acceptable for straight people to do so. If you had a rule of not letting anyone talk about who they had a crush on, straight or gay, that would be weird, but not homophobic. The issue is the assumption that gay relationships are inherently sexual and therefore Not Safe For Children, but that straight relationships are fine.
>I'm of the opinion that you can't really explain gay relationships without taking very long detours into sex and sexuality. With heterosexuality, you can say "2 people get together to make a child", and the vast majority of children will be like "Understood, have a good day".
Why do you have to talk about babies, rather than romance? "Two men who love each other like your mommy and daddy do" would be a fine all-ages explanation of a gay relationship.
>I would **definitely** be suspicious as hell if a teacher is telling the kids about his or her crushes.
I was thinking about kids telling each other about their crushes, not teachers telling kids, since "normalizing talking about these things" applies as much or more to kids talking to each other. It certainly wasn't the teachers who taught me how "gay" was used as an insult!
Thank you. Every single time I have seen this argument surface, as it has a disappointing number of times in this comment section, there is an obvious omission of the fact that society is thoroughly permeated with heteronormative content of every stripe, in contexts to match any homosexual-inclusive content to which people object. The charitable position would be to assume that this is merely a blind spot due to long immersion in such a society, but at a certain point it becomes difficult to believe that those making the "gay agenda" argument haven't been exposed to anyone pointing out the ubiquity of the "straight agenda".
The reason straight people never had to propagandize for straight relationships was because they had enough power to literally ban the depiction of alternatives. Read up on the Hays Code - for 30 years it prevented the depiction of any sort of "sexual perversion," which at the time was understood to include any hint at same-sex relationships.
Sure, nobody explicitly got up and said "these rules are to promote the idea that only straight relationships are acceptable," but that was because they had enough cultural power that they could just say "this is to promote good morals" and everyone would know what sort of relationships they meant.
Is there a reason a kid seeing a man in a dress/nonbinary person in a dress/trans woman in a dress is creepy? They only explanation I've been given that vaguely makes sense is "well there was this one drag event I went to that the performers were wearing revealing clothes", but I went to a pirate circus recently, which was advertised to kids and all the cis-women in the cast were wearing very revealing clothing. Not a single person showed up claiming the event was creepy. Given that, a better explanation would be very helpful for me to understand. Lacking one, it feels like a hollow argument.
I am likewise curious what you mean by "teaching materials and storytelling that advertises and describes homosexuality in vivid details in schools".
Some school libraries contain books with prurient content – and I'm fine with school libraries deciding not to stock those books if they're fair about it (no double standard where an act is considered more "prurient" simply for not occurring heterosexually). But it's also pretty easy to avoid books in the library! Most students do! Much harder to avoid teaching material – but it also seems that threats of prurient teaching material are overblown.
Sex ed must address prurient matters – but it can also be really boring about it! So at least there's that.
That being said, the question is whether "gay feelings mostly aren't spread by social contagion, typically aren't something youth are "groomed into", is true or not.
A recent survey at a US (liberal-leaning) University came up with something around 30% of students responding that they were neither straight nor cis. Has there always been 30% of the population who were trans, or bi, or gay and they've just all been in the closet up till now? Or is there social contagion? The question is valid I think since the congenital, immutable nature of homosexuality and transsexuality so far has very little scientific support.
I specified "gay feelings" rather than gay identity or gay behavior because it seems normal to feel less control over feelings than over the choice to act on them or prioritize them in your identity.
Women's sexuality appears more fluid than men's in general, and I trust men's report that, for many of them, it's very much not. We're all still living in the aftermath of Freudianism – curse it! – that placed inordinate importance on being sexually "normal". From what I understand, Freudianism even classified celibacy as a deviant sexual behavior! There's no winning the, "Hey, maybe I'm not such a scary deviant!" argument with a Freudian unless you're having – and enjoying – PIV sex. Which...
Eww, gross.
Even if you're a traditional Christian, who's not having sex in nonmarital relationships, why should the kind of sex you're not having matter so much? (American Christianity isn't free from the Freudian taint, either, so it ends up mattering – but should it?)
By contemporary measures, I'm not completely straight, but seeking and staying in a heterosexual marriage doesn't seem that hard to me. I love my husband. He's also, incidentally, a man. Conventional marriage has much to recommend it if you can make it work! Wanting to have a family the old-fashioned way seems a fairly normal desire, one which the decline of marriage generally seems to have threatened, but openly gay people, specifically, don't, in my judgment.
That said, I believe others' reports that they're more motivated by sexual impulse than I am. I found the loneliness of not having a romantic partner hard to bear when I was single, but not the sexlessness. Which would I rather have, sex or music? Easy! Music. Sex or math? Also fairly easy, and it's math. One reason my own sexuality is so malleable is indifference. Others, especially men, report *really* not being indifferent, and so, I'd surmise, even harder to "groom" than I am.
I don’t think male homosexuality is subject to much social contagion. Female sexuality appears to be more mutable on average, and I think it was slightly more susceptible to social contagion in the era when it stopped being quite so taboo.
It appears entirely plausible that “I would like to be perceived as having a different gender” is extremely susceptible to social contagion.
So I think homosexuality and social transsexualism are radically different categories, and shouldn’t be conflated.
That's largely bisexual females. Every poll I've seen gay men tend to be 1-3% of males even in very liberal environments. You need to be more clear about what we are talking about, because most women do have bisexual potential.
I think the statement is that just saying 'born this way' is no proof at all that the tendencies are moral, and therefore no answer at all to e.g. natural law arguments.
Ah, I see, that makes sense. I guess the argument selection feels a bit like a dog whistle, though. It could just as easily be said that 'not born this way' is no proof at all that indulging 'certain tendencies' is immoral, no? The point, that our genetic code evolves independently of morality, would be made either way...
Yes the point is equally valid either way. There's nothing about a particular individual's seemingly congenital desires that morally condemns or justifies that individual's actions. Libresco certainly is Catholic, and I believe holds the standard Catholic understanding of the nature and telos of human sexuality. By 'dog whistle' (usually a pejorative term) do you mean merely that her statement is congruent with that understanding? What is the dog whistle here?
Is 'dog whistle' typically a pejorative term? If so, I apologize. I didn't mean it in a pejorative sense, more so in the 'this is meant to gather support people who think LGBTQ people are immoral without too obviously provoking opposition' sense.
If anything, I'd say the use of 'certain tendencies [...] some of which would be immoral to indulge' here is pretty much a textbook example. I can't say with absolute certainty that the Libresco was referring to homosexuality here, as it likely alludes to many things more broadly as well, but it seems rather clear doesn't it? It certainly does to many of those replying.
"Dog whistle" literally refers to a whistle that produces ultrasound - frequencies too high for humans to hear but that dogs can.
A claim of dogwhistling is therefore a claim that someone's message has a hidden meaning only intended for some listeners. The classic example is politicians quoting the Bible on some topic; the highly-religious tend to be more familiar with the Bible than the irreligious, so quoting the Bible, as long as it fits reasonably well into the conversation, signals religiosity to the former while not being noticed by the latter.
SJ likes accusing people of dogwhistling racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia/etc. Most of the time, these accusations are not actually true (and a lot of the rest they're more in the category of "obvious but deniable" than "relies on ingroup knowledge"). As such, the term has gained a degree of notoriety.
I think it's argued in this specific case because one of the main argument against homosexuality (in practice, not in abstract political debates) is "it feels unnatural in a way that I find suspicious, even if I can't fully articulate why". So you can go "no it feels weird and unnatural to you, but for the people who practice it it wouldn't be they're just born different ".
As C. S. Lewis wrote in his final essay "We Have No Right to Happiness":
"When I was a youngster, all the progressive people were saying, 'Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses.' I was simple-minded enough to believe they meant what they said. I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bridled. Absolute obedience to your instinct for self-preservation is what we call cowardice; to your acquisitive impulse, avarice. Even sleep must be resisted if you’re a sentry. But every unkindness and breach of faith seems to be condoned provided that the object aimed at is “four bare legs in a bed.”
It is like having a morality in which stealing fruit is considered wrong—unless you steal nectarines."
>The actual rule is that more pleasure is good *unless* that somehow interferes with something more important.
It is debatable if one should consider stable birth rate and stable families as important, but the changes brought by the sexual revolution on the "more pleasure = good" basis surely seem to have interfered with them.
The demographic statistics say otherwise. Many developed countries have fertility rate below 2, whereas developing countries have increasing populations.
The stable families on the other hand is about divorce and out-of-wedlock births. There surely is much more kids in single parent households than in the past.
There is a complication that it is difficult to pinpoint it as to sole causal reason, which IMO are multiple, not just the sexual liberation Lewis complains about.
But as I said, it is an debatable argument: there are plausible consequences (interference) to other good things.
I see. Sorry, it read like a rhetorical question. I re-read it and it still seems mostly that way. You may want to expand a bit on your meaning in case other people misread it like I did.
I'd rather avoid a complex philosophical discussion. For starters, even "personal happiness" is complicated: one can have short-term pleasures and long-term goals, and sometimes the long-term goals require sacrifice of some short-term pleasures, so ironically even greedy personal-happiness maximization does not maximize the personal happiness.
The thing is, I find Lewis's quasi-religious preaching annoying, not only because I am not religious, but also because he even got the religious perspective wrong. I wrote a short answer that makes sense from *both* perspectives. But for a longer answer, I would have to choose one -- if I choose the religious one (maximizing God's glory, or something like that), it would be insincere, because I am not religious; and if I choose my perspective (a consistent extrapolation of the complicated human values), then the predictable reply is "well, that's your perspective, but Lewis was writing from the religious perspective".
And when it interferes with something more important, the impulse for that particular pleasure must be constrained, yes? Lewis's point is that our society give special treatment to judging "interference with something more important" when it comes to sexual desires than other desires. If I steal a car because I really wanted it we all agree that strong desire does not excuse theft. If I seduce another man's wife and steal her away from her husband than society is far more likely to excuse it by saying that I had a right to pursue sexual happiness.
As Lewis expands on in another section of his essay:
"The real situation is skillfully concealed by saying that the question of Mr. A’s 'right' to desert his wife is one of 'sexual morality.' Robbing an orchard is not an offense against some special morality called “fruit morality.” It is an offense against honesty. Mr. A’s action is an offense against good faith (to solemn promises), against gratitude (toward one to whom he was deeply indebted) and against common humanity.
Our sexual impulses are thus being put in a position of preposterous privilege. The sexual motive is taken to condone all sorts of behavior which, if it had any other end in view, would be condemned as merciless, treacherous, and unjust."
" If I steal a car because I really wanted it we all agree that strong desire does not excuse theft. If I seduce another man's wife and steal her away from her husband than society is far more likely to excuse it by saying that I had a right to pursue sexual happiness. "
Yes.
And this is a reasonable conclusion for society at large to reach, and a logical follow-up from the matters of the situation.
After all, if I steal a car, the car itself has no say in the matter. The car is not an agent in the world. The car has no free will. The car, forgive me, is not self driving. In a situation of seduction and elopement, several people are involved. Including, in this scenario, the wife who willingly leave her husband, consents to being seduced and willingly begins a process of wrecking a home. Eliding this facet reduces the comparison to a farce and a fiction.
When it comes to what we might call "intentional agents", their intentions and happiness rather matter.
It is, after all, why most of them do what they do. We judge them for it, too.
So indeed, there is fundamentally no analogous comparison between theft and a seduction. The two situations have remarkably little in common. Treating them as anything alike is poor reasoning.
Lewis is, for all his fine writing and sharp mind, incorrect here.
"Fruit morality" is different from "sexual morality". Simply calling it fruit morality does not make it fruity. A very, very large chunk of any legal system, philosophical system and societal system relies on this fact. I recall two individuals free willingness to steal and devour a forbidden apple as being somewhat of a central theme in the religion Lewis situates most of his views within. To declare such an act similar to a situation in which a snake forcefeeds poor Eve an apple would be, well, uh... fruity.
Presupposing that offenses against honesty have similarity to offenses against gratitude, good faith or common humanity is both malarky and terrible jurisprudence.
Indeed, we put sexual impulses in a position of preposterous privilege precisely because doing almost anything else would be inhumane. Because they belong in the same class of impulses wherein we put things such as "A starving man who steals bread" and "A slave who revolts" and "An unhappy partner who flees a relationship" and "A breach of contract by a business partner who finds out his business associates are using his products for malign ends". That is to say, intentional agents performing acts that increase their perceived happiness in contradiction to what might be technically illegal at the time. It might not reduce the illegality of the act, in the sense of the letter of the law, but it rather matters for every single thing we humans value.
>Indeed, we put sexual impulses in a position of preposterous privilege precisely because doing almost anything else would be inhumane. Because they belong in the same class of impulses wherein we put things such as "A starving man who steals bread" and "A slave who revolts" and "An unhappy partner who flees a relationship" and "A breach of contract by a business partner who finds out his business associates are using his products for malign ends".
...One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong...
On what level is someone getting a divorce because they're unhappy comparable to a starving man stealing food or a literal slave revolting against their masters? Wouldn't a more accurate comparison be someone stealing food because he's unhappy with the food he ordered, or an anarchist throwing Molotov's because he is unhappy that laws exist?
The fact that a car cannot consent to be stolen and a wife can conspire with a lover to abandon her husband doesn't change the harm done, or the violation of trust, or the broken promises. I have a car, and I am married, and let me tell you I would far prefer to have someone steal my car than convince my wife to break our marriage.
I have to agree, the two things aren't comparable: one is simple theft while the other is betrayal and abandonment: potentially even kidnapping in spirit, if she decides to take the kids with her. My two lovely girls and the wife I adore, gone: I would be devastated. A car can be replaced, but a broken family can't.
Yet (except for a few anarcho-communist types) nobody looks approvingly on car theft; yet in our society men and women are excused or even praised for committing far worse acts as long as they committed them in the service of pursuing sexual fulfillment and happiness. Imagine if a man swindles his customers, betrays his business partners, and defrauds his investors and then excuses it all by saying "I was unhappy as a poor man. So as an intentional agent I performed acts to increase my perceived happiness: isn't that what all we humans value?" Yet if a man swindles his wife with false promises, betrays his marriage vows to her, and defrauds her of the future he had promised her, it is apparently quite excusable as long as he was unhappy.
This would be a very good argument for why gratifying your sexual desires in ways that cause harm to others - such as rape, sexual harassment, and public masturbation - are bad. It would also be a good argument for why prioritizing your sexual desires in ways that harm yourself - sex addiction, porn addiction, spending inordinate amounts of time masturbating at the expense of other activities - are also bad (though obviously not nearly as bad as the former category, and not bad enough to warrant any sort of legal action to prevent it).
But progressives (and damn near everyone else) would agree that those things are bad, which leads me to suspect that Lewis isn't arguing against them at all. Rather, he's arguing against any consensual sex that occurs outside of heterosexual marriage, and possibly against all forms of non-reproductive sex even if they do occur in a heterosexual marriage. And for that purpose, it's quite a poor argument, because the analogies don't match. It's bad to steal food because that harms the person you stole from; it's bad for a sentry to fall asleep on guard duty because he's failing to do his job properly; it's bad to indulge in excessive overeating and substance abuse because those things are physically bad for your health. In all of those cases, there's a *reason* for people to restrain their own desires; it's only with sex that Lewis demands restraint for the sake of restraint unless a very specific and narrow set of conditions are met.
The specific essay, which I would encourage you to read, is actually primary about divorce. With a focus on divorces where a partner abandons the marriage because they've fallen in love with someone else:
"'After all,' said Clare. 'they had a right to happiness.'
"We were discussing something that once happened in our own neighborhood. Mr. A. had deserted Mrs. A. and got his divorce in order to marry Mrs. B., who had likewise got her divorce in order to marry Mr. A. And there was certainly no doubt that Mr. A. and Mrs. B. were very much in love with one another. If they continued to be in love, and if nothing went wrong with their health or their income, they might reasonably expect to be very happy.
"It was equally clear that they were not happy with their old partners. Mrs. B. had adored her husband at the outset. But then he got smashed up in the war. It was thought he had lost his virility, and it was known that he had lost his job. Life with him was no longer what Mrs. B. had bargained for. Poor Mrs. A., too. She had lost her looks—and all her liveliness. It might be true, as some said, that she consumed herself by bearing his children and nursing him through the long illness that overshadowed their earlier married life.
"You mustn’t, by the way, imagine that A. was the sort of man who nonchalantly threw a wife away like the peel of an orange he’d sucked dry. Her suicide was a terrible shock to him. We all knew this, for he told us so himself. 'But what could I do?” he said. “A man has a right to happiness. I had to take my one chance when it came.'"
Later in the essay he writes the following, which you may find relevant:
"And if you protest against this view you are usually met with chatter about the legitimacy and beauty and sanctity of “sex” and accused of harboring some Puritan prejudice against it as something disreputable or shameful. I deny the charge. Foam-born Venus . . . golden Aphrodite . . . Our Lady of Cyprus . . . I never breathed a word against you. If I object to boys who steal my nectarines, must I be supposed to disapprove of nectarines in general? Or even of boys in general? It might, you know, be stealing that I disapproved of.
"The real situation is skillfully concealed by saying that the question of Mr. A’s “right” to desert his wife is one of “sexual morality.” Robbing an orchard is not an offense against some special morality called “fruit morality.” It is an offense against honesty. Mr. A’s action is an offense against good faith (to solemn promises), against gratitude (toward one to whom he was deeply indebted) and against common humanity.
"Our sexual impulses are thus being put in a position of preposterous privilege. The sexual motive is taken to condone all sorts of behavior which, if it had any other end in view, would be condemned as merciless, treacherous, and unjust."
I would encourage you again to read the essay before making assumptions about what Lewis is or isn't arguing for. I would say that for sex the broad Christian objection to extramarital sex isn't restraint for the sake of restraint, but rather that sex produces children, human children are born helpless and require adults to care for them, and that parents have a duty to provide and care for their children. Marriage is a covenant between a man and a women that binds them to care for each other and for any children they produce. To have sex outside of marriage is to risk becoming a parent with a partner who may have no commitment to you or your children, and risks creating children who will be born without parents to care for them.
Lewis actually talks about this in a different essay, "Christian Apologetics" which was compiled from a speech he gave to Anglican priests about evangelizing to Englishman:
"A sense of sin is almost totally lacking. Our situation is thus very different from that of the Apostles. The Pagans (and still more the metuentes) to whom they preached were haunted by a sense of guilt and to them the Gospel was, therefore, "good news." We address people who have been trained to believe that whatever goes wrong in the world is someone else's fault—the capitalists', the government's, the Nazis', the generals', etc. They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world.
"In attacking this fatal insensibility it is useless to direct attention (a) To sins your audience do not commit, or (b) To things they do, but do not regard as sins. They are usually not drunkards. They are mostly fornicators, but then they do not feel fornication to be wrong. It is, therefore, useless to dwell on either of these subjects. (Now that contraceptives have removed the obviously uncharitable element in fornication I do not myself think we can expect people to recognize it as sin until they have accepted Christianity as a whole.)"
Of course contraceptives are far from 100% effective, and the growing population of single mothers and children raised in fatherless homes gives us a good sign that contraceptives have not completely gotten rid of the "obviously uncharitable element in fornication".
"They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world."
I understand why this seems blasphemous from a Christian perspective, but from a secular point of view, questioning the rules that you're expected to follow is just common sense. Indeed, it's a foundational principle of democracy, and thus of modern society and culture in general: we elect leaders who are expected to justify their policies with better arguments than "because I said so." Even in autocratic regimes, this is true to an extent; the whole reason that authoritarians rely so heavily on propaganda is because they still need to justify their draconian policies to the masses, even if those justifications are blatant lies.
The issue isn't even about "whether [God] can be acquitted for creating such a world." It's more about the fact that a God who expects people to follow his arbitrary rules simply because he'll punish you otherwise would be the absolute worst kind of petty megalomaniacal despot. It would make him *morally worse than Dracula,* because at least Ol' Vlad was ostensibly acting to protect the people of Wallachia from the twin threat of foreign invasion and domestic crime. And death by impalement, while horrifically cruel and gruesome and sadistic by human standards, is still an infinitely more merciful punishment (and I mean infinitely in the most literal sense!) than eternal damnation. This conception of God, which the more brutish, reactionary, Levitican Christians seem intent on reifying and deifying, is more akin to Darkseid from DC Comics than to any sort of All-Loving Creator - just about the absolute furthest thing from any benevolent divinity that I would consider worthy of worship.
Granted, a lot of Christians will claim that God's rules aren't arbitrary because "He knows what's best for us," or because God IS goodness in some abstract way. But that's only convincing if you're already 100% convinced that Christianity is true and correct in all particulars. For anyone else, "the Christian God says that it's wrong to be queer" carries as much weight as "the Unitarian Universalist God says that it's perfectly fine to be queer," or "the Goddess of Love and Pleasure says that it's actively good to be queer," or "the Jewish God says that it's wrong for men to be queer but fine for women," or "the (Iranian) Islamic God says that it's wrong to be homosexual but fine to be transgender," or "the Cathar God says that it's wrong to have any kind of sex at all, even if it's for reproductive purposes in a heterosexual marriage." Or, for that matter, lovely claims like "Moloch says it's virtuous to throw infants into the furnace to satisfy his all-encompassing hunger" and "Huitzilopochtli says it's virtuous to commit ritual human sacrifice in his name so he has the strength to fend off the Eternal Night." Who's to say which is *really* best for us?
"Of course contraceptives are far from 100% effective, and the growing population of single mothers and children raised in fatherless homes gives us a good sign that contraceptives have not completely gotten rid of the "obviously uncharitable element in fornication"."
Is this really your primary objection? If there was a new form of contraception that was 100% effective and so cheap, commonplace, and simple that almost everyone used it all the time, would you change your stance here? Does this mean that you support homosexuality, since it can't result in unwanted pregnancies? Or that you actively encourage men to get vasectomies and women to get tubal ligation surgery, in order to ensure that they don't produce any illegitimate children? Or, at the very least, that you support extensive sex education programs in school that teach about preventive methods like condoms and birth controls, since those have been statistically proven to reduce teen pregnancies more than abstinence-only courses?
No, the effectiveness of contraceptives are not my only objection. My point was simply that characterizing Christian restrictions on sex as "restraint for restraint's sake" is not accurate.
"They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world."
Of course! If there had been some supernatural entity that was responsible for the human condition, that was the author of the "thousand shocks the flesh is heir to", it would be hard to imagine a sufficiently severe punishment for it. That anyone would choose to be civil to such a thing, let alone obey it or worship it, strikes me as deeply alien.
Do you feel the same way about your parents? They are directly responsible for your existence. Even if they did not choose to conceive you, if existence as a human is as evil as you put it (so evil that "it would be hard to imagine a sufficiently sever punishment for" creating it) then wouldn't your parents be guilty for not drowning you when you were a newborn?
That anyone would be so ungrateful for the gift of existence as you are strikes me as deeply alien, yet we're both here.
I think you misunderstand the thrust of the "Born this Way" argument: It is very specifically a rebuke to the traditional Abrahamic view of human development, not an assertion that being born with a tendency makes that tendency unobjectionable. The Abrahamic faiths demonize homosexuality and maintain that it is a choice, something outside of God's plan for Creation. Now obviously, from a materialist standpoint, there would be no sound reason for demonizing homosexuality, even were it a choice, but it is useful, in seeking to dissuade others of their religiously-instilled prejudice, to be able to point to the innate nature of sexuality, thereby showing that their reason for shunning homosexuality is at odds with reality. Why would a God that hated same sex-intercourse create the New Mexico Whiptail Lizard?
I would say this is a very poor and inaccurate description of those religions. Most adherents would explicitly disavow your position as at best a bad misunderstanding, at median a heresy, and at the worst, a bad-faith polemic.
By the same token you might ask "Why would a God that hated murder create chimpanzees?" Or "Why would a God that hated rape create ducks?" (I had a few pet ducks as a child and let me tell you, they are not gentle lovers).
The born this way argument was meant to soften the hearts of religious people by communicating to them that they did not choose to have these sexual desires, and are physically incapable of changing them. That makes homosexuals easier for religious people to tolerate: it casts them as unfortunates instead of hedonists. But it doesn't change anything about the morality of homosexual acts from the religionist's perspective, just how sympathetic the person performing the acts is.
Essentially, there is nothing morally wrong with being a pedophile. Acting on this predilection may be, depending on the prevailing legal/moral views. Legalities are an entirely different matter.
I’ll bite that bullet: yeah, there is something morally wrong about being a pedophile. It is morally wrong to sexually fantasize about children. Indulging this lust in your heart is corrupting, and the only proper response is for the afflicted person to condemn their own thoughts as perverted, cruel, and unworthy.
I do not consider pedophilia to be special in this way. It is also wrong to fantasize about robbing and murdering. I do not consider persons who properly condemn their own desires about these things to be acting wrongly.
I think he means it in a more serious way, like "planning out the details of a crime" that you might actually commit? If not, then I think he's wrong about that too.
I’m sorry, maybe I don’t understand—do you go to movies because you have a more or less lifelong desire to see people murdered? You purposefully seek out movies to gratify and satiate your desire to see people killed?
I do, in fact, think that films which obviously glory in violence or crime are pretty vile, and to go to a movie to enjoy watching someone simulate murder is a pretty nasty habit.
Its not weird if you consider it's probably rooted in religious thinking and most people are religious. If god exists and he makes you a certain way, that way is probably divine right?
Yep, if someone is born attracted exclusively to children, they just have to be incels. Which is perfectly doable - despite huge amount of (non-pedo) incels in the present, there's no plague of rapes.
Isn't the whole "born this way" just part of false dichotomy, where it's supposedly in opposition to "it's a choice"?
Which is silly - I would imagine the larger part of my preferences for _anything_ are neither inborn nor chosen, but an effect of the environment and events in my life. Studies also support this for homosexuality.
("Born in the wrong body" seems to be the same kind of thing.)
"the relevant difference between homosexuality and pedophilia is moral, not biological." (edited for clarity) <- I believe this is how you quote it out of context.
The inserted 'N's make parts of this virtually illegible. Honestly, at this point, does it really make a material difference to you if some media outlet takes something you said out of context, yet again?
I didn't find them that bad and in fact found it kind of funny in small doses. I definitely wouldn't want to read more posts with this as a common technique though.
I wonder if this is a difference in decoding or reading method and Scott just didn't think it would be difficult to read with the Ns. I don't perceive much difference in the sentences with Ns vs the sentences without; I think that, prepared in advance to ignore them, my brain mostly ignores them the way you'd ignore periods or underscores.
I was expecting N’s instead of spaces, which would be very hard to read, but we got N’s with additional spaces, which turned out to be much easier to read.
From the description in the opening paragraph, I thought he meant he would literally replace spaces with Ns, aNbitNlikeNthis. So I found what he actually did strikingly readable compared to that.
I find it amusing that Scott is basically attempting to reverse engineer the writing that gets inserted into media pieces. It's the same vibe as hacking the universe by brute-forcing the names of God.
Yeah, I have a much easier time filtering separators that I don't process as symbols. I could work with emojis, Chinese characters, hieroglyphics, silent punctuation marks...but I can't not read letters.
It has the same vibe as the old disclaimers you'd find on pirate BBS relying on "the Internet Privacy Act signed by Bill Clinton" that prohibited all law enforcement or public safety personnel from visiting the site, "not even firemen".
After the first half-sentence or so I was able to read those passages fairly normally, though my brain did seem to maintain a "this is an N-sentence" flag in the background. Hopefully if this continues for a year the next SSC survey will help find what correlates with difficulty or ease at reading these passages.
I think "what drives homosexuality" is a different question from "is homosexuality increasing now"?
What drives homosexuality is *probably* (no evidence for this except what makes sense to me) the fact that it's very hard to fit an imperative like "have sex with women, women are people with such and such characteristics" into DNA in a way where it unfolds and is readable by the brain. Whatever system implements this is some kind of dumb hack, similar to the thing where birds identify their mother by having a red spot on their heads, and if a human wears a red spot on their heads the birds will think it's their mother. But much more complicated and multidimensional. Probably this mechanism fails sometimes producing various unusual fetishes or sexualities.
There's probably some base rate of this system failing. It seems plausible to me that it could fail more often now, either because of germs, pollution, or whatever. It also seems to me like this system could be very dependent on social context, and in a social context where people are often gay, the system gets confused more often. But this is all speculation. I remember Cochran had some good evidence, but I can't remember what it was.
Going by wild extrapolation from stereotypes, such a theory seems to predict that brothers of lesbians would be unusually eager to commit to long-term romance and cohabitation with a woman... which I suspect might be difficult to measure accurately, due to various confounding factors in the cultural context. Not exactly strong evidence against, at least.
Historically rich men had more kids than the poor ones due to widespread polygyny and better childcare. Europe was an outlier by practicing monogamy since the beginning of history.
Even in contemporary US men in the top 0.1% of wealth have higher than average fertility. Fertility is generally decreasing with wealth but the pattern changes at the highest levels of wealth.
I strongly doubt evolution could encode anything as complex as "absolute wealth" OR "relative wealth" into our brains, especially not in the mere 4000 years that wealth (as an abstraction that goes beyond "has a full belly") has existed.
We do seem to care an awful lot about relative wealth. I don't think we instinctively care at all about absolute wealth, since just about all living humans are far wealthier than our ancestors. Even extremely poor people who struggle to find enough food seem to be doing better than their ancestors in an absolute sense.
We could care about relative wealth in primitive environments, and likely did. If you have a tribe of 100 people and the chief and his family eat 20% of the food available while the rest of the tribe starves, people are going to care about that a lot.
What do you think of the theory that bisexuality is an adaptive sexual strategy (increases the number of possible partners, makes you “better at sex / seduction”) but that exclusive homosexuality is sort of bisexuality cranked up to 11 as a byproduct of getting too many bisexual genes (sort of like sickle cell trait, or your theory that things like autism and schizophrenia are the maladaptive long tails of otherwise beneficial distributions)?
I think I’ve seen it observed that historically gay men actually had a pretty similar rate of reproductive success to purely heterosexual men, and therefore our intuition that a “gay gene” must by necessarily be something heavily selected against by evolution.
For starters, if bisexuality were adaptive, then we'd expect to see a lot more bisexuals. Instead bisexuality (especially among men and not among girls-who-are-totally-bi-because-guys-think-it's-hot-and-they-made-out-with-their-friend-at-a-party-one-time) is even less common than homosexuality.
I think you’re applying present-day gay culture too much to the question. Historically “exclusive homosexual” would have been more rare and gay men would (out of social obligation etc.) ended up having enough sex with women to father children, and same-sex coupling could have some other adaptive role that made it stick around.
We aren’t 100% bisexual because it could be maladaptive for a couple reasons - “too much of a good thing” where a heavy dose of “gay genes” makes you uninterested in the opposite sex at all, plus probably sexually transmitted disease being more common among those with more partners.
It seems pretty obvious to me that girls who are bi enough to make out with other girls to turn guys on are evolutionarily well adapted.
Also, I think bisexuality is more common than you think. Among millennials/early gen-Z in broadly "liberal" contexts (I'm an American grad student), I estimate that about half of my friends will claim to be bi in private conversation, and there's no strong male/female bias there. More specifically, I estimate that a majority (51% or more) of humans are Kinsey 1-5, but for social reasons they may behave and/or publicly identify as "straight" or "gay" or "bi" somewhat independently of biological/psychological predisposition.
>Instead bisexuality (especially among men and not among girls-who-are-totally-bi-because-guys-think-it's-hot-and-they-made-out-with-their-friend-at-a-party-one-time) is even less common than homosexuality.
The Kinsey Reports disagree with you. Scoring 2/3/4 is more likely than scoring 5/6 for both sexes.
>I think I’ve seen it observed that historically gay men actually had a pretty similar rate of reproductive success to purely heterosexual men,
Do you meant that "gay men were forced in sham marriages because of homophobia, and therefore had to reproduce"? Well, many societies in Asia never had any laws against homosexuality, China and Japan copied these from the west.
Also, given that child mortality was high and picking optimal time for conception was unknown then, just replacement level fertility would requre quite a lot of sexual acts, why a man probably wouldn't do it he doesn't enjoy it.
“ gay men were forced in sham marriages because of homophobia, and therefore had to reproduce” Yes, and many of the women had to engage in less-than-enthusiastically-consented sex too. And a lot of the marriages between pure heterosexuals were for reasons other than maximum sexual compatibility. The past kind of sucked for sexual freedom. My point here was not to debate sexual morality but just to raise a theory I’d heard about why a drive toward homosexual behavior might have been adaptive evolutionarily despite facially being the opposite.
“ why a man probably wouldn't do it he doesn't enjoy it.”
The point of the theory is that most of them were at least a little bi, and therefore enjoyed it well enough. “So exclusively gay they never have sex with the opposite sex” would obviously still be evolutionarily maladaptive, hence me characterizing it in this context as “too much of a good thing”.
Compulsory heterosexuality has historically been enforced by a lot of mechanisms other than criminal law. These include but are not limited to:
1. Family/tribal expectations. Arranged marriages are extremely common throughout history in most of the world. While marrying a different opposite-sex partner was sometimes an option, marrying a same-sex partner was not, and refusing to marry incurred huge social costs.
2. Gender roles. In nearly all societies, boys and girls traditionally learned different skills as children; both sets of skills were essential to survival in the preindustrial world.
3. Children-as-a-resource. While contemporary societies tend to see children as at best an investment and at worst a burden, children in preindustrial societies were seen as positive contributors to the family from an early age. A child as young as five or six can contribute more than they consume in a hunter-gatherer or subsistence-farming family. Adult children and their children were the main sources of support in old age. So even if they managed to overcome all the social obstacles, a same-sex couple (or worse, a single individual) would start off materially worse off than a fertile opposite-sex couple, and would fall further behind with age.
Some societies did create alternative niches for people who were unable to fit into their standard roles, from monk/shaman/priesthoods to third-gender ceremonial roles to professional soldiers to various ad-hoc allowances for solitary life as a hermit/seer/herbalist/midwife/whatever. It seems likely that people we'd recognize today as Kinsey 6s and binary trans women disproportionately occupied those niches. But so did people with psychotic disorders, autism, extreme trauma, etc. and...really there just weren't enough people living alternative lifestyles in most societies to account for everyone we'd expect to struggle with being 'normal.'
Rome is an interesting example, where it seems that sex between men was fairly common, and not particularly remarkable, except that if you were in the “receptive” role it was considered “unmanly”.
For a citizen male, you might have a male slave (Rome ran on slaves to a pretty wild degree) known as a concubinus that was a designated lover prior to marriage. He was supposed to set him aside after marriage - but the master engaging in sex with the slaves (of both sexes) after marriage seems to have been very common anyway, and so long as the “marital duties” were performed, again not considered particularly remarkable or scandalous.
Which provides another niche for Kinsey 6s, namely providing a sexual outlet for Kinsey 2-5s as a slave and/or prostitute. Not a particularly pleasant niche, but there were worse ones in Rome…
For most of human history it's probably far more a case of "we expect you, like everyone else, to marry and have children for the sake of the tribe", because this is what matters socially.
Some cultures add draconian rules against homosexuality to this, while others don't care what you do in your free time as long as you do your part for the continuation of the society.
Male obligate homosexuality is both common (3% of the population?) and bad for reproductive fitness (in Australia, only about 10% of gay men are fathers, vs 60% of men as a whole). So it does pose a certain paradox.
Lots of male animals will have sex with other males - but they still breed with females. It's very odd for male to completely ignore females and only want males. As far as I know, we only see this in two animals: humans and sheep.
Fetishes and paraphilias are different: a man who's into women dressed in latex still probably passes on their genes. They're not quite an evolutionary paradox in the same way.
Obviously nobody's found a gay germ, so Cochran's theory is a bit speculative. His thinking is that it might not even be a germ but an immune reaction that messes up some part of the brain (similar to how narcolepsy is believed to be an autoimmune disease).
Could be there's separate "attracted to males" and "attracted to females" circuitry latent in everybody, so to speak, and some other shift in brain development glitched out the system which ensures the opposite-gender attraction circuit installs and activates, causing it to fail a significant percentage of the time, but said mutation simultaneously provided such an overwhelming fitness advantage for other reasons that there was never sufficient cause to evolve a patch. After all, human brains and skin clearly have key differences from their close relatives in the primate family, even before birth, and that seems to have something to do with their rapid spread across such a wide range of environments. Sheep neurobiology I'm not as familiar with.
“10% of gay men are fathers” - is this piece of present-day information useful though? Effective birth control means a lot less unplanned births than would have common in an evolutionary context. Also, if you’re only surveying men who identify as gay, as opposed to all men who have ever had sex with other men, you’re going to entirely miss the “adaptive bisexuality” of the theory I’m proposing.
It would be a paradox if gay fathers had a high chance of passing on their "gayness". But they don't! I don't even think that having a gay father increases your odds of being gay whatsoever.
So, this leaves three options that I can think of. Either
A. Being gay is some kind of accident that wasn't intended by the body to be passed along, like autism.
B. Obligate homosexuality is cultural (unlikely but possible)
C. There's some benefit to the community that someone is an obligate homosexuality (also feels unlikely to me, but also possible)
I also think part of what may make homosexuality different from other paraphilias is that the target you end up on still *is* a legitimate target both in terms of evolution/genes and in terms of social scripts and culture, just not the intended target for you.
Like, if there are genes for mate targeting in humans, presumably there are genes for targeting men and genes for targeting women (or some much more complex process where the same genes lead to different behavior in the presence of different hormones or etc.), so it's easy to understand how the 'wrong' set of extremely common, normal genes get expressed in someone. Or if genes interact with society and culture during upbringing to define your targets, it's easy to see how growing up in a culture where you are exposed to both scripts for targeting men and scripts for targeting women, you adopt the 'wrong' one, or both.
Whereas there are hopefully no genes and no social scripts for targeting children at all, or for targeting animals or dead people or any other paraphilia. Which makes it seem like maybe a different mechanism could be in play there.
One of Kinsey's big mistakes, I think, was defining attraction in terms of hetero/homo ratio, rather than "attracted to men" and "attracted to women" as fully independent variables.
Yeah, I agree, sexual preference is encoded via some glitchy system. The glitchiness probably also accounts for kinks. Whatever tells people to have intercourse with others can very easily slide sideways a bit andalso tell them to whip others, get whipped by them, seek out partners wearing latex, pee on partners, etc etc.
>fit an imperative like "have sex with women, women are people with such and such characteristics" into DNA...
It's far more complicated than that, because whether it's "women" or "men" seems to be largely-though-not-entirely driven by prenatal hormones (1), and whether it's "girls/boys" or "men/women" seems to be driven by a maturation process that's at least somewhat susceptible to environmental effects (2).
So the DNA has to encode, separately, "have sex with people" as a switch that gets flipped on at puberty regardless of sex; "those people should be female" as a switch that gets toggled on by prenatal testosterone; and "those people should show X degree of sexual maturity" as a slider that adjusts automatically with age but is partly-sensitive to environmental cues.
This sort of flexible, multidimensional system is even harder to encode than just "have sex with women," and introduces a whole bunch of additional failure points. Most human sexual "targeting errors" seem to revolve around those switching failure points, where an individual's pattern of sexual attraction would be normal in a differently-configured person (4).
1. Check out sexuality findings on girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia and girls with complete vs. partial androgen insensitivity syndrome: prenatal testosterone is quite clearly involved in directing sexual attraction toward women, and there's a dose-response relationship. On the other hand, cisgender non-intersex lesbians and gay men exist.
2. It's normal for preteens to be attracted to other preteens, but abnormal for adults to be attracted to preteens; whether~it's~normal~for~adults~to~be attracted~to~mid-teens~seems~to vary~by~culture~and~the~age~of~the~adult (3).
3. Whether an attraction is 'normal' is orthogonal to whether acting on it would be morally-permissible. It's normal to be attracted to an adult whose judgment is impaired by alcohol/drugs/severe active mental illness/severe intellectual disability, but unethical to act on it. In contrast, it's somewhat abnormal to be attracted to a same-sex adult, but nearly all secular ethicists agree that it's ethical to act on same-sex attraction under the same constraints that apply to hetero relationships.
4. We really don't see a whole lot of targeting errors at the baseline "have sex with people" level except where we've intentionally created objects to fool the targeting system, like porn. Errors that would be relevant in the ancestral environment, like bestiality, are very rare. The most common failure mode at this level is asexuality, which is a switching error: normal in young children but not in adults.
Similarly, it's quite hard to fit an imperative like "eat sugars, fats, and proteins, which are identifiable by such and such characteristics" into DNA in a way where it unfolds and is readable by the brain.
Which is why, of course, 3-4% of the population is afflicted by pica and routinely starves to death.
Pretty sure "attempted to eat something inappropriate" is a major factor in infant morality, yeah. Among adults. ingestion of dangerous neurotoxins such as capsaicin and ethanol is so frequent that deliberate lifelong avoidance would be more noteworthy than occasional short-term incapacitation.
Preindustrial infant mortality rates were far worse, a significant portion of which was attributable to diarrhea from foodborne illness. Modern understanding of necessary electrolyte mix for rehydration therapy, toys designed to avoid choking hazards, and various other public health measures allowed those mishaps to become less frequent and more survivable, by orders of magnitude, but the kid's own taste buds and instinctive responses don't deserve much of the credit for all that.
Oh, but Scott, I do want the taxonomy that correctly identifies mental disorders the way your N'd statements above do. I want that very much. That would be psychology finally getting off its ass and doing something useful. You could have a dual-classification scheme: 1) is this maladaptive in the patient's current environs? and 2) is there reason to think it's biologically maladaptive in the EEA? In the case of your two listed sexual targeting errors, the answer is overall yes to 1 and 2 for both.
2 is honestly mostly pointless, but it might be nice to identify situations where the disorder is understandable for deep reasons, like hoarding, which is obviously an adaptive trait that agrarianism beat into our ancestors over millennia, but which has aged out of usefulness in developed society.
With hoarding you have to draw a line between hoards that are useful in rare situations vs. hoards that are useless. Keeping 20L of water in the cupboard is of positive mean value, but a lot of people would label it "maladaptive" because recent experience will usually show it not being useful.
I think the line is normally drawn at "impacting the rest of your life". If you have 200 porcelain dolls neatly in display cases, it's a weird hobby. If you have them strewn over every flat surface such that most of your house is unusable, it's hoarding.
You're sidestepping the normative question. It's relevant to ask "SHOULD this be maladaptive?". If you treat current environs as immutable, you come to pretty unintuitive conclusions like "wanting to leave a cult is a mental illness" (environmentally maladaptive because it's not very fun to live in a cult if you don't want to, biologically maladaptive because leaving a group that feeds you is always a bad idea in the EEA).
On the cult point, I think one of the diagnostic criteria for any "disorder" has to do with whether this is a pattern or specific to a situation. It's highly adaptive in modern America to leave cults, but I do think a pattern of leaving every group you join over and over does probably point to an illness that would satisfy both criterion 1 and criterion 2 in my comment. Similarly joining lots of cults over and over.
I will continue to sidestep normative questions, that's the only thing to do with normative questions, is-ought etc.
It seems to me that calling something a "disorder" is in and of itself making a normative claim, generally some subset of "they ought to behave differently", "society ought to accommodate them", "someone ought to give them a helping hand", etc.
Looking back at your post, I see that you haven't made any specific ought claims. I may be assuming too much about your position. If that's the case, do you mind explaining how you would define a "disorder" in solely descriptive terms?
A disorder means they're upset enough about it (or someone else is, to force them) to see a psychologist/psychiatrist. It doesn't matter if that ought to happen at all, but I personally think it would be more useful (in my own observed preference, whether that preference ought to be met or not) if the diagnostic those professionals used was more like the one I suggest.
Someone being upset about something - i.e. something is causing them psychological distress in the jargon of a clinician - such that they believe something should change is pregnant with oughtness. They are saying "I ought to be different than this." A desire is a mental state that some state of affairs should obtain.
You really can't escape the judgment, "This is bad and it should be different."
Aside from the symptoms specific to each disorder, the DSM leans heavily on two other things -- causes distress to the person and impairs functioning in key domains (work, school, relationships, causes legal problems).
Both distress and functional impairment import a lot of historically and culturally specific factors that suggest various kinds of "ought" to people.
How on Earth is 2 useful? We could also ask if it's biologically maladaptive in first century Rome, but only a few historians are going to care about that question.
Why think there is one EEA? Surely at least some of the traits we share with other mammals were adaptive in the Cretaceous mammal environment even if they’ve never been adaptive since. There’s no reason to think lactose tolerance and sneeze reflexes and all the various sexual instincts we have were adaptive in the same environment.
I think in the future you should use a marker other than "N". Having the word "a" surrounded by Ns looks like "N a N" which makes me think of NaN, the floating point number value. And "all N things N" makes me think of a mathematical theorem.
Maybe you can use the Hebrew letter aleph, or one of the weirder Greek letters like the one that's not Zeta?
I can imagine that going badly. What if the journalist's computer can't render the aleph, so it shows up as little squares or something? The journalist might recognize it as a formatting issue but not realize that there's supposed to be something there, and just remove them to fix the formatting issue.
My impression is that the intended meaning is "this should be obvious but you're so dense I need to shout and clap my hands in order for you to listen", never mind that the actual statement is usually something not actually anywhere near uncontroversial.
Fully agreed. Trying to come up with fully biological explanations for human behavior seems to be mostly some kind of "Hard Sciences Fetish", a silly attempt to remove humanness from human behavior. In the end of the day pooping is completely biologically determined, but if you pooped your pants on a board meeting that biological explanation wouldn't go very far.
you'd lose a lot of status for pooping your pants in a board meeting even if you were suddenly in incredible GI distress and there was nothing you could have done to hold it.
I mean, I think the status loss would be a lot lower if the poop were full of blood - sufficiently bad medical emergency trumps most other considerations
"[...] everywhere from Abhkazia to Zanzibar, 1% of the population gets schizophrenia. (the most significant exception is certain groups of immigrants who move from developing to developed countries - expect a blog post on that eventually)"
Probably the same level of underlying condition as always, latching onto a new imprecise term to describe it (might have been normal body dysmorphia/anorexia 50 years ago, might have just been called 'hysteria' 200 years ago, etc).
'Social contagion' suggests to me that a new problem is being created, which I don't believe; the term 'gender dysmorphia' spreading as a meme to classify an existing problem, I buy.
I think the rate of left-handedness explains this phenomenon. Simply put, when left-handedness was seen as wrong/evil, the rates where 1/6th of what they are today. I feel the increased rate of people identifying as gay/transgender is most likely explained by this.
Now, is it the total story? I dunno. That's just my guess.
Since homosexuality pretty clearly is a mental disorder (in addition to the obvious evolutionary mismatch, there's a very high rate of comorbidity with other mental disorders), the problem here seems straightforward. Psychiatry is under the influence of politically motivated activists. As is the rest of the academy. As long as that continues to be the case, squaring the circle of empirical science and politics will be impossible. Indeed as you note, politics and science are intrinsically irreconcilable, so a better way of putting it is: so long as ideologically motivated actors insist on twisting science into pretzels to conform to their preferences about how the world should be, attempts to develop things like biological taxonomies of mental disorders are doomed from the outset.
The solution is quite obvious but a lot of people won't like it.
How is the notion of a 'disorder' not inherently political? If you assume to know the purpose of humanity you're basically starting a secular religion.
Even if you can demonstrate that certain men have evolved to rape that doesn't mean we want to encourage the behavior.
Without any normative statements at all, psychiatry will be reduced to statements of predictive value and that's it. The notion of 'disorder' will disappear.
Ideal itself is political. At least when it is applied to people. Ideal is a kind of an abstraction, but this abstraction doesn't work for people. Oh... People tried. For example they tried averages, and have found that there is not one pilot was average[1]. There was another story about Average American Woman, with a few contestants over all the America.
Mathematically speaking, if we have a bunch of points in R^n, with each coordinate in an interval of -1..+1, than all these points fall into a n-dimensional cube with side of 2. But if we define "ideal" or "normal" or call it as you like as a points with distance to the center less than r, then this rule will define a n-dimensional sphere. But when n approaches infinity the "volume" of a sphere divided on the "volume" of a cube goes to zero. It doesn't matter what the value of r. It is a nice visual metaphor of a problem.
But it is just a part of a problem, because there we silently assumed that all parameters have a normal distribution or something like it. It may be not normal, it may be bi-normal, or m-normal. Or normality can be fractal, how can we we know? And in R^n with a sufficiently large n, to look to our limited brains as infinity.
When we start talking about "ideal human" we are already made a political decision to ground all our morality and politics on a bunch of simplifying assumptions, which we cannot clearly state, and which clearly is a threat to an external validity of our theories about people and societies. It is one of the reasons to abandon the very notion of "normal" or "ideal". To free our minds from those silly assumptions that Ancient Greeks endowed us.
There are ways to think about disorders without resorting to "ideal". We can judge the impact of a person's mental condition on his life and on those who is around him.
Hmm, I hadn't really considered the concept of a disorder as normative; if you had asked me to define "mental disorder" I would have said something like: "A condition of the mind which is unusual."
But it seems to me that that would be precisely the way to write an apolitical diagnosis manual. Make no judgement call about the desirability of conditions and leave that up to the patient to decide.
If unusualness were enough, then perfect pitch would be a mental disorder.
You could define it that way if you like, but you'd then need to fill up the DSM with clearly-beneficial and clearly-benign trivialities.
I think you'd need to throw something into your definition about interfering with your ability to live a normal life. Perfect pitch doesn't, but homosexuality does.
Extending your argument in the obvious direction, it seems clear that having perfect pitch could well be debilitating for someone who doesn't have perfect control of their sound environment. I've met several people who wear earplugs as a matter of course to try to regain more control over their aural inputs. I've also observed people with an unusually sensitive sense of smell experiencing distress in ordinary environments, which often contain unpleasant smells at low levels that most people don't notice or can easily ignore.
That's a question of priorities, not empiricism. A value-neutral catalog of well-characterized psychological anomalies could include advice for each - folks with depression or schizophrenia respond well to particular types of therapy and/or medication, folks with perfect pitch or color-number synesthesia have a potential advantage in certain tasks and thus might want to consider related careers, etc.
I'd bite the bullet and define mental disorders as something like "a pattern of thought or behaviour that consistently causes distress or harm to the individual or to other people" (seems to be pretty similar to the definition I looked up) - variation is natural and there's nothing wrong with being unusual, it only causes problems if you can't function in society.
It's pretty hard to function in Afghanistan's society right now if you're a woman interested in higher education. If your interest is too strong, you might even find this causes you severe consequences. It's not hard to imagine a group of people describing the desire in a woman for higher education based on this abnormal behavior that invites negative consequences a form of mental illness. Heck, that this mental illness exists can then be used to justify the need to discourage a desire in women to have higher education.
This is an extreme enough of an example to our sensibilities that it probably reads as absurd, but it does get at an important notion that we're always making these implicit judgments about whether it is reasonable or not that some set of thoughts or behaviors are disrupting a person's capacity to function in society, and sometimes these calls end up being in enough of a grey area that it isn't obvious.
I realise this definition could obviously be abused in cases like that (e.g. in the Soviet Union, only the mentally unwell would question Communism - and they were treated accordingly! ) and I'm not intending to justify that - this is more of a descriptive rather than prescriptive position.
I think it's productive to consider how many psychiatric problems might be conditional on the social setting people find themselves in, ultimately people have to choose whether to change themselves or to change society.
I fully agree with the concept of disorder being inherently political / ethical rather than biological. Where it gets interesting is on things where culture is changing or where you think it *should* change.
Perhaps having some behaviour causes trouble because of how others treat you. That makes it a disorder because it objectively messes with your life and causes serious problems but the reason it does so is just because of unnecessary bigotry or feelings of isolation, so it's a disorder that shouldn't be.
Calling it a disorder is part of what makes it a disorder in this case. Sticking it in a book of disorders perpetuates the reason it is a disorder but leaving it out means you've left out something that is objectively a disorder currently for political / ethical reasons.
I hesitate to engage with this but I would like to suggest that a high rate of comorbidity with other mental disorders is NOT a good argument for considering something a mental disorder, particularly in the case of homosexuality.
First, it's probably obvious that you could certainly find a number of spurious correlations between certain behaviors/preferences (e.g. owning a dog, disliking the outdoors, etc.) and depression. Doing so would not immediately make it "obvious" why these things should be considered mental disorders.
Even in the west, oft considered "the bar" for social progressivism, the massive stigma faced by many young people coming to terms with their sexuality offers a far simpler explanation for the emergence of depression, substance use, suicide, etc. Culturally accepting attitudes are heavily linked with the remittance of these issues. The most immediate study that jumps to mind showed that the establishment of same-sex marriage resulted in approximately 134,000 fewer teens in the US attempting suicide each year.[1]
I also don't think that, evolutionarily, the picture is quite as simple as you are imagining it. It is probably true that, in general, a sexually reproducing animal that is exclusively homosexual will have limited direct reproductive success. In the case of humans, this is a bit less true, as there are many homosexual men and women that, due to stigma, suppress that aspect of their identity and start families. There are also other indirect factors to to be considered.
Finally, I don't really see a clear reason why reproductive fitness should be the sole determinant of whether something is a disorder or not...
The purpose of the sexual instinct is reproduction. If the sexual instinct is redirected away from this such that it becomes much less likely, something is pretty clearly malfunctioning. Since the sexual instinct is psychological, and not say, gastrointestinal, it seems clear that it meets the criteria for a mental disorder on those grounds alone, regardless of whether in some cases those so afflicted manage to reproduce despite this.
Comorbid mental disorders are very widespread in homosexuals. Maybe that's a spurious correlation and maybe it's not. That's worthy of investigation at the very least, unless you're scared of what might be found because your ideology tells you the wrong answers are a no-no and it's more important to you to be nice than to be correct. But then it's already been determined on an a priori basis that homosexuality isn't a mental disorder, so it's a moot point.
Malfunctioning from an evolutionary point of view, perhaps. But why should we care about evolution's POV other than instrumentally? Thanks to culture and critical thought, we don't have to be slaves to the evolutionary imperatives of nature.
Adoption is the most obvious source of children but there's no reason a same sex couple couldn't find a surrogate or donor, either, other than stigma and such. Not only that, but plenty of closeted men and women do go on to successfully raise families.
Human offspring have been raised primarily by a female parent since the dawn of humanity. Why has it, in the space of about 15 years, suddenly been decided that mothers are no longer important for raising offspring? There have been absolutely no scientifically rigorous studies in that respect. We have preferred to run roughshod over the question in order to make sure nobody feels bad about themselves.
Antisocial behavior perhaps, if antisocial were not confounded by the existing ASPD. Perhaps unsocial or countersocial, or some thing which acknowledges it as unhelpful to the social order while not equating it with "psychopathy."
Right, we don't have to be slaves to biology! Just because the purpose of the digestive system is to provide nutrients to the body doesn't mean there's anything wrong with eating indigestible objects if that's what I want to do.
Actually I am pretty sure that replacing macronutrients (at least those of carbohydrate variety) with non-digestables (a subset of non-soluble dietary fiber) would make quite a large portion of «food as actually consumed in the well-off countries» healthier.
(I remember to have personally seen _some_ 90+% fiber products sold as food inside EU with explicit high-satiation-low-caloric marketing, but unfortunately these are not yet popular enough to have large-scale cost efficiencies)
Fiber helps the digestive system accomplish it's purpose of providing nutrients to the body more effectively. The same wouldn't be true if you were eating shards of glass, or rocks, or hair.
My main point is that by the "we don't have to be slaves to biology" standard disorders such as Pica, or Anorexia, or cutting, would not be valid. Why should we care is someone prefers to eat wood chips and rubber bands? You do you girl. /s
Though based on the plot summary its a decent exploration of what happens when we are no longer "slaves to biology". Namely that it's horrifying and disgusting.
If in a hundred or so years the western societies have been replaced by more tyrannical cultures that did keep up the birth rates, was feminism et alea than successful?
Don't you think you end up with a paradox if you don't care about evolution? Assume you're a feminist and claim to care deeply about women but achieving your goal causes the long term extinction of your culture that gave women a lot of freedom, did you then really care about women or was it just about the selfish rush of endorphins?
Conversely, if those more tyrannical cultures can't maintain the loyalty of the people who build better machines, to the point that they face crushing defeat on the battlefield despite theoretical superiority in budget and number of troops, has that focus on biological reproduction truly been an asset to their survival?
I asked why we should care about evolution *except instrumentally*. Apparently, replies ignored that. Of course you have to pay attention to the effects of evolution and take them into account. That doesn't give them any moral weight. In the case at issue, IF homosexuality is an evolutionary error, why should we care about that if we no longer need worry about women having lots of children?
We are literally evolved creatures, are we not? Seems we should pay great heed to the directives of evolution. The hardware we run on is quite important, as is its intended mode of operation.
As I said, we should pay attention to evolution and take into account the effects the results of evolution have on us. For instance, a paleo diet makes sense (however you define that) because if you ignore our dietary evolutionary history, you are likely to experience bad health results. We should pay close attention to evolution when it comes to physical, health-related effects. When it comes to behavioral effects, we need to know what evolution "wants" and then decide whether than matches what we want. If it doesn't, and we accept any consequences, there is no moral imperative to be a slave to evolution. You mention the "intended mode of operation" but there is no intended mode. There is only the outcome of evolution. That's a fact but it's not a moral fact.
Should we let woman who need C-sections die, rather than performing surgery?
Because, if you think about it, for each woman who requires a C-section that we save, we're letting her pass on her genes, raising the rate that it will be required in the future.
So, of course, the only solution is to let them all die, right? We must pay great heed to evolution, after all. And why stop there? Having braces makes people who would look ugly look perfectly normal, meaning that their genes are more likely to being passed on. So, we should obviously ban braces.
Do you see why we shouldn't pay any heed to evolution, now?
Good examples. A less drastic one: I am very fair skinned. Given Barnes' apparently unlimited respect for the random outcomes of evolution, I should stay inside, and absolutely never go hiking here in Arizona (which I plan to do tomorrow.) I say: The hell with evolution. I do what I want while acknowledging evolution by hiking while the UV index is low, or covering up, or wearing UV blocker and by wearing sunglasses.
I like this logic. If a woman declines to have sex with me, then her sexual instinct is misdirected, something is malfunctioning, and she clearly meets the criteria for a mental disorder.
You know what else has an evolutionary purpose? Infanticide of the offspring of other males, to make a female available to bear your own offspring.
I hate to say this, but your latter statement isn't as ironclad an example as you seem to think.
Some people do actually want to have a lot of offspring, irrespective of whether they'll know them. One of the better means to do this in the modern world is to become an IVF doctor and surreptitiously replace other people's gametes with your own. This is no hypothetical; there have been real cases of this - and importantly, they tend to take years to be detected, which means the babies can't (all) be aborted.
Punishing this with a jail sentence or even execution doesn't really work, because by the social-Darwinist logic these people tend to follow, they still come out ahead with their 400 babies - more than they could have had had they not done the crime and not been punished.
There is, of course, one way to ensure that no-one can profit by doing this. It's not done in the modern world, because we consider deterring crime less important than avoiding punishing the innocent, but there's a legitimate tradeoff there.
I think you may have misunderstood my implication with that example, but i admit it isnt especially clear. It is only supposed to point out the flaw in valorizing reproductive instincts for their evolutionary purpose, as most people find this behavior in other primates disturbing.
I don't think I did; it's just that if I see a "A because B" argument in which B is wrong (or in this case, dubious), I tend to object even if I agree with A. As I said up the top, I was objecting to your example - not, particularly, your conclusion.
Honestly, the first one isn't a great example either, but for the opposite reason; reversing the sexes would make it hold water from an evolutionary point of view, but as written there's the issue that because pregnancy takes time and resources women are incentivised to be somewhat selective with whose semen winds up inside them.
That is to say, your examples are intended to be things that are favoured by evolutionary incentives and offensive to morality, but in the first case, while horrid, it's not actually favoured by evolutionary incentives, while in the second case, while certainly evolutionarily favoured, there are some significant asterisks on its offensiveness to morality (I would have used the ordinary adultery situation, but one could argue that that's outdated by paternity tests even if in practice they're rarely used). Ultimately, however, I do agree with the conclusion that evolutionarily-favoured =/= good.
credit where credit is due, this is a good one. and you may be right! i wont reproduce regardless of anyone elses decisions, though. it would be reprehensible, given the risk they would take after me in certain regards.
Behaviors that maximize your number of offspring are not the same thing as maximally morally good behaviors, at least according to approximately any moral systems people actually try to follow. A successful serial rapist in a place with no abortion, a fertility doctor who puts his own sperm into all his female patients, a smarmy dude who knocks up a long sequence of young women and leaves them each with a baby and skips town, a soldier who manages to do a lot of raping of women in conquered territories, a new husband who murders his wife's children by another man--all these are good strategies for maxing out your number of offspring (at least in a world without laws and police), but none of them are morally desirable.
>The purpose of the sexual instinct is reproduction. If the sexual instinct is redirected away from this such that it becomes much less likely, something is pretty clearly malfunctioning.
Attraction to menopausal women ("MILFs") is mental disorder, got it.
I don't think MILF is used to mean "menopausal." Plenty of babies come from sleeping with your 35-year old wife who's already given you a couple kids and maybe has stretch marks and some extra pounds on her.
Yeah, the archetypal MILF is either Stifler's Mom (from "American Pie"), played by a then-38yo Jennifer Coolidge, or Stacy's Mom (from the eponymous music video) aka then-34yo Rachel Hunter.
They might not be optimal from a how-many-healthy-babies-can-I-expect standpoint, but being a "mom" is evidence of fertility and also of a husband a man can cuckold to for extra offspring with minimal paternal investment.
Absolutely! That initial paper I linked showing reduced suicide rates state-by-state as gay marriage is legalized has some great references included. Here is a longer paper which talks about minority stress in detail as a model for understanding the higher incidence of mental health issues in LGBTQ people: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2072932/. A good way to find extra resources is to peruse or search through these articles and look at the citations they use when discussing issues you're interested in.
Something to keep in mind is that these cultural changes are very recent. As a 25 y/o, gay marriage was legalized in the US when I was a senior in high school. And, just because gay marriage is legal, that doesn't mean that negative views on homosexuality or the damage they cause will have disappeared completely overnight (although we are making pretty significant progress).
That first paper was not relevant to changes over time. The second posed it as a problem for why there are still such mental disorders given improvements, but didn't seem to actually go into whether the rate of such disorders has changed.
OK, I would consider a reduction of roughly 134,000 teen suicide attempts per year in a single country a relevant change over time. You are free to peruse these articles and their references more carefully if you would like. Really though, the burden of proof is on you for someone who is now apparently suggesting the rate of such disorders has not changed and will continue to remain unchanged in spite of such evidence.
If you go further back (though more coarser grained) you can see that suicide rates were declining between 1950 and 2000, then increased up through 2019:
If we focus on teens specifically (suicide rates are highest for people of age 85+, lowest for the lowest age groups including teens), the bottom comes between 2005 & 2010, but increased between then & 2015:
Isn't the main difference that pedophilia is a criminal act if the desire is acted upon?
I don't really understand why homosexuality wouldn't be classified as a paraphilia (aside from influential people who were into it successfully lobbying to have it reclassified). "Can consent and won't be harmed" does not seem to be a consistent delineation between paraphilia and "variants of normal sexuality." Case in point, coprophilia/coprophagia is still classified as a paraphilia in the DSM. "Men kissing men is okay but poop is icky" is hardly a consistent principle. Same case for zoophilia.
Yes, my point is that "criminal act" is a political category, not a biological one.
I agree that "paraphilia" is a useful category, although not as well-defined as people might like (is oral sex a paraphilia? should anyone care about that question either way?)
Point taken on soft borders to what is or is not a paraphilia. One could conceive of a threshold, e.g. something that <10% of people engage in or something that one has an inordinate obsession over. Something like oral sex could be a paraphilia in one generation but not in another.
On parapahilia, they would only require psychiatric treatment if:
1. the behavior would be criminal if indulged in
2. it interfered in the patient's ability to function and/or achieve goals in life (e.g. get married and have children).
Destigmatization, however, strikes me as a much less good idea. Stigma and shame are incredibly effective at discouraging unwanted behavior and highly preferable to any coercive alternative the government would come up with if too many people are causing trouble. Getting men to stick around and raise the children they father has been one of the great accomplishments of civilization, and I suspect that stigmatizing non-marital and non-reproductive sexuality has played an important role in that (if nothing else, family breakdown has strongly correlated with the sexual revolution). I would invoke Chesterton's fence before getting rid of any stigma.
Of course, this whole issue is about gradually coming to terms with this particular fence having long crumbled, around the time that no-fault divorce was normalized, and that there's no getting the horse back into the barn.
Meh, the horse was gotten into the barn in the first place. It could happen again. A world of falling population is gonna be weird, lots of potential for things to shift in unexpected ways.
It could, certainly, but that would probably be a new barn with new fences. Morality rested on the legitimacy of religion, which is in decline in the civilized world and unlikely to recover, and what would eventually replace it is anyone's guess.
Christianity may be in decline, but the functional components of religion remain in demand, namely 1) an explanation of the unknown/unknowable, 2) a moral system, and 3) a ritual system that gives life meaning. In the West, we are used to these three functions coming as a bundle, but they don't have to be (cf. Confucianism).
The past few years we have seen quite a bit of what is effectively religious fanaticism coming from secular movements. I wouldn't write of religion categorically.
There will certainly be new fences built. Mankind will relearn forgotten lessons, the hard way if necessary.
I suppose, but I wouldn't assume that attitudes toward sexuality can only change in one direction. Given how many new taboos have popped up around race in the past few years, it's not hard to imagine that future generations might have different attitudes towards casual sex and single motherhood.
The illegitimacy crisis has only gotten worse since Moynihan rang the alarm in '65. At some point, people who say they care about inequality might actually take a serious look at family structure.
> I suspect that stigmatizing non-marital and non-reproductive sexuality has played an important role in that
If you are talking about the western world then I think you misspelled "stigmatizing female sexuality". A woman who had sex before marriage became a "fallen woman", a man who had sex before marriage might risk being party to a shotgun wedding in some circumstances (depending on the power ratio of the families involved). High status males impregnating some servant girl and then firing her in shock over her immoral behavior seem to be a common trope.
Personally, I would rather live in a society where I would have some risk of my parents divorcing during my childhood than in a society where any missteps during my teens could exclude me from "polite society".
Even for pedophilia, I don't think the level of stigmatization our society has is optimal for minimizing the amount of kids being victimized. A rational approach would treat it like pyromania, perhaps: "Sucks for you that you have impulses which are very incompatible with life in our society. We will try to help you control them. If you act on them, you will be fully on the hook for the lives you destroy. There may be some jobs which we would prefer you not to take due to your inclinations, but otherwise we will judge you on the crimes you commit only."
Also, I can't help but notice that some organizations which are notorious for having covered up a lot of sexual abuse cases are very big on stigma and shame.
For a crime with little stigma attached to it, look at tax fraud. Do middle class people (1%ers are a different can of worms) file their incomes correctly because they would be shunned by their peers otherwise? In the words of Dave Barry, "We'll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail." The "coercive alternative" the government came up with mostly seems to be working ok.
That approach to pedophilia could be a slippery slope. If same-sex attraction wasn't taboo 500 years ago, but actual sex acts were treated the same way as in our timeline, do you think there would have been more or less gay sex in the last 500 years?
I've heard of the similar but meaningfully distinct combination where it's eg. the teenage prince knocking up a serving girl and then she gets fired when his parents find out. The actual father doing the firing would be odder - stories of mistresses and bastards often involve the father providing at least a modicum of financial support for the rearing of his children.
If criminal law were the main difference, shouldn't the ICD say that depending on where you happen to be located, paedophilia might be healthy and homosexuality a mental disorder or it could be other way around?
If something is criminal, then it automatically becomes something that interferes with the patient's ability to function and therefore should be treated. If it is not criminal, then whether treatment is necessary depends on how the paraphilia is affecting the patient's life.
"If something is criminal, then it automatically becomes something that interferes with the patient's ability to function" - depending on how much the law is enforced, how good the patient is at bribing officials, how skilled the patient is at avoiding detection, etc., etc., etc.
If you just optimize for truth and don't get irrationally angry at things you like sharing categories with things you don't like you are able to just wipe all of these downsides away like so much irrelevant screeching. Sure, homosexuality is a mental disorder, it has a clear downside if you would like to have biological children with your preferred partner. It shares a category with pedophilia as well as being unreasonably kind and self sacrificing. This is not a category on the moral dimension.
Optimizing for truth is nice, you spend far less time playing naval gazing word games terrified that the total nonsense you made up so that you could have your cake and eat it too comes back to bite you.
I don't think there is a "truth of the matter" on what is or isn't a mental disorder. Is video game addiction? Is playing video games at all? Is being annoying on Twitter? Is wanting to be divorced even though your relationship is going sort of kind of okay but isn't interesting anymore? Categorization has to depend somewhat on questions about what categories it would be useful to put things in, because it's underdetermined by purely epistemic factors
(Zack to show up and object in 3. . .2 . . .1. . . )
But these questions can be answered empirically with a consistent definition. These definitions might be arbitrary and not cleave reality at it's joints as much as we'd like but we wouldn't get so many weird edge cases where we try to stuff morality into the same pipe we push truth through and up forced to compromise one the other or both. And it's not like the watchers on don't know it's a farse, is there actually a human alive who has read the trans section of the DSM and couldn't tell some tomfoolery was afoot?
I'm not sure how to answer that - maybe I would understand better if you gave an example of such a definition, that carves out something sort of similar to our intuitive category "mental illness"?
From your post the DSM is trying to at least three things.
1. Be an accurate taxonomy of mental disorders
2. Minimize stigma around these disorders
3. Use the influence gained by 1 to force insurance to provide care
Your point seems to be the be that we can't just focus on 1 because then we risk 2 and 3. But it seems to me that the actual proposed purpose of the DSM is 1. 2 and 3 are not really the job of the people who compile these lists. And they can't help but corrupt the process.
Uh, what? The *current* purpose is 3, whatever the DSM was originally intended for. And you might want to rephrase 3 as "Use the influence gained by 1 to force insurance to pay the psychiatric industry". (It's never been clear to me how much of psychiatric "care" really improves the problems.)
Well if the purpose is 3 then a lot of the other designs and complaints don't make a lot of sense. It would be better formulated as a list of treatments with a totally separate list of conditions with which to reference. So the condition list may include an entry for homosexuality but the treatment list may have nothing in reference to it. Or I guess negative references like "don't do conversion therapy, it doesn't work". The problem is that this one thing is trying to do three or more things and it's causing it to fail at all of them.
Most political discussions are not about matter-of-facts, but are fights about definitions.
Is gun control good? Yes, certainly and obviously, if you use the right definition of "good".
Is gun control bad? Yes, certainly and obviously, if you use the right definition of "bad".
The issue is that politics needs to come up with decisions. We need to decide whether and how we act. Should we be more or less restrictive on guns? In which way exactly? If you and I use different definitions, then we both can have great edifices which are internally totally consistent. But they are not consistent *with each other*. And as soon as we try to agree on some action (a law or something), we will just clash as hard as before.
<irony> Unless you finally realize that your definition is silly and stupid and adopt my sensible definition, of course. <irony off>
Scott pointed out how that is true for the DSM: writing stuff into the DSM has consequences because it determines what insurances cover for.
I guess my preference eis that the DSM be a source of shared truth, to which aim it needs to be as politically neutral is as possible. If it takes a political position then it becomes the domain of one political group and you really can't fault the other political group from ignoring it as corrupt. Once you start justifying corrupting the sources of consensus reality to suit your political aims there really is no limit. Why not simply define opposition to your political aims as a disorder demanding removal from society?
Worse than that, if it takes a political position then it becomes the domain of one political group and you really can't fault the other political group from taking control of it to push their own political position.
"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."
In all likelihood, the APA originally intended the DSM to be purely descriptive. But since the diagnoses have de facto ramifications on cultural-stigma and insurance-policies, it's become a battleground between outside interests. Your advice is how the DSM ended up like it is today. "Wouldn't optimizing for truth be so much more efficient without worrying about politics?" = "wouldn't my metabolism be so much more efficient without an immune system weighing it down?"
How long do you think an explicitly politicized DSM can stand? You don't have to flip a whole lot of beaurocrats to have some heinous right wing influence. You're building weapons of a tyrant, eventually one will come around and show you how they're used.
If it's just about insurance, that seems like it could be dealt with on an empirical basis: here's a list of known psychological anomalies, with corresponding conditional probabilities of related life outcomes, and tested prevention strategies for obviously undesirable stuff - partly through proxy variables which also seem like worthwhile goals for other reasons, such as positive social ties and self-reported life satisfaction as a proxy for suicide prevention.
Some such strategies will involve specialized skills and tools the person involved couldn't reasonably be expected to take care of by themselves (due to various combinations of specialized skill, the need for an outside perspective, and simple expense) but are nonetheless recognized as a net benefit to society, so in such cases formal diagnosis serves as a qualifying factor for subsidized and/or mandated treatment.
Ignoring the political, truth avoiding, socially complicated aspects of human culture isn't optimizing for truth, it is avoiding truth. The truth is what you're offering won't work because people by and large are not built to prefer it. Please stop pretending like this is something that can be ignored or waved away.
Trying to control and influence the political and social realm by gerrymandering what should be neutral definitions can't help but further confuse discourse. I resent the assertion that we need the people who define terms to carefully protect us from ourselves. Does it not frustrate you that you cannot actually trust these lists to be accurate when accuracy might interfere with the interests of an unelected group of people? Are you sure these people will always use this truth bending influence in your favor?
Oh, I absolutely agree, but "If you just optimize for truth and don't get irrationally angry at things" is naive, harmful, and absolutely not brave. "Acknowledging that humans don't optimize for truth and that they get irrationally angry at things, here's a complicated, difficult solution I think can help some people work around these human weaknesses and biases" is better on all counts.
“Optimizing for truth” makes sense if words have a meaning independent of how we use them. The question here isn’t “what things fall under the category “mental disorder” that we found on a tablet at Sinai?” The question is “what is helpful for us to call a “disorder” in decisions involving treatment and insurance?”
You'll find very diverse opinions on what helpful means if that's your goal. I get the impression a lot of people here consider increased access to be a costless good. But beyond that I'm pretty sure the DSM isn't actually primarily for determining what insurers should pay for. I think it's specific purpose is to outline disorders and potential treatments and regulators/insurance groups use it to determine what to cover. We're basically hacking the truth values on a config file for ideological reasons. But feeding untrue things into this black box might have consequences.
The point he's making is that many of these people aren't hacking the truth values, because there are no hard truth values about mental disorder. The brains are real, but the labels and clusters are social constructs for social purposes. Alone on an island, you will have one or another set of mental tendencies and no reason to label yourself. In society, whether we put you in the same bucket as Steve and Alice has to do with *what we want the outcome of that bucket to be*.
If you're properly familiar with statistics and p-values, please consider this analogous to p<0.05. It's *not the truth*. It's a decision criteria which is beneficial. What most of us are doing here is trying to decide the beneficial decision criteria, and of course, there are disagreements about the criteria because there are disagreements about ideal outcomes, never mind the vagaries of the actual minds under investigation.
Indeed. Surely the measure of the harm of addiction is how much it prevents one from functioning in daily life, as well as any physiological damage from consuming whatever substance.
Journalist: "We can't edit quotes!" Editor: "We can selectively pick fonts for emphasis and readability! Use a transparent font for N and say that you blipped out the N-word."
The underlying issue is that having a mental disorder doesn't warrant stigma, while having an untreated mental disorder which poses a danger to oneself or others *does* warrant stigma proportional to the likelihood and magnitude of danger posed.
Please go ahead and label things mental disorders that you want to have treated by mental health professionals. Please don't stigmatize any of them any more than is necessary. I recognize that this is a hard problem that we don't and won't agree on the boundaries of. This does not absolve us from making our best efforts.
Do those seeking treatment whose symptoms are still poorly controlled and potentially dangerous warrant as much stigma as those not seeking treatment? Is it cooperation with mental health care that removes the need for stigma, or treatment success which neutralizes the condition? It sounded like your rationale was partly based on the danger of the outcomes posed, and partly based on the need to incentive treatment. (I raise this point in part because, in dichotomizing treated and untreated mental illness for moral shaming purposes, the not uncommon outcome of underwhelming treatment success is often overlooked. I think people tend to want this distinction to do a lot more philosophical heavy lifting than it can.)
The value of any stigma is the amount of harm prevented, less the amount of harm caused.
That harms caused are substantially easier to measure than harms prevented does not absolve us from making our best attempts, but should result in extending as much grace as we can to those whose estimates differ from our own.
[edited to add: that people may grant different weights to different harms should also move us to extend grace where possible, while nevertheless aiming for what we think is best]
Have you read the HiTOP proposal? Unless I missed something, the HiTop is not proposing a strictly biologically based taxonomy of mental disorders at all nor is anyone serious.
The DSM and any future taxonomy can effectively distinguish between pedophilia and homosexuality and the other conditions you list with the harm criteria, which requires the presence of distress, impairment in functioning, or involvement of non-consenting victims.
"The authors of these apolitical taxonomies want an incoherent thing. They want something which doesn’t think about politics at all, and which simultaneously is more politically correct than any other taxonomy."
So they add a social/cultural/political criterion but they don't want to think about politics?
Ok but "DSM alternatives say this all the time. ... Let’s replace it with our purely biological, apolitical taxonomy of mental disorders!”"
Who says this? Is it anecdotal? It's not in the post you linked. It's not in the any of the alternative taxonomies I know. No scientist and clinician I know says this. If anything the HiTOP and others are openly and explicitly pushing for culturally-sensitive categories. The RDoC might have flirted with the idea but it is not meant to replace the DSM in clinical practice. It might be useful to provide a link or replace the fake quote by a real quote.
Your real quote seemed to be missing the "therefore, we want something apolitical" part. So I went back to the linked blog to see if that was really the author's conclusion from that example.
And it wasn't. The author's conclusion was "we need to be careful about labelling harmless behavioural quirks as problems."
Taking "we need to be careful" as a political statement, the author is endorsing a politically-informed classification, not an apolitical one, and would full-throatedly endorse putting homosexuality and pedophilia on opposite sides of the diagnostic divide for precisely that reason.
I agree that the way it was worded in this post was too strong, but a weaker version could definitely be substantiated (it also isn't quite so wrong then).
An example from a very short search:
Shortcomings of approaches to classifying psychopathology based on expert consensus have given rise to contemporary efforts to classify psychopathology quantitatively. In this paper, we review progress in achieving a quantitative and empirical classification of psychopathology. A substantial empirical literature indicates that psychopathology is generally more dimensional than categorical. When the discreteness versus continuity of psychopathology is treated as a research question, as opposed to being decided as a matter of tradition, the evidence clearly supports the hypothesis of continuity.
The HiTOP Consortium formed as a way of addressing this need for breadth and coherence, closely tethered to data. However, HiTOP, like endeavors before it, is a consortium of human clinicians, scientists and scholars, each with their own unique perspectives, in addition to their shared goals. Although focused squarely on the role of data in adjudicating nosological controversies via its principles, how will HiTOP navigate new evidence, which, after all, is not self-interpreting?
As I understand it, transgender people regard themselves as always having been the gender they are now. So, for example, a transgender woman appears from the outside to have changed from a man into a woman, but from her own point of view she has always been a woman or girl; her outward appearance has changed to match her true self. So she was born a girl, even though the doctor marked her down as a boy on the basis of her groin.
In what way could a boy possibly be born a girl or vice versa? What is the evidence for that? All we know is that some people really don’t like their bodies --they’re obsessed and distressed by their physical embodiment in the absence of any problem or defect.
People who are addicted to cosmetic surgery (like Michael Jackson) have a similar problem. Was Michael Jackson “born that way”? Did he always know he was “really” a person with a narrow pointy nose?
That’s what “wrong gender” comes down to: “I really, really don’t like my body,m.” Or are you making claims for a gendered essence or soul -- and what’s the evidence of that?
> That’s what “wrong gender” comes down to: “I really, really don’t like my body,m.” Or are you making claims for a gendered essence or soul -- and what’s the evidence of that?
If you replace "soul" with "mind", this could mean that wanting to be a certain gender (having that anatomy, or fitting into that social category) is an inherent characteristic of that person's brain, neither naturally transient nor mutable by modern technology.
If you want to claim it’s an inherent characteristic of that person’s brain (in some sort of physical, medical, real-world sense) then you’d need some evidence. Good luck.
If you just mean that some people really really wish they looked a certain way, like,
*Olympian Jenner wishes ** had been born female.
*Michael Jackson wishes he had been born with a narrow pointy nose.
* I wish I had my 20-year-old body back.
…then we’re just talking about wishes. People can wish for a whole lot of things that they will never have. It doesn’t mean there’s a physical part of their brain wired for “narrow pointy nose” or “hotter younger body.”
Gosh maybe I was never meant to be a middle-aged frump! My brain says that my 20-year-old body is RIGHT for me. It feels much more AUTHENTIC. And I’m not even kidding. The way I used to look is the way that feels like the “real me.” But I’m never getting that back and I can’t waste time being too broken up about it.
If people’s disappointment about their physical embodiment causes them significant distress, therapy and some self-acceptance related to physical reality might be a better bet than drastic cosmetic changes.
It doesn’t mean people can’t be feminine guys or masculine girls or even “non-binary” behaviorally. It’s healthy to be whoever you are.
It’s where people start playing elaborate games of pretend, taking not-medically-indicated hormones and having not-medically-indicated surgeries and demanding the general public to say and do certain things where it gets kind of …emotionally unwell.
What happened to “Be Yourself”? It was all the rage in the late 20th century.
> People can wish for a whole lot of things that they will never have.
> The way I used to look is the way that feels like the “real me.” But I’m never getting that back and I can’t waste time being too broken up about it.
But plenty of people claim to have transitioned and been more comfortable in their new bodies. I'm not sure how to square that with your claims - do you think these people are just lying, or what?
As a corollary: If the tech really did exist that could make you physically 20 again, would you go for it? If you believe that it's currently impossible to "become" the other gender, do you accept a possible future in which that changes and you start being pro-trans?
I think this logic would argue that we should ban all plastic surgery, or at least make it as demanding and difficult to get as gender affirmation surgery.
I’m not sure that follows. I personally think cosmetic surgery, unless it’s correcting a defect (like a cleft palate) is unethical but I wouldn’t ban it for other people, just because I personally think it’s the wrong move. Getting black-out drunk might be the wrong move too but I don’t suggest banning alcohol,
Some people, no doubt, want to look different and I don’t suggest we stop competent adults from messing with their own health and own bodies.
I’m just suggesting we understand that there’s no such thing, literally, as being in the “wrong body” and a trans person seeking surgery is no different from anyone else who wants to radically alter the way they look.
I would suggest that if you want to radically alter the way you look (at a “Michael Jackson” level or a “trans person” level) you might have other complex emotional issues underlying your extreme displeasure with your body. You might. Those might be worth examining.
If I were a cosmetic surgeon, I’d probably see a fundamental difference between someone whose ears stick out and wants them pinned back, and someone who wants multiple surgeries to look like the other sex when probably they’re never going to look like the other sex, and certainly they will never accomplish being the other sex, and in the bargain they are likely to destroy their sexual functioning (depending on the surgery).
This level of human unhappiness is very serious. I don’t mean to trivialize it. I don’t think our present ways of addressing the unhappiness are very helpful, though, and I think they deserve an evidence-based look.
I would guess the argument might be more along the lines of "If actresses who had had a boob job insisted that it was immoral and possibly illegal to refer to the fact that she was once a B cup instead of her current D, that would be absurd and wrong."
At least some trans people would disagree with you; they'd argue that gender dysphoria is a very different feeling as compared to e.g. hating your body for being fat. They describe dysphoria as a persistent feeling of wrongness; kind of like a missing tooth, only extended to your entire self.
AFAIK we currently do not have a fully working biological model of gender; however, there's some evidence to conclude that some differences in gender (as opposed to sex) might be neurological, not merely psychosomatic.
They can describe it any way they want. I feel sorry for people who are suffering whatever the cause.
It has been documented since at least the 1950s as a particular challenge for the “gender doctors” to deal with; that many of these patients give oddly cookie-cutter responses to justify why they want what they want — almost as if reciting talking points. Back then, the doctors noticed that what the patients said was often at odds with what the families remembered.
Parents are now noticing this same phenomenon in distressed teens — they say their teens often seem to recite talking points which are at odds with what the families remember — “always played with opposite sex toys” for example, when the parent remembers toys stereotypical of both sexes being in the home, and the child mostly chose to play with toys stereotypical of their sex.
It’s very complicated. People are often not the best reporters of their own experience when they think there’s something they need to gain or achieve.
There are also numerous examples of online spaces where “trans” people encourage others to lie in certain ways to get what they want, including “I always felt this way” and including threatening suicide.
In no other complicated mental health context do we simply take what the patient says at face value.
I am interested to see what evidence there is for “gender” being “neurological.” I haven’t seen it.
Certainly people’s personalities and preferences vary. There are little boys who have always preferred “girls’” toys or clothing or activities, say.
That is authentic to who they are. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s probably wired in, the way our other preferences and personality traits are wired in.
Indeed it might be a normal and understandable wish, if you seem to fit in more with the girls, to wish you had been born a girl yourself.
If there were a magic wand to turn such a boy into a girl, you can understand why he might want to avail himself of the magic. Wouldn’t that be nice.
But there is no magic. There are just cosmetic procedures: medically unnecessary hormones with non-trivial health risks and clunky surgeries with often-bad outcomes.
No one really believes anyone changes sex. They only change appearance. Why do they change appearance? Because they were really unhappy with how they looked.
Instead of encouraging gender dysphoric folks to come to terms with reality (yes that’s a natural wish, but your body is what it is, and there’s no wrong way to be a boy/man) and instead of encouraging society to be more nurturing to and accepting of feminine boys or masculine girls, we have culturally adopted a truly crazy-pants, not-evidence-based belief that someone can “be” the opposite sex “on the inside” (because we persist in confusing gender stereotypes and gender performance with bodily sex, it seems) and we offer truly horrible body modifications that promise happiness and often fail to deliver.
Well, if you asked people to describe their headaches, they'd give cookie-cutter responses as well; in fact, there are diagnostic tests based on this fact.
I acknowledge your point about appearance and social contagion; but trans people maintain that at least *some* (not all !) of them do experience gender dysphoria that goes beyound mere fashion. Left untreated, this persistent sense of physical wrongness reduces their quality of life to the point where some of them do, indeed, commit suicide; hormonal and surgical treatments are significantly more effective at alleviating this condition than psychotherapy.
Granted, self-reporting is a relatively weak form of evidence, but I don't see how you can throw out gender dysphoria without also throwing out headaches and the Pain Scale.
Ultimately, IMO all of this comes down to medical technology in the end. We need better technology to detect neurological causes of headaches and gender dysphoria; and we need better technology so we can alleviate these conditions. We've made some progress (especially on the headache issue), but not nearly enough. Meanwhile, we should work with the imperfect tools that we've got.
The way a lot of things are gate-kept, scripted responses are a reaction to doctors who'll dismiss any patient that doesn't exactly tick their boxes in order. I know not much about gender dysphoria, but I have extensive bitter experience with the phenomenon as it relates to chronic illness
I think you may be onto something. I've had what you could call gender dysphoria, or at least gender incongruent feelings and behavior, since about four years old, and at this point I've been on HRT for just over two years.
From what I see, it appears that some people's desire to protect the feelings of trans people (or just a desire to protect their own reputations) causes them to accept certain ideas without due scrutiny. For example, that a trans person "really is" their desired sex or gender, that the desire is persistent across a lifetime, that it's not socially spread to any significant degree, that gender dysphoria is drastically unlike other body image disorders, and that the motivation is always wholly separate from sexual or paraphilic desires. My own experiences have been much more complex than these sorts of politically correct platitudes can describe. So this means either people who aren't "really trans" according to the ideology are able to easily get HRT (it took me two weeks), or it means that some of what we've been told to believe about trans people is wrong.
Now, do I regret taking HRT, consider it immoral, or plan to stop? Not particularly. I've already tried just about every other solution to my problems short of jumping off a bridge (and I came close to that a few times), but none of them worked. And as a mentally competent adult I strongly feel that I have the right to make my own medical decisions. However, I do believe there are good questions to be asked about the ideology of the movement, and about the implications of propagating these ideas in everything from philosophy to sports.
I really appreciate you sharing these thoughts and it’s so helpful as I continue to try to clarify my own thinking.
Re “And as a mentally competent adult I strongly feel that I have the right to make my own medical decisions. However, I do believe there are good questions to be asked about the ideology of the movement, and about the implications of propagating these ideas in everything from philosophy to sports.”
I agree. Ironically the “most authentic seeming ‘trans’ person” is the person who is thriving and happy with their decision.
And when I look around, especially at the crop of teenagers who presented a whole new trans demographic in the last ten years or so, I see people who are mired in other types of extreme unhappiness or other types of mental health struggles, who believe that gender is the solution to their troubles.
Something is just not quite right in the way we’ve oversimplified “trans” for the public.
Yes the goal is to be kind, compassionate, respectful. And yet with the oversimplification of what “trans” is (such that the general public believes without too much thought that there might be some kind of true “wrong body” condition—- or they think of it vaguely as “another kind of gay” — and so if same-sex attraction is biological, they suppose “trans” is too) I don’t think we do the amazing diversity of people who fall under the trans umbrella any favors by oversimplifying.
A young lesbian who was always gender nonconforming and who is anxious and unhappy about her same-sex attraction and who wishes quite earnestly (impossibly but earnestly) that she were a boy is quite different from an awkward teen boy on the autism spectrum who obsesses over video games and anime and wishes quite earnestly (impossibly but earnestly) that he were a girl because it’s so easy for girls to get laid, and they’re not expected to be masculine.
And those kids in turn are quite different from a fully grown adult who had gender incongruent feelings since age 4 which never went away.
And that person is quite different from a grown man who’s addicted to weird porn and who gets sexual thrills from cross dressing, from using women’s changing rooms, and from imagining himself as a woman.
Those are four very different people with four very different sets of needs. They don’t all fit neatly under a category of “people in the wrong body called trans people.”
Oversimplification — with thought-stopping slogans like “Trans women are women” — doesn’t serve anyone well.
If gender is defined by self-identification, then how can a baby be born with a gender? Wouldn't it follow that people only acquire genders after they're old enough to understand the concept?
a lot of trans people use the terminology “assigned gender at birth” (agab) to refer to their birth gender. they don’t believe babies are born with genders and instead that they’re “assigned” genders by society, sometimes incorrectly. once someone gets old enough to understand the concept of gender, if they think their gender is the same as the assigned one, then they’re cis, and if they think their gender is different, then they’re trans. not saying i agree with this worldview, it’s just the one most trans people have
And, if we are half-ways sane as a society, we will start using exclusively biological sex as the basis for all legislation. Gender has become a meaningless concept...
I think generally there's two varieties of pro-trans/pro-non-binary positions here:
1. Gender is innate, but doesn't always align with ones sex (or "assigned sex at birth.")
or
2. Gender is sometimes innate and does show up in early childhood, but in other cases it doesn't. It fundamentally doesn't matter when different gender presentation shows up, identification today is what is important.
I suppose you could summarize 2 as "Gender: 'Born this way' bad", but I think it's more complex than that.
The difference has nothing to do with how you're born. It's about whether what you *are* matches up with what you *want to be*. Your simplification is technically correct, but irrelevant. You might as well say:
Can you point to someone who has that particular combination of views? The Lady Gaga style pop-LGBT activists often say “born this way” about both (eg “I was born gay and took u til I was 15 to realize” or “God made me a woman but put me in a male body at birth to test me”). Plenty of academic lgbt activists deny “born this way” about either - instead they say “this doesn’t hurt anyone so let us do it”.
To expand on this... though it feels better leaving it as a minimalist pun. I am pointing out some inconsistency here. Not that any one particular person would necessarily need to hold both views at the same time. But in analogy to Scott's post: we can't really have it both ways. Either celebrating the fact that one is born with a particular combination of mind, sexual attraction, and biological sex, whether matching "society" 's expectations or not. Or, repudiating what one was born with and celebrating the idea that mind, sexual attraction, and appearance of biological sex are and should be changeable at will.
It seems easy (for me) to empathize with someone who is homosexual, because I, too, seem to be innately, immutably, attracted to a gender, in my case to women (whether or not it is 100% innate, my point is that's how it feels).
Similarly, I feel like it's easy for me to empathize with a trans person. I really strongly feel that I am male! I identify with being male, and want people to treat me as a male. Admittedly this preference has been shaped by my life experience ... but imagine if that feeling were innate (which maybe it is somewhat, who knows)! It would really really suck if, as a child, I felt I was male, but my parents and everyone insisted on treating me otherwise, making me dress up as a girl, etc. How humiliating! And the only reason they can give that they treat me like that has to do with things called "genitals" and "chromosomes" that I don't really understand....
Anyway, not even saying any of the factual claims here are correct. Just that like ... in theory it should be easy to relate to someone who has a really strong identity of being one gender and wants to be treated that way. Because we all feel that way, right? Most of us just feel that way in a way that lines up with our genitals and chromosomes ...
It seems easy, for me, to empathise with someone who is homosexual since I also experience sexual attraction, and to what kind of person will always be personal. So I accept others' attractions as well.
But I find it difficult to empathise with transgender people, or with cisgender people who are strongly rooted in the external trappings of their "gender". I feel my biological sex, male, but I don't feel strongly being part of a gender. Gender is a social construct: a set of specific expectations of behavior styles, clothing styles, hairstyles, which are all dramatically different and changeable depending on culture and times. And I have lived in too many cultures to take any particular fashion, or behavior style, as a marker for "men" or "women". From childhood on, I never understood why men and women should either dress differently of have different kinds of jobs in life, or why there should be any other differentiation between men and women than their sexual characteristics, primary (genitals) and secondary (breasts, beards, etc). Perhaps this is because I was raised in a household full of women with strong classical feminist characteristics who thought the same - that "women can do everything men can do". And what I observed at home was not "women doing this and men doing that" but "adults doing this". The only adults around me happened to be women, that's all. Had my family "raised me as a girl" they would have raised me exactly the same because no one forced the idea on me that girls and boys were somehow fundamentally different except for their bodies.
To me, the difference between men and women boils down very strongly and almost purely to biological sex. I am attracted to women, whether short or long hair, dress or jeans, heels or slippers. And of course, in the nude there is nothing but biological sex characteristics left. Gender disappears in the nude. The only thing left is genitalia and what you can do with the equipment on hand.
What attracts me to people is their personality, looks, and yes, their biological sex markers and genitalia. Their external gender trappings are meaningless to me. Same for myself: I feel equally at ease in jeans and boots (like Western Cowboys) or in sarongs as slippers (like Indians or Indonesians). Wearing a sarong doesn't make me feel like I'm wearing a "skirt" (which it is) or "being a woman" (which it isn't). I've often had long hair while my wife had a crew cut. I wear earrings more often than her. Sometimes I sport a thick beard, sometimes I don't. When my wife wears a dress and lipstick I feel like she shows up in drag, because she never does that normally. When I first started wearing a suit regularly, I too felt like I was showing up in drag, though I am more used to it now. All of this is gentle, entertaining cosplay to me, that has nothing to do with my identity.
Actually, I can't even identify with the idea of identity. I am me. Identity, as understood by the current gender discussion, is the attempt to place oneself in a group of people with similar characteristics. I feel no need to do that. I feel no national identity. I feel no ethnic identity. I feel no gender identity, though I feel sexually male. I don't want to be part of any particular pack of wolves. I am perfectly content in this.
I agree with the thrust of this post, as nicely summarized by Leah Libresco Sargeant in her comment.
That said, if you're concerned about a comparison between homosexuality and pedophilia being taken out of context, it seems prudent to at least to give that comparison a thorough examination. Much has been written on how
some rate of homosexuality may be evolutionarily adaptive, but to my knowledge there is no equivalent corpus for pedophilia. Of course, setting out to prove such a theory would be somewhat taboo, but so was the earlier research on homosexuality - to the extent that it lacked an implicit or explicit condemnation of homosexuals - and yet the work exists. I certainly don't see how sexual targeting of sexually immature individuals could be adaptive.
I don't think any of this stuff is actually evolutionarily adaptive. I think the "let's prove that all of this weird stuff is evolutionarily adaptive" research direction was mostly a dead end, although there are some things close to it that I believe are true (some mental disorders are the more-extreme-than-the-design-specs versions of good traits).
I could make a dumb hand-wavy argument that there are ten genes involved in attraction, you want to be attracted to pretty young people (eg late teens) because they're the most fertile, so it's good to have one or two genes out of ten predisposing you to attraction to youthful traits, but some people accidentally get 10/10 of those genes and get attracted to literal children. But I think this is giving the genome too much credit for making perfect sense. What I actually believe is something like what I explained here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/you-dont-want-a-purely-biological/comment/12193145
I think that's true in a statistical, probabilistic sense, that is that these are the peaks of distributions.
But an awful lot of men's attraction does age with themselves and an awful lot of older women are attracted to young men ("cougars").
I'm in my late forties, and I very rarely find myself personally attracted to a woman under her mid-thirties - women in their twenties come across as kids, and tend to trigger fatherly, protective reflexes rather than sexual ones.
But how much of this is the product current legal and social norms, that is both, what would the distribution look like in various historical environments, and what would peoples "natural inclinations" look like in the absence of any sort of social environment (in so far as that is a meaningful question).
I also think you overstate the degree to which as a matter of fact men's attraction does age, that is peoples revealed preferences with respects to pornography is quite telling, the cougar phenomenon is most prevalent in material featuring young looking men, that is the Jimmy Michaels and Jordi El Nino Polla etc. 's of the world as opposed to older actors. I could go on listing a great number of caveats and various ways in which pornography is biased but perhaps the most important takeaway is that "teen" porn and "teen" porn featuring older men sells very well even to older men (maybe especially), I also find it prudent to add that a significant percentage (maybe a majority) of mainstream pornography clearly presents women in such a manner as to provoke a "Pedophilic" response (clearly attraction to under 18s and maybe further), that is the women are physically immature, dressed immaturely, and behave immaturely, with great attention taken to exaggerate these facts further I.e. camera angles to make the actress appear even smaller, and a title to match.
From what I can tell only especially neurotic feminists have made a great deal out of this fact, with people interested in understanding sexual attraction ignoring this and other obvious lines of inquiry.
I like your profile pic, definitely a cute anime (Hinata best girl). I'd recommend following Aella (also goes by knowingless), she's definitely interested in that topic from a generally rationalist perspective. And while she was and is a sex worker at times, I wouldn't particularly call her feminist so much as curious to the point of lacking that common normie human feeling of wincing away at uncomfortable truths.
I've seen a taxometric study that came to the conclusion pedophilia was dimensional. I've also seen a taxometric study that came to the conclusion pedophilia was categorical.
At a wild guess, this could involve different definitions of paedophilia. There are 12-year-olds who are obviously post-pubertal, and if you count those as "paedo" when scoring then you're guaranteed to get a "dimensional" result since the enormous tail of "ordinary" sexual attraction will wash out any categorical signal.
It could just straight-up *be* dimensional, but if it's categorical then dumb studies would still falsely get "dimensional".
There's a reason why we use the same word “love” to talk about parental relations and couple relations. We also use “kiss”, “hug”, etc.
There's probably a large number of genes that are involved in both kinds of relationships, so it's no wonder that some genes might end up being used out of context.
The evolutionary adaptation you're looking for is: “let's encode several features with the same gene because it's easier that way” or “let's repurpose this existing feature for something related because that's easier that reinventing the feature from scratch”.
Given how obvious this is, its quite telling that almost none of the self described "evolutionary psychologists" and such have attempted to meaningfully talk about this fact let alone elaborate on in, especially compared to the various untenable theories attempting to argue that homosexuality is adaptive that have seemed to reach the mainstream.
It reminds me of a since deleted meme that I believe (not 100% sure) Diana Fleischman posted online a quite a while ago making fun of Canadian psychologists James Cantor and Ray Blanchard for trying to get the DSM-V to list hebephilia as a mental disorder.
I wonder if openly confronted any of theses people would be willing to bite the bullet given the current cultural environment and where its likely to go in the near future.
In before the hit piece gets written with "Scott Alexander wrote: "from a biological point of view, homosexuality and pedophilia are probably pretty similar. Both are “sexual targeting errors” [letters removed for clarity]."
On a more serious note, are we thinking about mental illness incorrectly? As far as I understand, physical illnesses are *diagnosed* by their symptoms - mental illness are *defined* by their symptoms. [This is because a mental illness is a malfunction of the mind, and the mind is not an organ, but a function.]
It is perfectly cogent to speak of a broken bone that is not causing symptoms, but it would be meaningless to speak of mental illness that is not causing symptoms.
If so, the criterion for "mental illness" should not be the underlying biological cause, but rather a superset of symptoms.
A reasonable candidate seems to be a way of thinking that causes a person harm. A broader definition might be a way of thinking that causes a person or others harm.
A corollary, is that all discrete mental illnesses would be thought of as clusters of symptoms all of which are gradational, rather than binary. Diagnostic criteria would thus be useful for convenience, rather than as observations in a Bayesian framework used to diagnose a physical condition. [e.g. if the "illness" is a broken bone, one could have a list of diagnostic criteria such that it is sufficiently unlikely that someone would have some number of symptoms without the underlying cause of a broken bone. But in the case of mental illness, there is no objective "state of being diseased;" rather, there are experiences / ways of thinking that can be counterproductive and treated.]
A corollary would be that a given behavior could be a mental illness or not, depending on conditions. Perhaps there could have been a time or place in human history where kleptomania would have been a useful trait [assuming the definition that mental illness = detrimental to the sufferer, rather than to others]. There could also be times and places where it is a maladaptive trait.
This would seemingly go against the whole conceptual underpinning of the DSM as I understand it. But it would also probably go against these DSM alternatives, as I understand them.
I don't think it is useful to conflate biology and misfunction for the same reason - it misses the point, which is the impact on the sufferer [and others.] The distinction between e.g. pedophilia, which from a biological perspective could be looked at as an aberration, since it does not facilitate reproduction, and a compulsion to engage in heterosexual rape - not an aberration since it can lead to reproduction seems rooted in the state of affairs under which humans evolved millions of years ago, which seems unhelpful if the goal is treatment. Today, even ignoring the harm to others, being a rapist probably does not make someone any likelier to pass on their genes (as emergency contraception, etc. are available). And let's say some study would find that actually being a rapist increases the probability of passing on genes by 5%, would that be a reason to not treat it as a problem? If one uses the criterion of hurting others, it surely hurts others, genes be damned. And even using the criterion of causing unwanted effects to the sufferer, being a rapist causes all sorts of negative ramifications to the rapist (e.g. increases the chances of him being stuck in prison).
The reader may question this model on the ground that certain "mental illnesses" correlate to genes. E.g. someone with gene X is much likelier to have mental illness X, or vice verse. This fits with the model of the mental illness being an underlying characteristic, and challenges the mental illnesses merely being conveniently clustered symptoms.
However, I think that neither objection is a problem. As far as the first, it may well be that underlying phenomena affect the frequency of certain symptoms. But I think it is still useful to conceptualize the symptoms as distinct from the cause.
More importantly, the existence of correlation between genes and named mental illnesses does not prove that superiority of the "discrete illness" model rather than the "arbitrary but useful symptom cluster model," since we would expect the same effect with an actual arbitrary but useful symptom cluster model!
E.g. if we were to divide the human population into two groups - the worst 2.2% of runners, and the other 97.8% of people, it seems extremely likely that we would find systemic genetic differences between the two populations. That doesn't mean that "WorstTwoPointTwoPercentofRunnersism" represents a meaningful Platonic "syndrome" rather than an arbitrary, if perhaps useful categorization.
[The same could be said for observed differences in fMRI. They can correlate with diagnoses, even shedding light on them, without legitimizing the model of equating mental illness with physical illness.]
Is my way of looking at mental illness a useful model, and have I correctly understood the existing frameworks?
“ If you call something a mental disorder, insurance has to cover treatment for it, which is good.
But if you call something a mental disorder, people will accuse you of trying to stigmatize them, which is bad.”
I kind of think we should just bite the bullet on the second part and say “stigma is bad mmmkay” and get on with it? The first part is much more important anyway, so it should dominate the “is it a disorder?” question. Lots of weird stuff in the brain - the stuff that creates problems for the sufferer or people around them are disorders.
Thus, homosexuality is not a mental disorder, because it requires no treatment - just go be gay. Pedophilia is a disorder because it often needs to be treated or controlled to prevent the afflicted from victimizing children. Gender dysphoria is a mental disorder, because it requires treatment (social and or physical gender transition). I get the urge to not call transgender people “mentally ill” but having already declared “stigma bad, mmkay”, it feels quite natural to say that a transgender person is “an individual who has undergone a successful intervention for gender dysphoria”.
If a thing in your brain will make you want to kill yourself if you don’t intervene, it seems very silly to not call it a “mental disorder”.
By those criteria, it sounds like there should be a diagnosis called "homosexual dysphoria" or whatever, that would be treated with conversion therapy. Clearly many (I would think most) people with homosexual urges would rather not have them.
At least in modern Western societies I'm pretty sure the vast majority of gay people are fine being gay. Medical case studies of homosexuals from back when the West was homophobic indicate that gays often or usually had a greater preference for society to change than for their desires to change. A few nowadays want to change, sure, but I'd say a fairly small percentage. They should be allowed to pursue conversion therapy , though I'm doubtful of its efficacy.
I'm skeptical of that claim (seems pretty hard to investigate), but, in any case, a vast majority of humans live outside the West, mostly in societies in which homosexuality is considered shameful.
Seems hard to investigate whether people mind being gay in modern tolerant societies? That seems easy, you can just ask....
In less tolerant societies , its harder to tell . But I think it's always been common for people to disagree with society , based on what I've read from people living outside the West, and what doctors said about their gay patients in the 19th century . What percentages , I dunno.
Re “This doesn’t seem especially destigmatizing to me - yes, you’re the wrong gender, but you’re crazy for being unhappy about it?”
Unless you’re willing to suggest that someone can be “in” the wrong body, Gregor Samsa style, how can anyone’s gender be wrong _except_ that the person be unhappy about it?
People’s bodies just...are what they are. If you’re a supermodel, you’re probably much more satisfied with your body than the ugliest person on the planet. Maybe the ugliest personal is even dysphoric about his appearance. But is either one of those people “in” the wrong body?
One is hard pressed even to find evidence that “Trans brains are different though.” Not really.
What could “being trans” be, other than a mental state characterized by emotional distress about one’s body? If one were cool with one’s body, one wouldn’t be trans. One would be gender nonconforming, which is arguably emotionally healthier than being “dysphoric” about the body one has.
In any case, emotional distress that disrupts one’s life is squarely in the domain of the mental health professions. So “being trans” (gender dysphoric) makes sense as part of the DSM.
Similarly, the reason homosexuality is not in the the DSM and pedophilia is, is because homosexuality rarely causes anyone any problems in the 21st century. You’re just gay or lesbian, you go along with your life, no mental health assistance needed.
(There probably is the rare gay or lesbian out there who is dysphoric about their sexual preference and who wishes they were straight. That would be something to explore with a mental health professional too, even if there were no specific DSM diagnosis for it.
But if you’re a pedophile, your desires are against the law, and if you’re a decent human, you realize they’re morally wrong too. No decent person wants relations with a partner who can’t consent, so if that’s what they’re wired to want sexually, I suppose this conflict would cause a lot of emotional distress -- again, the domain of mental health.
Maybe I’m missing something, but the distinctions don’t seem very challenging to make?
Is the person experiencing emotional distress that disrupts their life?
> But if you’re a pedophile, your desires are against the law, and if you’re a decent human, you realize they’re morally wrong too.
That understanding is politically (and especially culturally) conditioned. There have been human societies in which some of what we now think of as pedophilia has been neither illegal nor generally considered immoral.
> No decent person wants relations with a partner who can’t consent
A child, at least a more mentally developed one, is capable of understanding the idea of sex & of expressing their wishes clearly through words. "Can't consent" as applied to children just means that (modern American) society has agreed not to treat children's consent or lack thereof as significant; while a similar view has been common historically, it isn't obviously self-evident or logically necessary.
And in some cultures, it’s acceptable to cut off the heads of your enemies and do a dance.
I get it. It’s cultural.
Still, in our culture people are repelled by sexual contact with children -- really really repelled -- so whether you think the pedophile’s problem is “fair” or not, he’s still got a problem, right (?), because if our culture tells pedophiles they can’t pursue children as sexual partners, they’ll have emotional distress.
Emotional distress is the domain of mental health professionals.
The DSM doesn't actually categorize pedophilia itself as a mental illness. It instead has Pedophilic Disorder, defined as being pedophilia+they either did something illegal or are distressed about it.
I don't think the solution to the general problem of 'people who need treatment cannot get it paid for by the insurance companies unless what they are suffering from is classified as a mental illness contained in this book of mental illnesses' can be solved by playing Whack-a-Mole and rapidly patching the book to contain each new thing that people turn up in the doctor's office with. If somebody shows up in your office with a compulsion to steal Telsa automobiles and crash them into trees, the proper response isn't 'oops, not in the book', surely?
Excuse me. I'm interested in your opinion on a certain matter regarding one of the things you'd said in regards to this article. But I don't really...want to bring it up publicly, and it seems Substack has no private messaging function. I don't suppose there's anywhere I could contact you to get your opinion?
(1) The member suffers from a health disorder as defined in the policy, and
(2) The treatment proposed has demonstrated efficacy in treating that condition.
Number 1 used to bar contraceptives (because the condition being treated was fertility, which is not a disorder) and still bars most cosmetic surgery, even if its a health treatment that would improve your life.
Number 2 means that the catch-all diagnoses don't always demonstrate that there's evidence that the proposed treatment is likely to improve the condition, at least without more data.
Thank you. (2) appears to make difficulties for people who have patients with conditions that are difficult to treat, especially if they want to try something new. Is that a problem in practice?
the "this is needed because else health insurance will not cover necessary interventions" is an horrifying kludge on multiple levels.
and proves too much: if a queer got deluded into believing social conservative memes, then treating their distress (with e.g. drugs known to delete libido) would be as justifiable as transgender treatments for dysphoria.
Completely agree with your take, Scott. There are many inconsistencies and absurdities in DSM. Some of the ones that I ruminate about a lot:
One intuitively plausible definition of illness is that it is something that causes the ill person to suffer, and many of the things labelled psychiatric disorders fit that criterion: Anxiety and depression, for instance certainly do. But then how do we think about disorders that do not cause suffering, or at least would not if the individual was allowed to act as he pleases, suffering neither interference nor censure? Homosexuality, pedophilia and in fact all of the paraphilias fall into this category. In fact, is there any reason to think that indulging one’s kink gives less pleasure than vanilla sex gives non-kinksters? Actually, my impression from talking with a lot of kinksters is that their sexual pleasure is unusually intense. It’s as though they’ve found the sexual motherlode. From that point of view, people with sexual kinks are exceptionally high functioning.
How about drug addiction? Seems like that some addictive drugs have quite a pleasant effect, and that people addicted to them would be content and able to function reasonably well if they were supplied with the gradually increasing doses they need to maintain the drug’s effect. Of course using the drug in ever-increasing doses will probably harm their health — but so do the surgeries and drugs required for changing one’s gender.
Should we think of gender dysphoria as a form of Body Dysmorphic Disorder? According to the DSM, surgery to change the defect that preoccupies people with BDD rarely decreases their distress.
Why aren’t the experiences small children have with doctors thought of as being similar to the experiences of sexually abused childen? I don't think I was any more horrified by doctor visits than the average preschooler, but I still have vivid memories of the horrors my pediatrician perpetrated upon me when I was a small child. I was often forced to be naked except for my underpants and felt vulnerable and embarrassed to be seen undressed. And even the underwear usually came off before the end. He stuck things into my ears and nose and throat that really hurt, and the things in my throat also made me gag and feel like I could not breath. He pushed down hard on sore injuries and poured stuff that burned into raw wounds. He jabbed me with spikes in the butt and pushed a glass rod up my butthole. He looked at my genitals. And all the while he acted friendly and plied me with candy and gave explanations for the humiliations and tortures he visited on me that somehow fooled my parents. I truly believe that I would have been less distressed by visits to the pediatrician if the doctor had, instead of doing medical exams and procedures, fondled my genitals and shown me his penis. Of course I do realise that child sexual abuse often includes other toxic elements besides fondling, etc. I am speaking here just about the effects of an adult imposing his will on a child’s body.
It seems that deciding that homosexuality shouldn't be considered a mental disorder to avoid stigma its just as much a political decision as deciding that it is a mental disorder because of stigma. I suspect that some people just assume that an unbiased, apolitical process will just end up confirming their own political commitments because they believe that their own political commitments are unbiased.
" It’s just the claims to be able to avoid political bias in what is vs. isn’t a disorder that I find compelling."
... compelling? Or problematic?
Also, maybe the problem is that 'disorder' has a non-technical meaning. If we just called gender dysphoria a 'potential subject of treatment' or used some clunky term that didn't have a popular meaning and was awkward enough to not seep immediately into the popular lexicon then maybe that would buy us some time.
>We may want to categorize being addicted to meth differently from being addicted to Twitter, even if the neurobiology behind both addictions turns out to be similar, just because meth addicts have the bad luck to be addicted to something that’s really bad for them and for society.
I'm not sure whether the phrasing of this was meant to be subtly darkly humorous or not, but I can't help reading it that way.
I took it as a joke. Also, I wouldn't sleep on a future version of the DSM including compulsive use of social media associated with a list of problems this causes as a diagnostic condition. There are people who can't maintain their lives due to compulsive use.
Gaming disorder made it to ICD-11. Social media use disorder or Excessive Internet use disorder might be on its heels.
What if I want a purely biological, apolitical definition of mental disorders and I'm willing to bite the bullet of calling homosexuality a mental disorder?
Let's assume I don't really care if people are mad at me, I just want to have an accurate and consistent model of the world.
Au contraire: feeling a compulsive need for others to like and admire you is a mental disorder; refusing to interpret what people say except in the most literal and least contextually informed way seems to be the symptom of a mental disorder; having opinions that some others disagree with and not being bothered about that is not.
See my other comment. "A behaviour of a person inducing distress or harm to themselves or others" is the best for intra-personal problems, and I think works for inter-person problems very well (for most cases).
The boundaries are what constitutes as acceptable or inacceptable "distress" to others, and that's impossible to be looked at apolitically - I'm looking at you, "I'm offended for the minority, so you need to stop!" heckler at a comedy show!
What would a purely biological, apolitical definition of mental disorders that classifies homosexuality but not heterosexually as a mental disorder look like?
How do you define “mental disorder” in a non-political way that has accuracy conditions? I could define a “mental disorder” as a positive integer divisible only by itself and 1, and I get a nice precise apolitical definition (it’s either a prime number or 1) but it’s not a helpful definition for what I want to do with the concept. But lots of what we want to do with the concept of “mental disorder” is inherently political. So it’s going to be a partially political concept.
Seems like it is a lot easier just to bite the bullet and say that, yes, homosexuality is a mental disorder, that DSM declassified for political reason. I mean, it is what the history books tell us happened, and homosexuality has strong loadings on mental illness symptoms, so it is rather obvious once you put on the evolutionary psychiatry glasses.
Another curiosity here is that the opposite of pedophilia, gerontophilia, is not in the DSM, despite also being a targeting error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerontophilia In fact, it might be a bigger error when men are doing it, as old women are never fertile and cannot become so, while girls might be, and at least will be at some later point.
Any male who doesnt encourage other males to be homosexual to reduce competition for females is mentally disordered. Also any male who spends his time complaining about the DSM not pathologizing sexual preferences he doesnt like instead of trying to impregnate any and all women he can.
Were a man's taste even so far corrupted as to make him prefer the embraces of a person of his own sex to those of a female, a connection of that preposterous kind would therefore be far enough from answering to him the purposes of a marriage. A connection with a woman may by accident be followed with disgust, but a connection of the other kind, a man must know, will for certain come in time to be followed by disgust. All the documents we have from the antients relative to this matter, and we have a great abundance, agree in this, that it is only for a very few years of his life that a male continues an object of desire even to those in whom the infection of this taste is at the strongest. The very name it went by among the Greeks may stand instead of all other proofs, of which the works of Lucian and Martial alone will furnish any abundance that can be required. Among the Greeks it was called Paederastia, the love of boys, not Andrerastia, the love of men. Among the Romans the act was called Paedicare because the object of it was a boy. There was a particular name for those who had past the short period beyond which no man hoped to be an object of desire to his own sex. They were called exoleti. No male therefore who was passed this short period of life could expect to find in this way any reciprocity of affection; he must be as odious to the boy from the beginning as in a short time the boy would be to him. The objects of this kind of sensuality would therefore come only in the place of common prostitutes; they could never even to a person of this depraved taste answer the purposes of a virtuous woman.
A flaw in your argument. Gay men may have feminized brains and thus score higher in trait neuroticism, like women. But that isn't evidence of any significant genetic loading for mental illness, it could be loading for feminized brain structure. To the extent you call homosexuality a mental illness (because it may be more common for gay men to be anxious or depressed) it requires one to call being female a mental illness. It can be considered a darwinian disease as Cochran calls it, but you need to have a better reason why.
>>(a common claim is that the DSM says transgender itself is not a mental disorder, but the distress it produces is. This doesn’t seem especially destigmatizing to me<<
It seems straightforward to me, to understand this as saying that biased public reactions to trans people pruduces stress which is unhealthy.
Is being black a mental disorder (or, I guess, a skin disorder) if you live in a racist area? It sounds like biased reactions to your being black would produce stress, which is unhealthy. Would it be better to call it Racism Sadness Disorder, where the disorder is that you are stressed because of racism?
I think you *could* frame it that way, but it would be very unproductive and stigmatizing. But for some reason with transgender everyone agrees this is the nonstigmatizing way to do things.
If people can be diagnosed with dysfunctions (worse than average) that cause incompatibility with their local society, they should also be diagnosed with eufunctions (better than average) that cause incompatibility with their local society. Try Racism Sadness Meliorder, if we're in the mood to use Latin roots in new ways?
If a black person is stressed due to racism and sees a therapist, they might be diagnosed with depression or anxiety. That's plenty for insurance to cover a therapist and some SSRIs. Transgender people need specific treatments such as hormones, which I'm guessing is why they need a specific diagnosis. Otherwise stressed trans people could be treated just like any other stressed person.
It was immediately (and rightly) mocked by folks opposed to the institution of slavery, but taken seriously enough by their political opponents to make it into reference books, even as late as the third edition of Thomas Lathrop Stedman's Practical Medical Dictionary in 1914.
Was Stedman a political opponent of folks opposed to the institution of slavery? Because otherwise I don't think his inclusion of it (with even his first edition being published well after the abolition of slavery) suffices to show that.
Samuel A. Cartwright, who invented the term, certainly was pro-slavery, but I don't know much of anything about Stedman, just got that reference from the wikipedia article. My point was that such textual persistence seems inconsistent with it having been "never taken seriously."
There is race-based traumatic stress, which is kinda close to what you're somewhat derisively calling "racism sadness disorder."
I think we could imagine a theoretical condition in which a person displays a symptom pattern specific to the experience psychological distress caused by racist treatment such that you name it its own thing with its own set of best practices for treatment. In the real world, I'm not entirely sure that would be justified, but insofar as you're proposing this hypothetically, sure, why not? It doesn't imply that the disorder is the person's fault anymore than PTSD subsequent to sexual assault should stigmatize the person with the condition.
How about the other direction--I assume people come to therapists from time to time because, despite their best effort, they can't help just fearing/disliking/being upset by blacks. It's hard to see that as a disorder, exactly, but you can see why people would want to find a way to stop feeling that way.
Outside of psychiatry, there are things covered by medical insurance that do not constitute a disorder. Anything that has to do with birth control or childbirth comes to mind.
Perhaps there should be a way to decouple "should be covered by insurance" from "constitutes a mental disorder"?
(Oh, and nothing will ever prevent people who believe they get to tell everyone what to think from quoting you out of context. Anyone who is happy to lie to get their point across will also think it's OK to misquote.)
Within psychiatry and clinical psychology it's not uncommon for people to have off-book treatment needs that get a catch-all diagnosis like "adjustment disorder" for insurance purposes. I think this is an open enough secret to not be a secret.
Anything that you're very upset about (or can convincingly pretend to be sufficiently upset about) can be treated as an "anxiety" or "distress" or similar.
I assume the problem is, then, that not every doctor does this for everything their patients need treated. Perhaps there should officially be some catch-all psychiatric diagnoses for things that need treatment but for whatever reasons aren't in the classification.
That exists, but insurance is tricky and it's safer to pick something that'll stick, but isn't wildly inaccurate. That's why a vague diagnosis like adjustment disorder can provide cover for a lot of off-book issues.
"If you don't want people to take your stuff out of context, then stop using shit examples to make a contestable claims."
Congratulations, you have just demonstrated why Scott needed to put Ns up like Christmas ornaments around the words.
"How very dare you trample on my toes about something I think is peachy!" is what your comment sounds like to me. He's not saying "gayness bad", he's saying "if you're looking for biological bases only, these two things are not that distinct in which has and which hasn't one".
And you demonstrate precisely the politicised angle which drives these decisions and why the pure biological factors only approach is not going to fly.
In a world where there are methods to avoid women getting pregnant, pedophilia could have enormous fitness advantages, because it's possible to have children specifically for the purpose of abusing them.
"Pedophillia has no evolutionary fitness advantage"
How do you know? Why are men of all ages attracted to a narrow band of female age range, while women can be attracted to an older age range? The evopsych story there is fertility versus proven provider.
The younger the girl is when the man has sex with her, the likelier to be at the peak of fertility, he can be sure that the children are his as he is the most likely to be her first/main sexual partner, and the longer span of reproductive years she will have. That this gets knocked about so that some paedophiles are attracted to children too young to be past puberty doesn't matter, if there are hebephiles who like girls of twelve upwards, then there's a lot of reproductive advantage there.
Men who like young boys (ephebophiles) are no worse off for evolutionary fitness advantage, in re: the gay uncle theory, than the gay uncle who likes them a bit older. And the classical instances of gay uncles are indeed men who like them young, not men in same-age steady relationships. Paederasty has been the model of male same-sex relationships, not thirty or forty year old men living in quasi-wedded bliss. Then you go on to get married and have kids as your duty to society, even if you prefer fucking twinks. So long as you do the social role of propagating the family, you can sleep with boys and have that be tolerated or accepted.
>Pedophillia has no evolutionary fitness advantage
>How do you know?
What matters is the amount of offspring a female can give a man over the long-term not her current fertility. A 30yo woman is over half way through her reproductive lifspan while an 8yo girl has all of her fertile years ahead of her. Even though an ancestral man would have to wait some years for his 8yo wife to reach reproductive age he could still potentially get double the amount of offspring out of her than a 30yo wife.
It would have made more biological sense for ancestral men to chase after 8yo girls than 30yo women and we see this happening in modern primitive foragers. In a lot of these primitive societies it's normal for men to marry little girls before puberty and these little virgin girls are more sought after and highly prized than the adult women who have already had children.
A certain amount of pedophilic attraction does make evolutionary sense for men. But don't expect evolutionary psychologists and psychiatrists to be objective about this. Attraction to minors is just about the biggest taboo in the West at the moment and the official position is that it must be completely abnormal and can't possibily be evolutionarily adaptive!
Also, being smaller and weaker than the man is one of the markers of femaleness -- it's common, though obviously not present in every male -female pairing. Seems to me that responsiveness to smallness and weakness may be some of what drives pedophilia in males. As a woman, I have no trouble understanding feeling tempted to have a sexual relationship that would do harm to someone. But even if you surgically removed my entire conscience I don't think I'd want to have sex with children. They're just not sexy to me. They too small, and just in the wrong category -- they way, say, parakeets are.
Generally speking though, it seems like pedophiles are explicitly attracted only to pre-pubescent girls (true pedophilkes here) It's not, "attracted to girls when they are pre pubescent nd then continue to be sexually attracted to them as they age".
My guess would be it is mre that sexual imprinting is very flexible, and the one thing we know to be a cause for pedophilia is to be sexually molested pre-pubescently.
Yes, and we don't know how big a part being molested as a child plays in someone's becoming a pedophile. It's very hard to get data, because a LOT of people are sexually abused as kids and never tell anyone, including earnest researchers. So if we find that say 20% of pedophiles were sexually abused as kids, we don't really know whether that percent is higher than baseline. Also at least one study found that pedophiles frequently lie about being as abused as kids, in hopes of being seen more kindly. So I think it's entirely possible that sexual attraction to children comes into being the same way all the other kinks do. It's just a very unfortunate kink to have, because you can't enact it without harming a child, and the whole world hates you.
And I don't think we really understand much about where kinks come from. My impression from reading about kinks and talking to kinksters is that it's mostly not imprinting. Adults into BDSM have vivid memories of BDSM-like experiences they had -- spankings they got or witnessed, movie scenes where somebody was tied up, etc -- but what they say about the events isn't that the event caused them to develop an interest in BDSM They say that it was the first time they became aware that BDSM-type interactions were fascinating and thrilling to them.
I'm sorry, can't the pedophile help his kin as much as the gay man? (Do I need to say I think practicing pedophilia is a crime? )
No one said the pedophile was acting out his urges, let alone on his own kin... Anyway how are any of my childless brothers different from each other, regardless of their sexual leanings?
Theyre not really different. None of them have their genes passed on, so it's largely irrelevant in this sense whether they're gay or not.
Hmm well almost, they all have (on average) the same number of genes in my kids ~ 1/4.
Total genetic similarility is irrelevant. We're talking about whether a particular trait gets passed on by means of the genes that code for it being replicated. If a gene codes for a trait that reduces that's gene's replication (i.e. not having kids due to being gay), then it will be selected against.
If any of your siblings lack the gene that makes them (occasionally) infertile, their non-infertility genes will be selected for and come to dominate the following generations.
One could also argue that the paedophile has a *greater* incentive than the gay uncle for his siblings to have lots of children and to help those children thrive. Maybe Uncle Virtuous MAP doesn't act on his impulses, but he's 'very good with children' and is always around to babysit and help out, whereas Uncle Gay is spending all his resources on attracting boy toys and splurging on roosters and hoops to impress them:
https://www.worldhistory.org/image/13546/ganymede-playing-with-a-hoop--rooster/
The problem is that there are so many 'just-so' stories around evolutionary psychology that we don't know that the gay uncle/gay aunt theory is anything close to reality. In some cultures the mother's brother is very important in the family, but that doesn't mean that the uncle is himself gay.
"trying to solve the riddle of eusociality"
Trying is the word, indeed. How many samples of real-world Gay Uncles do we have, where they invest time and money into their siblings' children?
If gay men today want kids, they can (if they can afford it) go the IVF and surrogacy route. So there is no bar (except money) to having their own biological offspring and investing in them, not in the nieces/nephews.
Yes, there's the traditional trope of the family dancing attendance on a rich, childless, elderly relative in hopes of getting favourable treatment in the will, but Rich Bachelor Uncle or Spinster Aunt need not be gay. They could as well be widow or widower, or their own kids died young.
The basic argument I'm seeing in the comments is that "homosexuality must have some evolutionary advantage or why would it persist?" and the Gay Uncle theory is an attempt to fit a suit of clothes for evolutionary advantage.
Well, by the same token, paedophilia must have some evolutionary advantage, or why would it persist? But homosexuality good, paedophilia bad, is the reaction there. *That* is why there can't be a pure objective science-based psychology manual, no matter what the hopes and wishes are.
This is a confused view of evolution. Reproductive fitness is the limit of the drunkards' walk. Things can happen that happen (in an evolutionary setting of the hunte gatherers) rarely enough that they dont negatively impac fitness. Maybe in post agriclutre society with endocrine disurptoes they happen more freqiently.
"Because of its genetic basis, there is strong evidence to imply that it is positively selected for,"
But the "genetic basis" for homosexuality is very weak! Heritability estimates are lower than most behavioral traits. The classic old ironyis that views on gay marriage are literally more heritable than being gay itself is!
I also made the point that I disagree with Scott that homosexuality is simply a case of faulty sexual imprinting with no evolutionary benefit.
But your last sentence is vile.
If you make contestable claims then you have no right to complain when bad faith journalists deliberately smear you.
That's rubbish. Every claim that anyone makes is contestable. Decent people just say "I disagree, and this is why.."
I also see no evolutionary advantage to paedophilia - but we could both be wrong about this. We don't know; this claim is contestable too.
Scott is a lot more respected than WatchMeDoMakeupOnTikTok lady number 12055, so people will take his comparison more seriously than a tiktok trend, and I think it would be wise to consider the effects of expanding a harmful platform carefully.
Doxxing is distinctly awful &, whaddya know, can threaten the safety of the person doxxed and individuals around them including minors. It's weird that no one takes it seriously as an issue. Meanwhile, other topics about threatening the safety of minors cause people to absolutely lose their marbles. Strange.
Even more vile.
'You are not allowed to express that idea because I imagine that "literally Nazis" agree with it'
- is a line that has been used by the far left to shut down any questioning of the ideology they are trying to impose on the rest of us.
It has got so bad that to even suggest that it might be a bad idea to put rapists in female jails is "dangerous speech" and "hate speech". No thanks.
>(Especially the blindness to the fluidity of sexuality, how many "gay" men have had children? Turns out you can hit both ways!)
Homosexuals are not bisexuals. I have never felt attraction to a woman. I probably never will. Lord knows I spent years trying to turn myself straight in my teens and early 20s, drenching myself in self-loathing in the process, before finally ripping the bandaid off and learning to just accept myself for what I am.
Yes, some strictly homosexual men marry women and have children within those relationships, but this is largely due to societal factors that are dying out in WEIRD societies. Trust me, there are no strictly homosexual men "hitting both ways".
I find the idea that everyone is bisexual deep down to be a common error that's obviously false. I see it a lot from bisexuals, unsurprisingly, but I also see it a lot from a certain type of politically liberal heterosexual.
Regarding the whole " everyone is bisexual deep down" argument...here's what I think. I think sexuality is a spectrum. Many people are on either end of the spectrum (straight/gay), while a select few are in the middle (bisexual). However, I actually think that a lot of people are mostly straight/gay, but not exactly. Like...I think that many straight men can recognize when they see another guy who's hot, even if they would never fuck them.
So...while I don't think that everyone is bisexual, I do think that a...moderately high percentage of people might not be perfectly straight or gay. But hey! That's just my guess, I could be completely wrong.
> and there have been many investigations into the ways that gay or lesbian aunts and uncles may help overall biological fitness of families within indigenious cultures.
But having a 'make gay babies gene' wouldn't be passed on, even if your siblings kids were more likely to survive. Their kids success is irrelevant, because those kids aren't the ones carrying the 'have gay babies' gene, so it can't be selected for! Even if it benefits the group overall, on the individual level, whoever has the most fertile offspring determine the genetic landscape of that population, and having non-gay kids (and the genes for this) makes having more fertile offspring much more likely.
>This also meshes well with the observation that humans are one of the few species that survive past menopause - there is an evolved preference for supporting the children of those in your immediate family. Their reproductive success is reproductive success for your genes as well!
This is completely different. Your kids have your genes, and being monopausal on net balance is likely to increase the rate YOUR genes propagate, hence your genes for eventually having menopause are passed on!
If your helping other people's kids, even those related to, it's not your genes being passed on, and if we're talking about a trait that makes you different than your family members (i.e. 'having gay babies' gene), then the gene for this trait won't be passed on, because them having fertile offspring is precisely because they lack this gene.
It doesn't matter if it benefits the group, no individual is evolutionarily incentivized to have infertile kids, because the genes cannot be passed on. And it doesn't even matter if you're strongly genetically related to your siblings. If you're the one with the gay babies gene and they're not, your gay babies gene doesn't get passed on. Even if a majority of your genes are tied up in that of your group, the specific trait of having gay babies cannot be passed on in this way.
>and evolutionarily ignorant!
This is a dumb thing to say.
You're the one positing a magical form of evolution where genes that code for not having your genes propagate are somehow being propagated more than the genes which don't code for this. This is magical thinking.
I'm not saying I agree with the axioms before the math, but redo your math friend. If a family has five kids, with one that doesn't reproduce and four that do, and each of the four kids shares a random 50% of their genes with the one that doesn't, that's a pretty decent chance that the four kids will pass on the genes the other has.
The ones that don't have gay babies genes are the ones that will pass on their non-gay-baby genes
It doesn't matter if you share a lot of genes with them. If they don't specifically have the gay baby gene, the gayness-as-reproduction-strategy- cannot possibly be passed on. Infertility CANNOT BE SELECTED FOR regardless of how much it benefits the group, because by definition the genes specifically for that mating strategy cannot propagate, and people without infertility genes, even if they share most of your other genes, will domiante future generations
> If your helping other people's kids, even those related to, it's not your genes being passed on
People who are related to you by blood (likely) share genes with you. This is what matters for evolutionary pressures. The percentage of shared genes is (likely) lower than with your own children but this is just difference in degree.
but humans evolved in groups. if one group survives because of its complex dynamics when others peroish, those duynamics are passed on- its an overlooked harder to measure aspect of evolution in social species where individuals cant survive withot the group.
Maybe you meant to reply to Goldman Sachs Occultist rather than me?
Those dynamics cannot possibly be passed on. Genes are what gets passed on, and if the genes giving rise to this dynamic (having gay babies) have no vehicle by which they can be passed on, the dynamic dies after one generation.
It doesn't matter if it benefits the whole group. Evolution acts on individuals because individuals are the vehicles of genes. Any individual in a group who has more fertile offspring than the rest of the group will dominate future generations, and individuals without gay baby genes will be more fertile. Infertility cannot, cannot, cannot be selected for. Sharing 50% of your genes without your siblings isn't enough. If the people whose genes make up subsequent generations aren't the ones having infertile kids (which they necessarily won't be), having infertile kids is not a trait that gets selected for.
All kinds of things *could* benefit groups but that do not emerge as stable reproductive strategies because they are genetically self-stultifying. It may benefit the group to not have kids, but people with genes to have more kids are the ones whose genes get passed on, therefore the strategy has to die.
Again though, you're not thinking about how groups as a whole could become extinct losing out to other groups who have evolved more useful dynamics.
In that case, whatever fluctuations of evolution in the group arent reproduced, whereas groups where fluctuations that resulted in group with better dynamics relative to the local environment do go on.
Failed groups dont show up in the fossil record.
Its kind of like how if one evolves a culture that is outcompeted by other cultures , not only the culture dies off at the small group level but the evolution of members of said group which result in the culture also dies off.
At any rate, my argument if for group evolution, not that this is the cause of homosexuality specifically. Things can happen that arent beneficial in an evolutionary sense as long as they happen rarely enough that it doesnt hurt the fitness of genes. It is likely that homosexuality is a combination of genetic susceptibility and hormone exposure.
if such cases were rare enough, but the genes that made one prone had potential benefits for some other reason, in large scale socities where there was more exposure to conditions that created homosexuality of transgender or whatever you would see more manifestation.
Its well known that genetic diseases where the genes other different circumstances of different configurations can proliferate and last even though they are obviously non adaptive.
It doesn't matter how related you are in general. The specific genes for 'infertility' need to be passed down, otherwise the strategy has no way to propogate
if any of your siblings/cousin etc don't have genes for gay babies, their non-gay-baby genes will dominate future generations
But this strategy does (at least potentially) have a way to propagate. If there is some gene/allene that raises the probability of homosexuality in men and then those gay men would help their relatives, some of whom might be carrying the same gene, more than otherwise, then that may mean that gene is evolutionarily favored.
Were you perhaps thinking that the claim was that there would be a dominant allene that would cause homosexuality with 100% probability? I don't think the hypothesis was that extreme (and even in that case it likely wouldn't cause homosexuality in both sexes). Of course, I don't know if there's any evidence for this kind of hypothesis but at least it's not an illogical proposition.
but in a situation where groups are competing, groups with more succesful dynamics woould outcompete those with less successful dyanmics, and that would be very hard to calculate since you cant look at the range of ehat group dynamics allowed one group to surviuve while another perished.
First of all, I already explained why having gay kids doesn't help the group during times of hardship, because any resource benefit is delayed a full generation. And if gay people using resources is fine because they help raise their siblings kids, then why does it suddenly stop being fine a full generation later? Not only does it change from one generation to the next, it changes at a point even further removed from the initial stress that 'necessitated' having infertile offsrping!
Second, it doesn't matter how successful a group is. For a mating strategy to propogate, the genes for that trait specifically need to be passed on.
It doesn't matter if having infertile children benefits the group. Genes for infertile children will necessarily be selected against, which means genes for infertile children cannot be passed on. Even if your infertile children benefit the group, other members of the group who don't have the genes for infertile children are the ones will pass on their non-infertility genes, and 'having fertile children' genes will be the only thing inherited by future generations (other than through mutation).
For a trait to be selected for, the genes that code for that trait specifically need to be selected for.
Benefitting the group does NOT allow infertility genes to be passed on. There is literally no possible way that infertility can be selected for. Your infertility genes die out and the most fertile of your group will have their genes dominate future generations, meaning infertility as mating strategy MUST die out.
See? This is the entire attitude and argument in a nutshell. "Comparing homosexuality and paedophilia? But that is so wrong, everyone knows gayness is great and natural and beautiful and kiddly-fiddling is wrong and bad and terrible!"
Biology doesn't care. If a twist of the genes one way gets a result, it'll twist genes into all kinds of shapes. And some of those shapes have more in common than we might be comfortable with. Being exclusively gay so you never have any kind of sex with the opposite sex means no reproduction. Being exclusively paedophilic so that you never have any kind of sex with adult members means no reproduction (until we get into the area of 27 year old men fucking 9 year old girls and knocking them up, which is wrong and bad and terrible but evolution does not care because baby).
Biology does not have a moral judgement about good or bad, ethical or unethical, moral or immoral. Biology judges on "life? more life? continuing life?"
The political angles around "we used to think gay bad but now we think gay good" have nothing to do with biology.
Have you read "the goodness paradox", I think you'd like it. Humans domesticated themselves, and one of the traits that goes along with domestication (less aggressive behavior.) is increased sex... I mean who doesn't remember the dog trying to hump every human leg it saw. (I guess most of our dogs are 'fixed' these days?)
No, I haven't and on your recommendation (I think this is the third?) I don't want to. Your obsession with humping sounds like you need a dose of bromides, or a course of psychotherapy. Obsession is a sign of mental problems.
Oh sorry, please excuse me I didn't mean to offend. The book is not about sex, it's about violence, and this idea that humans self domesticated themselves to reduce reactive violence, but still have (perhaps increased?) proactive violence.
The inquiry for truth is valuable even if victim-cosplayers and special pleaders might complain about it.
Our society's current moral framework excessively valorizes victimhood. A saner society would devalue or ignore it. Instead we celebrate it.
I am an unapologetic gay man. But I don't care about PC and I find this sort of thing tiresome.
It'd MAYBE be one thing if this were being blared into the front page of Big Newspaper circa 1985. But it's not. This is a community of mature adults, I'd like to think. No one reading ACX is going to go on a gay panic rage fueled crime spree.
Let people explore weighty ideas!
I think it's abhorrent and deeply unethical for a doctor or ethicist to impose their view on how a person should be over that person's own judgement. If someone wants to change their sexuality or anything else about themselves, they should obviously be free to attempt that because it's nobody else's business.
You still need some criteria for what mental states qualify as a problem. For instance, right now whether your behavior impacts your ability to maintain a job is a factor we'll consider in whether your mental status constitutes having a mental disorder. It's part of your overall global functioning. If you're just independently wealthy with people hired to manage your wealth, consider yourself lucky.
My area involves people with cognitive disabilities. Because of this, I'm especially sensitive to how surrounding economic conditions are an important variable in what it means to be able to maintain employment given how you think and behave. Macroeconomic conditions, employer attitudes, government regulations, etc. all matter a lot.
There's no brain scan you're ever going to be able to give someone that will tell you someone has a disorder that makes them have difficulty maintaining gainful employment separate from the prevailing economic conditions and culture. Disqualifying traits for employers aren't objective, for example. They're dependent on social context.
How would involuntarily institutionalizing someone who has depression help, exactly?
If your point is that mental disorders are to be treated as a social problem first and suggest involuntary treatment as a go to, then yes, you are disregarding the mentally ill person as a person. There is no way around that.
No - treating mental health primarily as a social problem when considering an individual and treating it primarily to make others feel better around them is disregarding them as an individual.
Well, you can give them meds and prevent them from killing themselves. You can structure their day, ensure that they get enough sleep, get good nutrition, get some sunlight, do some productive work (weeding a garden, building something). There are people who argue not implausibly that some fraction of at least modest depression can be effectively treated by behavior modification. But if the patient lacks sufficient clarity of purpose and motivation -- which is typically the case in depression -- then inducing therapeutic behavior modification by external force might be the kindest and fastest approach in the end.
The same argument is made in the case of alcohol and drug abuse, hence the common preference in the judicial system for coercing offenders with a drug and alcohol problem into inpatient treatment by offering them jail as the only alternative.
I know several people who avoid seeking help, despite being depressed, sometimes suicidally so, because they fear involuntary commitment. Necessarily, if someone like this goes on to kill themselves, they'll be recorded as a suicide that didn't seek help in the system. This isn't necessarily saying involuntary institutionalization is a bad thing in every instance, but if it prevents people who want care from getting care because they fear this mortifying ordeal, it needs to either not happen or be so closely controlled so as to not substantively prevent people from getting help.
I was struggling to write a response to your drugs and alcohol comment but cannot come up with the necessary evidentiary backing to respond - it's a complicated thing. For alcohol specifically, the people being threatened with jail or some form of rehab (12 steps options being cheap) have probably committed some alcohol related crime, like drunk driving. If rehab is the acceptable alternative, why is jail on the table? Not trying to pretend society is a coherent or cohesive thing, but why is "We can either rehabilitate you or punish you" even a choice? If someone's behavior is so dangerous that they find themselves in this situation, shouldn't they go to a jail that aims to rehabilitate? Either/or is a bad solution.
Sure, either choice is going to have collateral damage. That's the nature of the real world. The question is are more people saved by forceful intervention or by avoiding it? I don't have a good answer to that question, but I'm a priori doubtful that either extreme is an optimal solution.
I will say two events tended to push me towards the side of intervention, though. The first is when I read a long story in the Atlantic, I think, many years ago, which reported on a detailed study someone had done of people who had attempted suicide from the Golden Gate bridge. (This was in the context of the endless debate at the time about installing a suicide barrier, the usual objection being "it won't do anything, because if people can't kill themselves from the bridge they'll just do it some other way.") Astonishingly (to me), it turned out almost none of the people who jumped and survived ever even attempted suicide again. A significant number of them took their survival as the affirming miracle that it was, and turned their lives around. One quote from a survivor really stuck with me: "I realized in the moment that I jumped that everything I had thought was insoluble and unbearable in my life could be solved -- except for the fact of my having just jumped." The conclusion of the report was that at least in this particular subset of people, preventing them from killing themselves *on that attempt* could very likely prevent them from doing it at all -- it was a momentary impulse, and if thwarted by force, would *not* necessarily cause them to just find other means. (This is also, I believe, the logic by which people who urge gun control believe fewer guns, even legal guns, would cut down on gun suicides, which is most of them, because if people don't have a gun at hand, they will not, contrary to the opposive argument, just go out and buy a rope.)
The second thing is that I had a good friend some years ago who actually did this thing, he jumped from the Bridge. (He was not one of the rare survivors.) It has definitely occured to me that had he been prevented *on that day* from carrying out his impulse, he might ultimately have been saved. He was just the kind of person who would get carried away by an impulse, but, if prevented from acting on it, reconsider and be more reasonable. It happened in many small things, and then one day, it happend in the biggest thing of all. When people say to me "well, we should just respect his agency, it was his choice to make, et cetera" I tend to hostility. He liked his life, mostly. He was usually happy, but not always, and sometimes dreadfully unhappy. He had good friends, he could hold down a job, and he had a future.
But he also had a disease inside his head that made him sometimes do stupid shit, like go off his meds, not tell anyone, and sit around in a dark apartment until some demon told him to go end it. Abandoning him to that demon seems inhuman to me. I believe in the famous Donne quote[1], we *are* our brothers' keeper, and we let people like my friend down, all the time.
I don't even necessarily believe it's because we venerate free choice so high, as we often say. I think in many more cases the real reason is squalid and unworthy: it's because the mentally ill can be incredibly exhausting, and we just secretly want to wash our hands of them.
Yes, people in the justice system who are compelled into rehab necessary have some punishment hanging over their heads, usually for some minor crime -- petty theft, assault and/or battery, robbery. It's a choice because (1) the system is overwhelmed with cases, and they try to clear their caselog with deals if they possibly can, and if it's clear a drug or alcohol problem is underlying, they think it's worthwhile to try to kill two birds with one stone: put the offender in what amounts to a closely-monitored parole setting *and* try to ensure he doesn't come back, and (2) most judges are actually fairly human people who are trying to help the miserable wretch in front of them straighten out his life. You probably have to be a first-time offender, without a record -- certainly not violent -- and it helps to be young, so the court quails before screwing up your life for a very long time with a criminal record and jail time.
I don't want to romanticize it, however. There is also substantial corruption with the system, and sometimes the treatment programs are abusive and exist just to bleed insurance companies for cash, and sometimes the connection between the court and the program is corrupt. It's a human system, and necessarily imperfect, with dark corners and squalor.
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[1] https://www.bartleby.com/73/134.html
I don't have anything substantial to add, but I would like to thank you for taking the time to write this heartfelt and well-thought-out comment.
I am sorry that this happened to your friend.
I wrote my comment with the understanding that suicide is often impulsive - when we remove certain convenient methods of suicide, the rate drops and doesn't recover. I believe one of these was a kind of coal fired stove, but it's been years since I read the article and I think I'd have trouble finding it now, so forgive the lack of source. I think there's kind of an error in assuming that giving caregivers the ability to involuntarily institutionalize others they suspect (for what might be very good reasons) of being about to attempt suicide - plenty of people have some level of suicidal ideation constantly for months or years, but picking out the specific moment the impulse strikes me as difficult, if not borderline impossible for a caregiver. I think a preferable solution would be to remove more convenient methods of suicide as a society - netting under bridges and tall, hard to climb fences around rooftops - similar to what you hint at with guns (I certainly don't want to turn this into a gun control debate, this is thorny enough without introducing something else highly contentious).
Shortly - we should not abandon people suffering from depression and suicidal ideation to their demons, but we shouldn't inadvertently aid their demons in attempting to help in a way that causes unnecessary harm. Unfortunately, I think we're also rapidly approaching a point in this debate where even the most measured solutions will have casualties - some from what I fear, which is the folk who cannot seek help from fear of internment, and some from the other direction, folk who could use internment to hold through the worst impulse but are not interned, and then are no longer here.
I think one reason to support free choice as much as possible, even with depression and suicide, is to recognize that we value other human beings as human beings, not just creatures we need to prevent from doing bad things to themselves because otherwise we would feel bad. Other people matter not just because we care about them, but because they have inherent value as individuals with agency, and carrying the threat of internment in anything but the most severe and immediate cases is diminishing them as people. It's easy to think "Oh, I don't matter as a person who makes decisions, just someone who needs to stay alive so that others won't be sad."
As for drug and alcohol addiction - I don't think I have much to add to your points. I would prefer these be treated as social and health problems rather than legal problems, but I would also prefer that petty crimes of other sorts be treated the same way. I'm sorry for not giving this the detail I gave the other topic - there's too much to get out and it's a big enough topic all on its own.
I'm not sure that I disagree, and if so by how much, but I do want to observe that you are talking coercion in either case. Either you coerce people who are mentally healthy -- e.g. by constraining the tools they can own and use, like guns, or by ruining the view from the Bridge, or compelling people to fork over more in taxes to construct suicide barriers -- or you coerce people who are mentally unhealthy. There's no getting around the fact that there is no social solution at all (short of exhortation and prayer) that doesn't involve constraining *somebody*. I don't think it's a sufficient argument that certain kinds of constraint constrain people in ways that aren't readily legible, or that if we spread the burden out among a million people it's a priori better than if it's borne by a few on the other side. These approaches are evasions of responsibility, and do not face the problem squarely.
As I said, I don't have a good answer. I study physical law, because that is amenable to mathematical certainty. This kind of stuff is not, and there's a good reason I did not aspire to a career in it. I'm just arguing for unflinching clarity in recognizing the issues at stake, and the costs in either direction.
I think we can also theorize that survival and prosperity of a group or population MAY be enhanced by a % of homosexuality and evolution of a group could favor that.
You can theorize all sorts of dumb things. The math of genetic group selection doesn't work out, because of variance within groups vs variance between groups (cultural group selection is a different story).
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/group-selection-and-homosexuality/
> And who's to say that there aren't child-rearing and social hierarchy benefits to having population subsets (including grannies) who are not competing for offspring?
Homosexuals are not notable for devoting greater effort for the raising of children. Grannies are grandmothers, as in they have already reproduced and are now devoting their energies for raising the fitness of their existing descendants rather than creating more.
Who said I'm just talking about post-industrial societies? Where is there any evidence in any society of males devoting themselves to child-rearing rather than mating? There are societies in sub-Saharan Africa where a mother will receive more help from her brother than her husband when it comes to raising a child... because in those societies men take many wives to benefit from their labor without expecting sexual fidelity, and thus the maternal uncle can be more confident he's actually related. But those uncles still don't prioritize helping raise their sister's children over pursuing mating opportunities for themselves.
Male chimpanzees don't devote much effort to the raising of children. Henrich's "The Secret of Our Success"* discusses the novel development of fatherhood in one of its chapters.
* Which I reviewed here: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2022/08/08/the-secret-of-our-success/
I think your point would be right on a narrow conception of politics on which it has to do only with elections and parties. But it’s very natural to characterize the French Revolution and liberation theology and Extinction Rebellion as political movements, along with anything that determines how we collectively live as a society.
it's political because it determines insurance policy.
You should read Szasz. He goes much deeper in the books, talks about how people take on different roles and narratives in a bid to get things from other people. It's very interesting.
On the other hand, if gene editing of the kind you describe were to become widely available, I'd expect most parents to edit their offspring to be bisexual. It's the most mathematically advantageous orientation, and with wide availability I'd expect any latent social stigma to disappear.
In a world where reproduction is done by selection from drop-down menus and homophobia is a cultural memory like dying of gangrene?
>It's the most mathematically advantageous orientation,
Not if you're optimising for number of grandkids, it's not.
Imagine optimising for the number of grandchildren in a world with available genetic engineering
The strategy doesn't disappear, it's just altered a bit (specifically, you want to maximise E(genes passed down), which is something like E(biological offspring)*E(percentage of genes not engineered in grandkids by kids)*(percent of genes not engineered in kid by parent)). Of course, at that point you're talking about the sky falling in a few generations because you just summoned Shub-Niggurath at full power, as Scott pointed out in Meditations on Moloch.
The way you optimize for genes passed down is to make your kids asexual but irrationally devoted to making clones of their parents.
I expect your expectation is dead wrong.
There are some surveys asking gay people how they rate their life satisfaction or how happy they are, and in big liberal cities gay people were just as happy as straight people.
And in American Samoa and Samoa there have historically been non-binary people and I believe when researchers asked them they were just as happy as cis people.
So I think we can reach a stage where we have Trans people be as happy as cis people. And for gay people I think we have basically already reached this point.
>And in American Samoa and Samoa there have historically been non-binary people and I believe when researchers asked them they were just as happy as cis people.
I recall that anthropological research in Samoa where all that originates (starting with "Coming of Age in Samoa" by Margaret Mead, 1928) is argued as a controversial by the sort of people who would argue it is controversial. And it is argued as established non-controversial science by the sort of people who argue would that. I have resigned into "whatever", as I don't have time nor interest to become an anthropologist.
Mead’s particular claims are controversial, but I don’t think it’s controversial that gender relations in Samoa are *different* from those of Kansas or Sweden.
+1
In general, I think there's just a huge cultural layer of sexual and gender stuff going on in every society. Stuff as simple as whether marrying your first cousin is common, acceptable, or taboo, and as complicated as what gender roles look like in your society and to what extent there's any flexibility in them.
Trans people are unhappy with their physical body, almost by definition. I think sci fi medical tech could make transition sufficiently complete and painless as to make trans people as happy as cis people, but I don't think any amount of purely social change can get there - fundamentally, gender dysphoria has a component that's independent of other people and would continue to exist on a desert island, IIUC
Some genes that are correleted with autism are also correlated with highter intelligence. Would you prioritise gene editing in favour of highter intelligence or against autism?
Do psychoanalysts still believe homosexuality is a psychological dysfunction?
I also wonder about it and it would be wonderful to get an answer but for what it's worth I was reading "The Neurotic Personality of Our Time" by Karen Horney (from 1937) and it was implied there that homosexuality is a result of pathological develompent but I wouldn't say it was impiled it was "bad".
I don’t think psychoanalysts are taking a moral stance on homosexuality, but I do suspect they still believe it is caused by pathological development rather than having a ~~genetic~~ biological component, ie nurture rather than nature.
FWIW, I suspect that it *does* have a strong genetic component. But that that's not dominant. Also that in small, highly-related groups (e.g. tribes) it was advantageous to the group. So it was fostered by kin selection.
OTOH, I also suspect that most people have a strong tendency towards homosexuality. There have been studies that indicated that more women than men were homosexual, and men have been known to be focused on .... well, I even heard of one case that was focused on tailpipes, though I'm not sure whether it was automobile or motorcycle. That *CAN'T* have been the "genetically intended target"...but it also can't be anything that he would have chosen rationally (if "rational choice" means anything in this area).
It's *not* "nurture rather than nature", but rather a feedback system involving BOTH nurture and nature, and with a huge helping of random chance.
There's evidence to suggest that women are more sexually-ambivalent ('bisexual') than men, yes, but the vast majority of women still self-identify as heterosexual. Literally one anecdotal case of a man screwing a tailpipe doesn't prove anything about men as a class (honestly, isn't the lesswrong/rationalist crowd supposed to understand statistics?)
Ignoring tailpipes (which can get painfully hot), why the fcuk do we care about sexual preferences, at all? The urge to classify and to try to explain people's sexual preferences seems pathological to me. Is the need to categorize people in the sexual preference categories genetic or learned? I suspect that it's learned, because many pre-modern societies didn't make a big deal about it (though some did). But the need to lump things or people into binary categories seems to hardwired into our brains, and once we start doing it for one set of categories we can't seem to unlearn it.
So guys group themselves into the "I like gals" groups and the "I like guys" groups, and socially they tend to isolate themselves from each other. And the gals who like gals want to hang with gals who like gals while the gals who like guys tend also isolate themselves (but I think less so than the guys). And anyone who likes both are given the hairy eyeball because they don't fit into those predefined categories. And because of our pathological need to lump people into sexual preference categories we build all sorts of stereotypes about the people we place in those categories—many of which tend deindividualize or worse dehumanize people in those categories.
Back in the 80s I remember seeing an interview with Robert Reed (who played the dad in the Brady Bunch) on some daytime talk show. He had at some point publicly came out as gay (even though I guess he was pretty open about the way he swung with the Brady Bunch actors and crew). Anyway, he seemed to have regrets—even though he didn't specifically say that—about proclaiming himself gay because he said he was now the "gay actor" in the Brady Bunch, rather than the actor who played the dad in the Brady bunch—and he felt the label eclipsed his talents. Meanwhile, Jody Foster kept mum about her sexual preferences until the rumor mongers forced her to admit it. Why the obsession with Jody Foster's sexual preferences? Why the need to pigeonhole her? It all seems rather pathological to me, but I don't write the DSM...
Nice try, but hard to believe you don't care!
I'm not sure why we care about sexual preferences either, but I have the sense that we're wired to care. Certainly nature wants us to be aware who is a possible mate, so of course that pushes us in the direction of being alert to the sexual interests of the opposite gender. I believe -- but am embarrassed to say I do not know for sure -- that most cultures make rules about sex and that these rules are taken pretty seriously. It may be that we are driven to make rules about sex because we sense its power and make rules to try to keep order. Many murders, suicides and plenty of crimes are motivated by sexual ambition, sexual jealousy, sexual loss and humiliation. Also, we seem to feel sexual repugnance as easily as we feel sexual desire. Sex acts that do not seem hot and luscious often seem grotesque and repugnant to us. There's not a lot of in between. And that kind of seems like wiring to me too. So while I agree with you that for us, in our era, it's really not important how somebody gets off and who they like to do it with, I think we are wired to care.
Because sexual desire and romantic attraction are some of, if not the most, powerful motivators of human activity (generally speaking), with some of the most powerful intuitions, taboos, and disgust reactions surrounding it; and sexual reproduction is how humanity carries on from generation to generation. It's literally at the core of who we are, how we relate to each other, how we organize our societies, and how we reproduce.
LOL. "Doomscrolling" is a prevalent issue right now, so it's not just sexuality classifications. People are actively hurting themselves over all flavors of "must read how a thing has been described and classified." Apparently in-home cooking appliance classifications is the latest trend.
Yes, and almost all men self-identify as heterosexual. But there's LOTS of variation. IIRC Kinsey used a 9 level scale to figure the degree of homosexuality, but I think that's still wrong, because it's one dimensional.
P.S.: What the guy with a tailpipe fixation proved is that people can fixate as unreasonably as a gosling. They usually don't, but there's no reason to believe that that guy was extremely out of the ordinary except for the particular object class that he fixated on. Possibly because we delay the fixation until much later in life than a gosling. (Though there seems to be *something* about motorcycles and flashy tailpipes that is fairly widely considered sexual signaling.)
A Swedish twin study put the contribution of genetics at 1/3 for gays and 1/6 for lesbians (with shared environment having no effect and non-shared environment making up the rest).
So it's certainly a factor, but it's also the smaller factor.
That was my impression as well, yes.
To my knowledge twin/sibling studies indicate that homosexuality is around 30% genetic, but "non-genetic" is not necessarily the same thing as "produced by nurture"- environmental influences can be congenital and/or random (e.g, produced by random hormone fluctuations in the womb, intestinal flora, role models, or whatever.)
I'm personally willing to take the stance that, yes, in fact, homosexuality is a biological disorder. It's just incurable, and so long as the individual in question avoids spreading dangerous STDs or screaming for the family to be abolished, it's a harmless disorder. Like having a version of OCD that just compels you to always put on red shoes in the morning, or something.
Likewise... yes, gender dysphoria is a disorder of some kind. If, e.g, a biological male wishes to live and pass as a woman, then depending on how you look at it you're either looking at a man with a psychological problem or a woman with a physiological problem- either way, it's a disorder. If there wasn't a disorder of development, they wouldn't have dysphoria!
Technically, no, but the idea that humans should cease reproducing and/or cease taking responsibility for looking after their offspring is an idea so close to promoting your own society's extinction that I would consider it tantamount to calling for violence.
Would you consider heterosexual non-breeders to be perpetrating a violent act? Or are non-breeders with non-standard sexual preferences or identities the only ones perpetrating violence by not reproducing?
In case you haven't noticed, there's currently no shortage of people on the planet. I don't know whether homosexuality and transsexuality is becoming more common, but if it is I'd wonder if possibly that's nature's way of limiting population growth. It's certainly more humane than killing off a bunch of people via starvation and plagues.
What pushes you towards seeing homosexuality as a biological disorder rather than as a biological variant, in the same category as red hair or left-handedness?
I believe Scott explained it fairly succinctly in the original article, but to reiterate: healthy organisms normally gravitate toward sexual partners they can actually reproduce with.
(Same-sex sexual acts are not that uncommon within the animal kingdom on a sporadic basis, but a stable lifelong attraction to the same sex is actually very rare: it is only documented in humans and male domestic sheep. There's a theory this might be a consequence of self-domestication.)
Well, you and also Scott if he said what you think he did, would need to define quite clearly what you mean by healthy. What are the criteria by which you judge an organ, an entire body or a behavior to be healthy? You mention that homosexuality is rare among other species. Is that how you define a healthy behavior -- one that occurs as frequently among animals as it does in our species?
Here's the thing: I think ourt species is wired to have strong reactions to the sexual habits of other people. My observation is that most people do, and also I think it makes sense that we would have strong reactions. We are social animals, and the way sexual relationships play out can have both very good and very bad consequences for society: It can lead to lasting bonds between sexual partners, and of course it produces children and then the tribe also has the extra stability that comes from having bonded family groups. But sexual ambition, jealousy and disappointment also lead to conflict and misery, and of course that's bad for the tribe. In my experience, a lot of people's objection to homosexuality comes down to their having a very strong EWWWW reaction to certain sex acts and/or to picturing any sex acts at all happening between members of the same sex. I'm inclined to think we're wired to react that way to sexual acts that are a bit different from those we enjoy. So if you find yourself viscerally convinced that homosexuality is unhealthy, you might try on the idea that your EWWW is interfering with fairminded thought.
Nature is replete with healthy organisms that do not gravitate toward sexual partners they can actually reproduce with. Kin selection is such a successful strategy that haplodiploidy has evolved at least 10 separate times, and it's entirely plausible that evolution selects for a certain amount of "take care of your sister's kids instead of having kids yourself."
I think whether you see it as a disorder or not depends on the context in which you're thinking about it.
First, you might think in terms of individual well-being. In 2022 USA, being gay is not a huge impediment to living a good life. But in 2022 Iran or 1922 USA, it's a substantial impediment to living a good life. At an individual quality-of-life level, whether being gay is something terrible that wrecks your life and so you'd really like to be cured of depends on your environment and culture.
If we're thinking about evolution, then it's a disorder to the extent it decreases the inclusive fitness of the genes of the gay person. It seems almost inevitable that being gay decreases your fitness in most contexts (when you get a chance for some extracurricular action, do you go for the kind that *can* leave an extra kid or the kind that *can't*?). But this isn't a moral evaluation or anything, it's just how we can think about evolutionary forces. To the extent homosexuality is genetic, it's kind-of a puzzle, since it seems like it must decrease the number of offspring you leave behind.
If we're thinking in moral terms, then it depends on our moral code. If you believe that homosexual behavior or desires are terrible, wicked, sick, etc., then you're going to see homosexuality as a disorder needing treatment, much like we'd see pedophiles. People with a different moral code will see things differently. And since we don't all agree on moral codes, you can easily end up with people in our society who desperately do not want to be gay, and would like some kind of therapy or something that would turn them straight. I gather this doesn't work too well, but it's not crazy that someone who is convinced that wanting to sleep with dudes makes them an evil person doomed to eternal hellfire would like some help with that.
What does “dysfunction” mean? If it’s about something biological not functioning in the evolutionarily normative way, then it might be a dysfunction, just like ability to shift time zones frequently without experiencing jet lag.
Would you say my computer is dysfunctional if it was operating more quickly than usual?!
Likely yes, because it would likely be generating more heat than usual too. You might have a setup where excess heat generation isn't as much of a problem as the benefit gained by the excess speed, just as someone with a job that involves a lot of international travel might have a setup where the unstable sleep cycle is beneficial, but in the environment both of these systems were developed, they likely ended up with particular normative behavior because the downsides were worse and the upsides were much less.
Ok. I think you know what dysfunctional means.
It depends on the software you are trying to run. For example, some old videogames expect your computer to process at a certain speed and become unplayably fast in modern computers. Modern games don't have that limitation anymore.
In this analogy, a computer operating too quickly is the dysfunction, CPU/framerate throttling was the treatment and videogames are society.
Very droll.
Well, I think the short answer is "no" (since psychoanalysts are probably liberal about such things, and I understand even some early psychoanalysts were), but the question is what one means by dysfunction. I think psychoanalysts think that a lot of behavior or personality is the result of early adaptations that might not make sense in later life, but when do they become dysfunctions? I mean, if all men treat women based partly on their childhood relationships with their mothers, all men are at least a bit crazy (since these women aren't their mothers), but for some of them it works out and for others it doesn't.
I get the impression that psychoanalysts (and a lot of therapists) don't like the DSM style diagnostic system, which is based on somatic medicine and divides mental health problems into discrete disease states.
Most of what I know about contemporary psychoanalysis is based on reading Nancy McWilliams's books (psychoanalyst and professor at Rutgers). They are quite good if one is interested in the subject.
ISTM as an outsider to the field like the need to medicalize everything and make a diagnosis in order to get psychiatric treatment covered by insurance or Medicare or Medicaid warps the hell out of diagnostic criteria.
I think it varies. There are a lot of subschools of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts tend to be artistic, literary and politically liberal. I'm sure these leanings push them in the direction of thinking homosexuality is not a dysfunction, and psychoanalytic theory is so vague and so independent of empirical tests that I'm sure it's possible to adjust one's personal version of psychoanalytic theory to make it consistent with all kinds of ideas that are driven by political leanings, wutz kool at the moment, etc.
I suspect nothing will actually stop the NYT taking you out of context. You’ll probably just get something stupider about the Ns being a dog whistle: “Scott Alexander drops N bombs in article comparing pedophilia to homosexuality.”
What's with the N's? Am I OOTL?
Scott explained it in literally the first paragraph of this post.
Oh right. I was skimming through email and didn't sink into the post until a few paragraphs in. Thanks
The NYT would never call our host "Scott Alexander". That's what started the whole thing after all.
Lol
Witty
I hope it does cause any readers who see it out of context to go back to the original article because its funny as hell.
But also, the idea Scott is writing about is extremely taboo, even in context. People aren't ready for it. We have too much cultural and religious thinking that elevates fatalism, determinism and what's 'natural' as justification for who we are supposed to be.
I just think that is silly and counter-productive. If someone wants to quote this in a hostile way, he or she could simply say that the author is aware of how bad it sounds and so wrote the most objectionable parts in a sort of code with the idea that it would dissuade quotation. But translated back into ordinary English it reads as follows: [insert the text without the extraneous letters]. With that explanation there would be no journalistic problem with quoting the real sentences being communicated without regard to any added characters.
>"You’ll probably just get something stupider about the Ns being a dog whistle: “Scott Alexander drops N bombs in article comparing pedophilia to homosexuality.”
r/Sneerclub did it already.
Did they actually
Just checked yes they did. Bit harsh...
huh. That group seems.. pretty intense. Is ir generally just a "hate rationalism cause its not hard left" thing?
I think there are probably valid crtiqiues of tendencies and ideas that are common to x-rationalist circles andI'm sure there are some sketchy individuals, but they seem like, really really intensely angry that rationalism is a thing.
Yeah it's bizarre... I guess so.
I personally feel like... so what. We know there are people who are going to permute everything through their political tribal lens.
Why should we care anymore that the NYT will do it then that some Muslim will think "these people dont believe Allah is the one true God so they are all evil followers of Satan?"
what is r/sneerclub?
I found the concept of sneerclubs, but what subreddit does this refer to specifically?
oh, nvm, that is an actual name of a subreddit
Yes, this has always been a weird thing about "Born this Way" moral arguments. Each of us is born with certain tendencies we want very much to transcend, some of which would be immoral to indulge. You can't sidestep ethics with appeals to biology.
Well, you CAN, but only if you're willing to adopt a particularly … elegant ethical system.
Might makes right?
I was thinking something more like "Do What Thou Wilt."
But don't do the children.
I believe the reference is to Crowley's Thelema ("'Do what thou wilt' shall be the whole of the Law"), which is literally a Satanic philosophy*. So I think that addition breaks the intended meaning.
*Crowley renamed himself Aleister in order that his name add up to 666, and claimed the title "Master Therion" - "Therion" means "beast" and also adds up to 666.
Sorry, but Crowley's philosophy was NOT Satanic. It was, however, definitely non-christian. And he was making things up as he went along (allegedly with "spiritual" inspiration). If you want Satanic look up Anton Lavey. I found Crowley's philosophy an incoherent mix of anarchism and authoritarianism. This is probably because he drew on multiple sources, including Hinduism.
That said, he *did* work to present an image of a Satanist, but that was pure PR.
Not sure I'd call taking several books to explain that "thou" and "wilt" don't actually mean what they sound like "elegant"...
No, you can’t, because that ethical system is not an appeal to biology. It’s another ethical system.
As she said, “you can’t sidestep ethics with an appeal to biology.” You’re not appealing to biology, you’re appealing to a new ethics.
I interpret "born this way" as an appeal to the same cultural sympathies that helped race relations make real gains in the late 20th century. Homosexuality is at the very least more mutable than race, so your point is taken. But positively affirming the ethics of homosexuality wasn't a winning strategy when progress was being pushed for. I'm not surprised "born this way" got as much traction as it did.
Plus, this isn't like anger issues or nail biting or some objectively bad thing. If someone likes the way they are and they aren't hurting anyone, why change?
People are born unvaxxed and their rights are very restricted if they don't take vaccine. One could say the unvaxxed help virus circulate, but this is at best, probabilistic. Similarly, a great host of diseases are more effictively spread by homosexual men than by heterosexual contacts, due to e.g. alternating passive and active roles (not possible in heterosexuals), greater desire to engage in group sex, etc.etc.
>>alternating passive and active roles (not possible in heterosexuals)
I fear you may be underestimating the sexual creativity of heterosexuals.
No I don't. Most virus-friendly way is to insert penis into anus (and probability of passing infection is depedant on direction), and women lack the former. Dildos, ropes etc. don't change that.
People generally think of "harm" in diffeent ways; direct harm or social harm. Both traditionall moral conservatives and progressives have ideas of "social harm" whereas libertarians tend to foucs on "direct harm".
As an example, there are places where people are not allowed to do things on their own prpoerty. The libertarian view says "the thing this person does on their property doesnt cause me any harm." The social ethical view says "this person lowers my properrty values thus brings me harm" or "brings down the neoghborhood" or some such.
So sexual behavior that is consensual doesnt cause any type of direct harm- the "harm" you're talking about is a 'social" harm, i.e., some forms of sex increase the risk of disease transimision which has negative effects on cost to society etc.
But generally the people who think of "harm" are thinking in two very distinct ways.
Furthermore, the reality is most people in our cultural spheres think of bpth but draw the lines differently- the have their own ideas of what is personal autonomy versus social harm.
I literally just wrote a 1000 words on how WRONG this claim is in the recent “when do we get political backlashes” thread! To avoid you having to refer back to that, let me cut an paste:
I think that at least part of the answer requires an *honest* understanding of why the "losing" side is against whatever the issue is. Such honesty is, of course, not exactly common...
In the case of gay rights, I think the explanation is pretty simple. The issue of gayness (being honest now, as opposed to the usual story) I think was primarily viewed by its opponents as set of anti-bourgeois values and morals. And why wouldn't it have been so? In the late 60s/early 70s gayness presented as an all-party all-the-time lifestyle built on endless drugs, zero personal responsibility, and destruction of the family:
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/michael-bronski-gay-family/
The infamous 1972 Gay Men’s Liberation demands looked to most people like a demand for legalized pedophilia and does the usual political yutting thing of throwing in multiple demands that have zero to do with gayness but an awful lot to do with making themselves unpopular with most of America.
https://thecambridgeroom.wordpress.com/2018/01/16/bostons-gfls-10-point-demands-to-the-democratic-convention-1972/
Read the above document. THAT is what most people thought they were protecting America from in the 1970s, and who can blame them...
What happened in, I guess the 90s, is that a smart enough group of gay people managed to wrest control of the agenda away from these lunatics and worked hard to ensure that the ONLY issue on the table was gayness. Not gayness and how the military sucks. No gayness and how the family should be abolished. Not gayness and drug legalization. NO OTHER CRAP except gayness and laws related to that. And it turns out that, big fscking surprise, Americans did not have a problem with gayness per se, once it was stripped of the lunacy.
To the extent that other agendas like "racism" or "sexism" win without backlash, it would be by following the same agenda. But it appears that both of these are in too deep in terms of having defined a totalizing world view that is anti-bourgeois and anti most of what Americans support (including such basics as decency, honesty, truth, and rationality).
In a sense I think you have the story backwards. Both race and sex got most of what was reasonable in the late 60s and early 70s, but were not content to take the win and build on that; they created a backlash by refusing to take yes for an answer.
Gay rights stand out as being a rare case in history where common sense prevailed, where the winning group was content to accept its winnings, shut up, and stop fighting. If gay marriage had immediately been followed by other items on that 1972 agenda ("Americans remain as homophobic as ever, until they are willing to destroy that most homophobic and repressive institution of all, the family!!!") yes, there would have been, and would continue to be, massive backlash.
More generally, if Y is a more extreme request than X...
...if you actually want Y, bundle X with Y.
...if you actually want X, unbundle Y from X.
This reminds me of a warning to be careful about people for whom your goals are only a mean to achieve their goals. Wasn't obvious why you should care. Even if they care about your goals instrumentally, they will still help you achieve them, right? But one possible problem is they might bundle your requests with their specific requests, because they do not care if it decreases the probability of your requests succeeding, as long as it increases the chance of their requests.
But... if Y is much more prominent than X, then you might want to bundle X temporarily in order to raise it up the prominence ladder to the point that it can stand alone (at which point you unbundle it).
There is a great deal to this. But it misses an important part of the history, which is why the GLF were so radical in the 1970s.
The Mattachine Society had been asking for gay rights on a "just gayness" basis from the 1950s and getting absolutely nowhere. By allying with all these other radical groups, the GLF were able to get gayness onto the radical agenda - if the GLF is demanding an end to the Vietnam war, then supporters of the end of the Vietnam war would be more favourably inclined to the GLF.
What happened afterwards is not so much what you have as the 1990s, but that the existing moderate pro-gay groups (from the Mattachines to the Gay Rights National Lobby of the 1970s to the Human Rights Campaign since 1980) were able to get traction in a way that they hadn't until the late sixties/early seventies - because they got traction in opposition to the GLF and other radicals.
This is a pretty common thing: there are both radical and moderate supporters of a cause, the moderates are unable to bring initial attention to that cause, while the radicals can bring that attention. But it's the moderates who get the cause actually implemented.
There are still plenty of radical anti-family gay activists. It's just that HRC has nothing to do with them and the media largely doesn't report on them.
I'm not too familiar with this, but I do wonder if age played a role - lots of people are anti-family in their youth, then change their mind as they get older. I'm sure there are some people who stick with their convictions, but it wouldn't surprise me if many of the people who were in the GLF ended up becoming more moderate supporters a couple of decades later.
Absolutely. Also many GLFers were just gay people who were angry and "weren't going to take it any more" (as that generation put it) - they didn't endorse the whole agenda, and certainly didn't endorse the linkages that GLF had created. But they endorsed the radical noisy tactics of the GLF, and radical noisy tactics tend to be organised by radical people who are usually keen on multiple radical things and support whatever the current broad radical agenda is.
There are always two issues - why things happened as they did in the past, and what is the relevance to today. I was more concerned with the relevance to today aspect, along with clarifying the history.
Relevance to today is that we see the same over and over again. Consider, for example, BLM.
Let's consider one way BLM could have played out.
BLM advocates could have said "police violence is a problem for all Americans, let's all work together to try to ensure that it is tracked, that it is punished where appropriate, that it is reduced". The slogan could have been, I don't know, All Lives Matter...
But of course that was the path not followed, and people who tried to go down this path, that police violence is a problem no matter what the circumstances were accused of being racist and scorned.
Now how should one interpret this? *I* interpret it (and I think most Americans agree with me) that the real goal here, for the activists, is not police violence, it is "ways to make whitey feel guilty". And so anything that solves the police violence problem but does not make whitey feel guilty (and hell, maybe reduces the salience of some aspect of white guilt) is not a path to be pursued. Leninist "heighten the contradictions" as opposed to liberal "solve the problem as much as possible".
The gay case is interesting because it shows (again IMHO) just how reasonable Americans are when a reasonable case is presented to them. BLM, for example, could have chosen to go down that path. They did not, and I believe they deliberately chose not to go down that path, fully aware of (and desirous of) the consequences.
I guess I understand it differently - that if radicals don't go out and piss a lot of people off, then there's no way that moderates get the political opportunity to achieve something.
I think a large part of the difference between us is that I see this as a battle between two groups (of radicals and moderates or Leninists and liberals or whatever you want to call them) where one is better at getting attention and the other is better at converting that attention into effective action - while you see it as a tactical choice by a more homogenous group of people.
To me, you can't stop the radicals being idiots. Sometimes you have to publicly scold them, sometimes you have to just ignore them and concentrate on doing sensible things, sometimes you have to protect them from an overreaction from the other side. But you're not going to stop there being people who want whatever it is that they want.
What it is that they want is a separate question. I think they are themselves a very varied group, some want white people to feel guilty, some want to abolish the police, some want to abolish the entire concept of enforcing laws, some want to bring the revolution, whether that be an authoritarian communist one or a chaotic anarchist one - and some are just angry at the police for beating up and killing black people and want to express their rage and haven't really got as far as wanting a specific solution.
One of the things I've learned about politics from thirty-something years in various political organisations is that everything is factional, and every statement, every policy, every manifesto, every slogan is the result of negotiations between factions and usually reflects much more the internal dynamics of those factions than it does have anything to do with intent on how people outside will think about it. The ability of any political leader to prioritise how the mass of people on the outside will consider what you are saying/doing/proposing over the internal factional dynamics is what generally makes for effective political leadership, and it's a rare talent - you have to both know what will be effective messaging and policy and also be able to win the internal faction fight to let you use it.
You're right that you can't stop stupid. But you don't have to valorize it!
We have enough experience from history to know how these things work out.
The Whigs gave us 1688, the Jacobins gave us 1789. The progressives and the Fabian Society gave us Social Democracy, communists gave us the USSR. MLK gave us the passage of the civil rights laws, Malcolm X gave us the backlash that persists.
I don't see why society (broadly understood) is making excuses for why these people are "valuable", let alone treating them as heroes. They are dividers, not uniters, and I reject the very premise that they "accelerate" change; instead they create precisely the environment where change is not possible until catastrophe.
("These people" is not left or right; it refers broadly to people of the "my way or the highway persuasion", people who are unwilling to accept either compromise or allies with only limited overlapping aims. These people are poison to the entire project of politics because they are conceptually opposed to the compromise that is the essence of politics, and enjoy the act of burning down the world by labelling as enemies anyone who is not 100% committed to every detail of their current ideology [which can, of course, turn on a dime. There's a reason the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was a touchstone for identifying the type, or why tankie is such an effective [and accurate...] insult.])
Black Lives Matter was specifically focused on the problem of police misconduct as it relates to its disproportionate impact on black people. This isn't to dismiss the issue of police misconduct and subsequent impunity generally, but to to focus attention specifically on racial discrimination. It's an assertion that the rights and well being of black people matter too. Responding to this with, "well, all lives matter" at best misses the point, and more nefariously was adopted by people as a counter-slogan meant to actively dismiss and mock their concerns.
There is no indication that american blacks are disproportionately impacted by 'police misconduct' once the frequency of black crime rates are controlled for. (They're somewhat more more likely to be subject to use-of-force when arrested but actually less likely to be killed during arrest, relative to whites, and unarmed men of any race in the US are more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by police.)
https://necpluribusimpar.net/reality-police-violence-us/
practically speaking as an anti-poloice activist, I do se the point that prior to BLM there was an increasing consensus from americans of all stripes the police wer out of control and had to be reigned in, whereas BLM practically ahd the effect of making it more of a tribal racial issue that probably increased racism (a racist who sees an american or a human have their rights violated might start to have more sympathy when they think "that could happen to me or smeone I carr about"- by making it a "this only happens to black people and not white people" (which isnt true, though true proportionally) the movement was hurt and more people supported the police and became more racist.
This was my practical observation, and I think part of the reason was you had people sort of attach other political agendas to the poice reform movement which were less palatable, i.e., the "woke" agenda, as the practical organization of BLM groups became domiated by these politics and there were cases for example where libertarian police reformers were explicitly harrassed and kicked out of blm groups for being opposed to the police bot not supporting the broader poltiical agenda.
As someone who was long an anti-police activist, I was personally quite willing to let the racial issue "take the lead" so to speak but this often wasnt enough and people who wanted to support the caiuse were harrased for not agreeing with seperte politival issues.
I agree that the normalisation of gays and lesbians played a big role in their public acceptance. Obviously opinions will differ within any movement, but from what I've heard gay marriage was initially a controversial proposal within the movement - the more radical members didn't even want it and had other concerns, while the more pragmatic saw it as too far out of the Overton window. The idea of gays and lesbians wanting to marry probably did change people's opinions on the movement, challenging some previous preconceptions of who they were and what they wanted - in many ways it's a very conservative demand to make!
"Gay rights stand out as being a rare case in history where common sense prevailed, where the winning group was content to accept its winnings, shut up, and stop fighting"
It sure doesn't seem like it. What about the "rainbow bombardment" of our children these days? Not content to have each person do their own thing in their own bedrooms (which I think 99.99% of us are all in favour of), we are now trying to force the teaching of homosexuality and transsexuality as equally biologically normal and equally morally valid as heterosexuality... in public schools... to six-year-olds... apparently to make sure that no one feels bad about themselves...
Given that, as Scott mentions above, there is little evidence so far to support a wholly genetic or congenital cause for homosexuality, this means it's cause must be at least partly sociocultural. This does not mean it is a choice, just that some genetics, together with an unchosen set of environmental factors seem to be the most likely cause. And if homosexuality is even partly decided by sociocultural factors, parents should be free to not wish that lifestyle to be encouraged in their children (as atheists might wish, in a public school, to not have religion taught to their children, or vegetarians might not wish for their children to be taught to eat meat).
So if the gay movement had stopped at the achievement of being treated with respect in doing what they want to do in the privacy of their own homes, that would have been great and everybody would have been happy with that. But that hasn't happened. There is not an episode of any new Disney series which goes by where my young children don't get homosexual themes explicitly thrown in their face. It has become an ideology which must be imposed...
This is correct, but I think it doesn't quite get to the real point.
As I get older, I keep getting more convinced that the relevant dueling values are between 'sex is for entertainment' and 'sex is for reproduction'. There's always been tension between the two, or at least for as long as the 'oldest profession' has been in business, and I don't think any society can claim to be entirely one side or the other. Neither can claim to be totally correct, but there is enough fundamental behavioral truth to them that neither is wrong. As such, there are strong reasons 'sex is for reproduction' has stayed around, most of which are probably associated with unchanging truth that sex is an act which may have life-long consequences for everyone involved, and treating it casually is a recipe for potential tragedy.
The LGBT community is a focal point for the underlying entertainment/reproduction debate in that basing your identity around who you want to have sex with implicitly assumes 'sex is for entertainment'. The government weighing in on this via the schools thus firmly puts a massive finger on one side of the scales. What this has generated is people that were told 'sex is entertainment' and when hit with the natural consequences supporting 'sex is reproduction' (or just the internal contradictions in 'sex is entertainment') they push even harder.
That is fine, but I just want to say that 'entertainment' isn't the right word for me. Sex as an itch that must be scratched, is closer, but still not quite right.
I agree with this. The biggest problem with LGBT activism isn't the bad behaviour of a minority of gay men with respect to STDs and borderline-pedophilia (though that's not a trivial problem.)
The biggest problem is that destigmatising LGBT lifestyles means that your wider society has to collectively pretend that having children isn't the healthy and normative thing to do (something that gay men, lesbians and transsexuals intrinsically have a harder time with), and/or pretend that there's nothing special about the nuclear family (as if stable pair-bonding or the protective instinct of biological parents was irrelevant to childrens' safety.)
Equality is nihilism. The only way we can all have equal value is if nothing we do matters.
>having children isn't the healthy and normative thing to do
>there's nothing special about the nuclear family
Yes and yes. Both are things people get pressured into just because. People should be free to choose the type of family, including the number of children, based on whatever works for them, and not because their parents demand grandchildren or something like that.
"There is little evidence so far to support a wholly genetic or congenital cause for homosexuality, this means it's cause must be at least partly sociocultural"
Twin or sibling studies don't rule out congenital causes, and 'environment' doesn't necessarily mean 'sociocultural factors'- it could just mean random hormone fluctuations in the womb, for example.
With that said, I broadly agree that the "lunatics" name99 refers to don't appear to have disappeared anywhere and it certainly doesn't look like their 60s/70s PR tactics were purely instrumental.
Leaving aside transsexuality for a moment, since most people have a harder time with that one, it seems like homosexuality /is/ equally biologically normal and morally valid as heterosexuality. Not as common perhaps, but neither is being left handed vs right, which was once persecuted more than homosexuality.
We're teaching six-year-old kids in public schools about sex /already/, often by government mandate, so everyone's faux-shock about this issue is pretty ridiculous (or insidious). Acknowledging the fact that some people like to have sex with others of the same sex is /not/ advocating for children to start doing so, any more than teaching them about sex is advocating for them to start.
Just like teaching that many people believe in different religions is not the same as advocating or preaching religion, and explaining how it's perfectly fine that some people eat meat is not the same as forcing vegetarian children to eat it.
You seem to think that people want children to be forced or argued or even encouraged into homosexuality, which has never been on any school's agenda, and no advocate would tell you is an actual goal, it's just a weird strawman conservatives are madly fighting against.
People just want to be acknowledged for who they are and not stigmatized while they aren't hurting anyone. Which is /absolutely/ a thing that six-year-olds should be taught in all arenas, which includes sex, since we're already teaching them about that anyways.
"Leaving aside transsexuality for a moment, since most people have a harder time with that one, it seems like homosexuality /is/ equally biologically normal and morally valid as heterosexuality."
I'm not sure why I'm being notified for this remark, but... again, as Scott explained fairly clearly in the original article, that's probably not true. Biologically speaking homosexuality and pedophilia are likely to be both be "sexual targeting errors", and can be considered maladaptive insofar as they reduce the reproductive fitness of the host.
The main counter-arguments don't add up. (Kin selection isn't supported empirically. And although homosexuality is more common than would be expected given the fitness penalty, you could easily say the same for colour-blindness or endometriosis. We don't have to *persecute* people for being colour-blind, but at the same time nobody bends over backwards to explain how colour-blindness must be 'normal'.)
Huh, all I can say to that is we are working from different meanings of the word "normal" here. I think that if we treated homosexuality the same way we treated my slight color-blindness (which is extremely common and, in my usage of the word at least, super-duper normal), then that would be fine.
There's basically no stigma associated with most common-but-mildly-maladaptive traits, as you mention, and that seems like it fits the fairly colloquial meaning of normal I'm familiar with at least. No bending-over-backwards required. No one is trying to say it's /ideal/, it's just perfectly normal. Replace with "common and acceptable" if you like.
If I had an A/B selector for my own child, I wouldn't choose homosexuality, since dating and relationships are hard enough as it is without that wrinkle. But since no-one has that selector, I certainly want my child growing up in a culture that thinks it's perfectly fine, just in case that's how he turns out, through no choice on anyone's part.
And, for what it's worth, language does have power, and classifying that group of people as "abnormal" does not seem to lend itself to creating that culture, despite it being true for some meanings of the complicated word normal. I would love to see the negative connotation taken away from the concept of "abnormal", but that's a dumb hill I certainly don't want to die on.
As to the morally valid part, I assume we both believe there is a vast gulf between pedophelia and homosexuality on that score.
eh, there are still some of us lunatics around. I'm not personally against families, but I tend to see issue sof sexual ethics that way.
yeah, reading that dcoument it mostly sounds reasonable to me. Now, I dont support forcing people not to discriminate, but i think they shouldnt, and the rest sounds fine.
If someone likes the way they are, and they aren’t hurting anyone, then why does it matter whether they were born the way they are, or they chose to be this way, or it happened in some way other than genetics or free choice?
It turns out that a lot of people aren’t convinced by that question, so “born this way” is a rhetorically effective move. But it is morally problematic because it conditions acceptance on an empirical claim that could easily be false, rather than on a better moral theory.
+1
I think partly this is an arguments-as-soldiers thing. It was historically easier to argue for gay rights by framing homosexuality as something you were born with, rather like race. And at least some arguments for widespread societal acceptance of homosexuality would be undermined by arguments that homosexuality is heavily affected by environment and social pressure. But neither of those tell us that the born-this-way explanation is correct or incorrect.
Seems like most of it is easily solved by just accepting that "born this way" is really just a stand-in for "didn't choose this", which is the reality. Either way, the same acceptance should apply.
Very much so. It doesn't matter where desire comes from, only whether one acts on it.
I think the "Born this way" argument is more a counter-argument against people who shout homosexuality is unnatural. The default opinion is that any behavior is morally neutral; you have to argue why a behavior is morally wrong. "Born this Way" are counter-arguments to homosexuality being wrong; not an argument that homosexuality is right.
Without supporting the sexually conservative viewpoint I'd like to take a minute to explain the notion of Natural Law because the "Born this way" argument consistently uses a strawman of the Natural Law position.
Natural Law was a moral movement that influenced the Sophists and other ancient Greek philosophical groups and was basically adopted by early Christian apologists who wanted to use the hip lingo of their day. The terms of Natural Law are not used with perfect consistency, but the question of whether something was 'natural' or not never had to do with whether or not that thing was found in nature. So the constant litany of examples of this or that behavior being 'natural' because someone found an animal doing it are missing the point, either accidentally or deliberately.
Natural Law is an attempt to construct a system of ethics which is higher than convention or the status quo, and can therefore be used to criticize the status quo.
If you find animals defecating next to their drinking water, this is not proof that getting poop in your drinking water is 'natural.' However if you find proof that defecating near drinking water spreads disease in humans and makes them sick then you can argue that allowing poop in the drinking water is 'against nature.' And you can still make that argument even if the king himself or a majority vote or a thousand-year-tradition has determined the position of the outhouse.
Your framing of Natural Law doesn't seem to make as much sense at first blush. Specifically, it seems like you'd have to assert that getting sick is against nature (can I use "unnatural" here? Not sure...). But getting sick and being sick seems like a very natural thing for humans to do from time to time.
Yeah, you haven't quite got it.
It is "natural" for people to get sick in the sense that getting sick is a thing that happens.
It is "not natural" to be sick because a living things "natural" state is to be well: the only way we recognize a difference between sickness and health is that sickness is an abnormality that is different from the "natural" functioning of an organism.
Natural in this sense means "According to somethings nature" and not "the oppisite of artificial." So, for instance, a dog "naturally" has four legs because part of the nature of a dog is that it is a four legged animal. The fact that some dogs are born with two or three legs doesn't change the fact dogs are "naturally" four legged.
Well, then apparently it's either not natural to be a ginger, or completely natural to be gay, as these two things have about the same prevalence in the human population.
Whether something is natural or not in this scheme has nothing to do with frequency but is about whether it is in line with the Teleology of the species.
With the difference that being a ginger is 100% genetic while being gay is, according to the evidence so far, not...
"It is "not natural" to be sick because a living things "natural" state is to be well"
Is it, though? I would bet that a large majority of living animals at any given time is suffering from at least one significant injury or disease. Organisms that are completely healthy must be a rarity in nature.
That is, unless you interpret "natural state" to mean "best possible state", in which case "natural" becomes just a synonym of "good", and Natural Law degenerates into a tautology.
You will indeed better understand "natural law" if you interpret "natural" to be "best possible state", although that goes a smidge too far in the other direction.
A dog is "naturally" a creature with four legs, eyes, nose, digestive system, waggy tail, etc. If the dog gets cancer and his digestive system is blocked and no longer functions he has moved away from his "natural" state into an "unnatural" one. One way we know this is that the purpose of the digestive system is to turn food into nutrients that the body needs, and if cancer is blocking his intestines so that the food cannot pass and the nutrients cannot be absorbed then the digestive system is being frustrated in accomplishing it's "natural function".
Actions that make you sick might be said by some to be opposed by nature. Getting sick would generally be a negative *consequence* of an action, not an action itself.
I'm not saying that Natural Law is a good or coherent system or a rigorous system, especially as the ancients conceived of it. I'm saying that people keep going back to trying to define 'Natural' (a term of art with a distinctly non-modern meaning, in context) as 'that which is commonly observed' rather than 'according to an intended higher purpose' (Catholic) or "that which avoids harmful consequences." (more sophist/pagan)
If someone wanted to make a natural law argument in favor of same sex relationships it's not enough to say "bonobos are often observed having same sex relationships so such relationships are natural." You'd have to argue that such relationships were *purposeful* or *adaptive.* Which you could do. People argue that same sex relationships in bonobos help diffuse tension and promote bonding, for example.
TBH the argument that "homosexuality is unnatural" should not be counter-argued; it should never even have been taken seriously in the first place.
(Cannibalism is found in umpteen species. The use of wheels is found in only one.)
Dung beetles?
It would be reasonable to define wheels in a way that requires some sort of axle used to make the wheel support something.
Well then it's not wheels that are the magic invention, it's bearings.
In which case you'd need to consider the molecular machinery of a rotating flagellum on some single-celled organism as possible prior art, along with hip joints, and that one type of flea which uses interlocking gears to ensure symmetrical leg motion when jumping.
I don't really find this convincing.
My impression is that the majority of people break under torture. If one person is being tortured into giving up the location of the rebel base, and another person isn't, then the torture is really the most morally important fact here. I don't think it's fair to say "everyone faces temptations to give up rebel bases, I don't know why you [who are being tortured] couldn't resist them like I [who am not being tortured] did." This is true even if the second person is being tortured in some kind of incredibly weak way (like being in a room 5 degrees warmer than is comfortable) such that there is no clear yes-being-tortured vs. not-being-tortured distinction.
I also don't think this metaphor depends on "literally everyone breaks under torture" to work. If one in a billion people can avoid breaking, does the metaphor still hold? One in a thousand? One in ten?
I thought that's what moral heroism is. People who eat meat enjoy eating meat, but if you think not eating meat is ethically positive despite losing out on eating meat, then you're doing something good. You still might have the same desire, but you choose not to act on it. If someone has a very strong desire, as in desiring to stop being tortured, it would still be ethical for them to not erm, give up the rebel base.
Based on Israel's and America's experiences dropping torture from police interrogation, I would say: torture reliably makes people *talkative* but doesn't reliably make them *honest.*
You don't get more *honesty* by using force, just more *verbosity*. Your captives remain perfectly aware that they can lie to you, and continue to lie, no matter how much you beat them, as long as they think you've no way to tell the truth.
In some situations, you can reliably check tortured confessions more easily than obtaining the information independently. For instance:
"Where did you bury your ex-girlfriend's body?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
*torture*
"Where did you bury your ex-girlfriend's body?"
"Under the house."
*digging*
"Your ex-girlfriend's body isn't under the house."
*torture*
"Where did you bury your ex-girlfriend's body?"
"Dumped it in the lake."
*search*
"Your ex-girlfriend's body isn't in the lake."
*torture*
etc.
Same mostly goes for passwords, although auto-locks after a number of failed passwords can somewhat frustrate that.
That might work *if* you've taken the right guy in the first place. If the suspect actually doesn't know where the body is, your scenario plays just the same, until you find the body by sheer accident or the prisoner dies from the torture.
Yes, of course. I'm merely making an existence claim.
Fair enough, then I agree. I apologize if I interpreted your post as more general than it actually was.
I can absolutely guarantee that you will get my debit card PIN code out of me through _very_ brief torture. Presumably this holds true for virtually everyone else as well.
This seems trivially true. Muggers exist and work from the theory that *threatening* bodily harm is a great way to get people to hand over their wallets. People could try to lie and say that they don't have one, or whatever, but mugging is very successful anyway.
I think society has developed some kind of need to pretend that torture doesn't work because a society where torture is an option is a society where torture is overused and we're dealing with a lot of traumatized people. I think the alternative is a society that toughens up and a wide range of petty tortures (getting punched, someone screaming at you, etc.) are ineffective for most people. This appears to be the norm in prior generations, maybe up until the 80s or 90s.
Of course, these previous generations were less psychologically healthy in other ways, so there's some give and take involved.
Yeah, this is weird. We can all agree that torture is at the very least _almost_ always wrong, and the problem is _that_ it often works - if it didn't, it would be far less of a problem, after all, as there'd be no point.
Current society seems to have this bizarre idea that evil things also don't work, and you're wicked for suggesting they might, as though efficiency and moral quality were the same thing.
Shades of 'Against Murderism' here.
Meh, current society seems more like it's (correctly) arguing against a policy that allows torture, and will, via some motivated cognition, take any ammunition they can get. The story of humanity. I think most people would agree that mugging is effective.
Still, torture for actually usueful purposes (i.e. not some random civilian's PIN #) is probably only effective in some pretty specific types of situations, and cases where it's the best (not just the most expedient) option are surely vanishingly rare and nearly impossible to correctly identify.
In Stalin's Russia, about 1 in 50 condemned officials resisted all torture and refused to sign the confessions drawn up for them.
So "1 in 50" is my guess for how many people completely resist even pretend cooperation with their torturers.
For "reveal the rebel base" or "kill your own mother while I watch" scenarios, where the cooperation is much less superficial than "sign this confession," I'd expect a higher number.
I think this probably depends entirely on how painful the torture is vs. how bad doing what they want would be, and how much the victim believes in their cause. I'm reluctant to put any generic numbers on it.
Definitely a lot of variance by scenarios, in the evidence on torture.
Is torture helpful in getting people to recite false confessions? Moderately supportive evidence.
Is torture helpful in getting people to be more honest and not just make things up? Moderately opposed evidence.
Is all torture data super confounded by the regimes that choose torture and their differing agendas? Oh heck yes.
> Is torture helpful in getting people to be more honest and not just make things up? Moderately opposed evidence.
Torture as a threat ("tell me what I want to know or I'll continue to torture you") doesn't shield against people making things up (presumably, to stop the torture at least for a while).
I wonder if the following was tried: 1) assign tortured person cognitively demanding task (like a video game), automatically give them (more or less intense) electric shocks if they don't perform well enough. 2) while they're playing, ask the questions.
Lying is cognitively taxing, so it might be ~impossible if torture-game's difficulty is set properly for a given person (but make it too difficult, and they might not be able to tell you even the truth).
Compulsive liars will lie more easily in this scenario. People who have to stop and think through their lies will struggle to lie. This is the same theory that goes into interrogation using loud noises, bright lights, people yelling at them, etc.
The confessions almost always included confirmation of false accusations against others, and the balance between «those we will kill no matter what» and «are you an enemy of the people that you let the now-known crimes of X slide?» in the works of the system is probably still unknown (and from some evidence prisoners seemed to err on the side of the latter), so the difference with «reveal the base» is less in superficiality and more in the risk for captors to be lead into a literal minefield.
But doesn't context matter to the sample? A condemned official in the USSR in 1935 would know that there are zero even theoretical limits on what the secret police can do to him, etc. Russia had zero cultural history of anything but totalitarian government, etc. His situation is hopeless -- complete resistance is basically "suicide by cop" -- and everybody knows it. So only the most truly stubborn and/or pain-resistant and/or suicidal individuals would stick with complete resistance.
Whereas someone in a different cultural/historical context but in the same sort of room with the same sort of investigators demanding at him to give up the info -- say a Brit or an American -- might not be as completely convinced that the situation is hopeless. They might keep demanding a lawyer no matter how many times they're told by the interrogators that nobody knows where they are, they have no rights, etc. Just because they grew up with a different baseline expectation -- however unrealistic it may be in the moment -- than a 1930s Russian did.
It doesn't seem clear that the resistance rate in Stalin's USSR would map into other less-extreme cultural contexts, in other words.
> would know that there are zero even theoretical limits on what the secret police can do to him
Most likely many of them did believe (usually mistakenly) that police still tries to keep the investigation in some contact with reality.
> Russia had zero cultural history of anything but totalitarian government
No recent history of non-absolutist government, yes (short fluke was quite clearly a fluke…). However if we are talking about court system, Russia had half a century history of a trial by jury system where lawyers openly argued for jury nullification with nonnegligible chances of success. It was clear, of course, that Bolshevik court system was willing to just kill for «interests of revolution» reasons; however early red terror did include announcing who and why, for some values of «why», is persecuted. Switching to the mode where it is OK for an accusation to be beyond forgery and all the way into absurdist prose was a change many missed…
> complete resistance is basically "suicide by cop"
Some did not know, some had no chance to survive either way, though…
(Not sure what fraction of people initially destined for a non-lifelong prison term refused to sign a confession and still got a non-lifelong prison term, that probably also has happened)
> They might keep demanding a lawyer no matter how many times they're told by the interrogators that nobody knows where they are, they have no rights, etc.
Those might break at the stage where interrogators start torturing their relatives before their eyes (which the 1930's USSR political police have done at least in some cases — not sure how often things reached that stage).
Was this a case of "you will be shot anyway", or did they have a chance of survival if they held out against the torture? This makes a giant difference, after all.
Note that torture was applied not only to those they planned to shoot, but also to those they planned to imprison. I wouldn't exclude existence of circumstances where the confession reduced the eventual prison term, and existence of other circumstances where it made the sentence harsher. (Of course what the people under torture believed themselves about this is hard to establish…)
I've heard it claimed (can't vouch for this, though) that a weird legalism was in place, where convictions often required proof (which was difficult and annoying, especially when someone was innocent) or a confession (much easier!). So the confession might not have been just window-dressing.
Not dissimilar from some *actual* witch trials, come to think of it.
I would make the point that the religious conservative perspective doesn’t exactly excuse heterosexuals from needing to resist sexual temptation.
Nor for that matter are people excused from resisting the temptation to commit other sins, regardless of how much they naturally want to. If you happen to be born with a particularly bad temper, too bad, Thou Still Shalt Not Murder.
The crucial issue you are leaving out is that the socially conservative viewpoint gives heterosexuals an outlet for their sex drive - arguably the second strongest human drive after pure survival - and none for homosexuals who are supposed to glory in their suffering or something.
Many would argue that regarding a sexual relationship–or any human relationship–primarily as the outlet for a drive gets you off to a bad start in terms of moral thinking
I mean, sort of. But the reality of marriage is not exactly that you have a willing and available partner to satisfy you at any moment. It’s not exactly uncommon for married people to cheat, or fantasise, or watch porn, or masturbate, etc. Marriage is in no way an end to sexual temptation.
Everyone knows what it’s like to be horny. Everyone thinks it is bad to fail to control those urges in some circumstances (e.g. in the middle of the grocery aisle, or if you happen to be sexually attracted to children). There is some disagreement on the correct range of those circumstances.
I don't think anyone would disagree that it's harder for an obligate pedophile to avoid raping a child than it is for man who sexually is as vanilla as store brand ice cream. One is metaphorically being tortured to a significant degree, while the other isn't being tortured at all. Certainly if the pedophile resists temptation he is acting in a far more praiseworthy fashion than the straight man is for refraining from molesting toddlers. By the same token, if the pedophile gives in to temptation we can't really say the straight man is significantly morally superior to him, since the straight man had no temptation at all.
None of that changes the fact that *its wrong to rape kids*, and it certainly doesn't make it okay to rape them because you were born with a strong desire to do so.
This sounds a bit asymmetric to me. Resisting a unique temptation is a virtue, but failing to resist a unique temptation is not a lack of virtue?
Imagine, hypothetically, that people can be split into two groups A and B. Each group has a set of 100 temptations, completely different from the 100 temptations of the other group. Oh, and the group A contains 90% or 99% or 99.9% of humanity, and the group B only contains 10% or 1% or 0.1% of humanity. By that logic, only the group A can be judged morally?
Also, the sets of temptations are not completely incomparable. The straight man can also feel a temptation to have sex with people he can't (non-consenting adults, his neighbor's wife, etc.), so I would say that yes, if he resists all these temptations, that makes him morally superior to someone who has one extra temptation in the same category and doesn't resist it. Like, a success rate 10/10 is better in some sense than 10/11, even if the denominators are different.
EDIT: For the record, I do not care that much about the praise/blame framework; I am only using it to respond to your argument. I care more about consequences, and the world is unfair in this regard -- some people accidentally get into situations where their actions have more serious consequences than the actions of others.
It's not that resisting a unique temptation is a virtue, but that resisting a powerful temptation is more praiseworthy (if you don't like that word, maybe substitute "morally excellent") than resisting a weak temptation. By the same token, failing to resist a powerful temptation is less blameworthy than failing to resist a weak one.
For the sake of example, lets say that moderation in drinking alcohol is virtuous, and that drunkenness is a vice. I personally find it very easy not to be a drunk because I hate the taste of alcohol and don't particularly enjoy the sensations drunkenness brings. It is praiseworthy that I have consistently avoided getting wasted, but not very praiseworthy. It wasn't very hard to do. In comparison if we considered an alcoholic who is trying to reform their temptation to drink to excess is going to be very strong. If he manages to resist that temptation for a month then he has done a far more morally praiseworthy thing than I have. Similarly, if I end up downing a bottle of whisky tomorrow and get so drunk that I stagger home and yell at my wife and kids then I deserve more blame than if the alcoholic does the same: I literally have no temptation to do so, so if I decide to do so on a lark that's a pretty terrible thing to do.
A better way of looking at it is what the two scenarios tell us about the character of the people involved. The fact that I am not a drunk (or that I don't rape kids!) does not tell you very much about my character because I'm not tempted to do either of those things. If an alcoholic avoids getting drunk than that tells you a lot about his character: that he's the kind of man who can resist strong temptation in order to pursue virtue.
> Certainly if the pedophile resists temptation he is acting in a far more praiseworthy fashion than the straight man is for refraining from molesting toddlers.
About as praiseworthy as incels refraining from rape.
Exactly!
> My impression is that the majority of people break under torture.
This doesn't mean they tell the truth, though. Hollywood interrogations about rebel bases are wrong on this part. People go from saying what they want to saying whatever syllables will make the pain stop. It's like conversations with GPT (which is trained by rewarding/punishing responses based on how fluent and plausible they sound to some random person on fiverr.com). You get plausible-sounding syllables out. There may or may not be some relation to truth in there, but there is no way to tell. Worse, if what is true sounds complex or implausible, it certainly won't be in there, because it won't help make the pain stop. The process does not result in truth, because the thing it rewards is plausibility, and there is no way to make it reward truth instead unless you already know what the truth is and thus don't need to bother.
This is why actual interrogation techniques involve building rapport instead.
It's also how "conversion therapy" and the like fail. If you torture someone enough, yes, eventually they will break and hide deep in the closet. This doesn't actually change what they feel, though; merely what they present to you.
Hang on, the famous Hollywood joke about rebel bases was entirely accurate wasn't it? The result was a lie.
I mean, the literal Hollywood interrogation about the literal rebel base just plain failed; Leia didn't say anything. Tarkin's threat to blow up Alderaan - which wasn't torture - did get her to talk, but she lied (and Tarkin's own lie that he'd spare Alderaan precluded trying again).
You can't sidestep ethics with "born this way" arguments, but if gay feelings mostly aren't spread by social contagion, typically aren't something youth are "groomed into", then straight people have less reason to perceive uncloseted gay people as a threat to their own sexual formation.
It's easier to get along with someone you merely have a moral disagreement with than with someone you perceive as a moral threat.
What exactly do you mean by "describes homosexuality in vivid detail?" Do you mean "vivid descriptions of gay sex," or do you mean "vivid descriptions of two characters in a romantic relationship, who are the same gender?"
I'm not aware of any children's books in the former category, and I don't see any reason why the second category should be banished to the sex-ed class. (Every book with a romantic subplot describes heterosexual relationships in vivid detail, but I have yet to hear that Cinderella should be restricted to sex-ed class.)
>I have never understood why not talking about what you're sexually into amounts to making you feel isolated or alone, even to a teenager, but I understand there are arguments to be made in this claim's favor.
It's not "not talking about it" per se, it's the fact that it's unacceptable for them to talk about it but acceptable for straight people to do so. If you had a rule of not letting anyone talk about who they had a crush on, straight or gay, that would be weird, but not homophobic. The issue is the assumption that gay relationships are inherently sexual and therefore Not Safe For Children, but that straight relationships are fine.
>I'm of the opinion that you can't really explain gay relationships without taking very long detours into sex and sexuality. With heterosexuality, you can say "2 people get together to make a child", and the vast majority of children will be like "Understood, have a good day".
Why do you have to talk about babies, rather than romance? "Two men who love each other like your mommy and daddy do" would be a fine all-ages explanation of a gay relationship.
>I would **definitely** be suspicious as hell if a teacher is telling the kids about his or her crushes.
I was thinking about kids telling each other about their crushes, not teachers telling kids, since "normalizing talking about these things" applies as much or more to kids talking to each other. It certainly wasn't the teachers who taught me how "gay" was used as an insult!
Thank you. Every single time I have seen this argument surface, as it has a disappointing number of times in this comment section, there is an obvious omission of the fact that society is thoroughly permeated with heteronormative content of every stripe, in contexts to match any homosexual-inclusive content to which people object. The charitable position would be to assume that this is merely a blind spot due to long immersion in such a society, but at a certain point it becomes difficult to believe that those making the "gay agenda" argument haven't been exposed to anyone pointing out the ubiquity of the "straight agenda".
The reason straight people never had to propagandize for straight relationships was because they had enough power to literally ban the depiction of alternatives. Read up on the Hays Code - for 30 years it prevented the depiction of any sort of "sexual perversion," which at the time was understood to include any hint at same-sex relationships.
Sure, nobody explicitly got up and said "these rules are to promote the idea that only straight relationships are acceptable," but that was because they had enough cultural power that they could just say "this is to promote good morals" and everyone would know what sort of relationships they meant.
Is there a reason a kid seeing a man in a dress/nonbinary person in a dress/trans woman in a dress is creepy? They only explanation I've been given that vaguely makes sense is "well there was this one drag event I went to that the performers were wearing revealing clothes", but I went to a pirate circus recently, which was advertised to kids and all the cis-women in the cast were wearing very revealing clothing. Not a single person showed up claiming the event was creepy. Given that, a better explanation would be very helpful for me to understand. Lacking one, it feels like a hollow argument.
I am likewise curious what you mean by "teaching materials and storytelling that advertises and describes homosexuality in vivid details in schools".
Some school libraries contain books with prurient content – and I'm fine with school libraries deciding not to stock those books if they're fair about it (no double standard where an act is considered more "prurient" simply for not occurring heterosexually). But it's also pretty easy to avoid books in the library! Most students do! Much harder to avoid teaching material – but it also seems that threats of prurient teaching material are overblown.
Sex ed must address prurient matters – but it can also be really boring about it! So at least there's that.
Amen.
That being said, the question is whether "gay feelings mostly aren't spread by social contagion, typically aren't something youth are "groomed into", is true or not.
A recent survey at a US (liberal-leaning) University came up with something around 30% of students responding that they were neither straight nor cis. Has there always been 30% of the population who were trans, or bi, or gay and they've just all been in the closet up till now? Or is there social contagion? The question is valid I think since the congenital, immutable nature of homosexuality and transsexuality so far has very little scientific support.
I don't think you can take University students and extend that to the entire population.
Not unrestrictedly, but it effectively recenters the burden of proof onto those who are asserting “born this way” without much in the way of evidence.
I specified "gay feelings" rather than gay identity or gay behavior because it seems normal to feel less control over feelings than over the choice to act on them or prioritize them in your identity.
Women's sexuality appears more fluid than men's in general, and I trust men's report that, for many of them, it's very much not. We're all still living in the aftermath of Freudianism – curse it! – that placed inordinate importance on being sexually "normal". From what I understand, Freudianism even classified celibacy as a deviant sexual behavior! There's no winning the, "Hey, maybe I'm not such a scary deviant!" argument with a Freudian unless you're having – and enjoying – PIV sex. Which...
Eww, gross.
Even if you're a traditional Christian, who's not having sex in nonmarital relationships, why should the kind of sex you're not having matter so much? (American Christianity isn't free from the Freudian taint, either, so it ends up mattering – but should it?)
By contemporary measures, I'm not completely straight, but seeking and staying in a heterosexual marriage doesn't seem that hard to me. I love my husband. He's also, incidentally, a man. Conventional marriage has much to recommend it if you can make it work! Wanting to have a family the old-fashioned way seems a fairly normal desire, one which the decline of marriage generally seems to have threatened, but openly gay people, specifically, don't, in my judgment.
That said, I believe others' reports that they're more motivated by sexual impulse than I am. I found the loneliness of not having a romantic partner hard to bear when I was single, but not the sexlessness. Which would I rather have, sex or music? Easy! Music. Sex or math? Also fairly easy, and it's math. One reason my own sexuality is so malleable is indifference. Others, especially men, report *really* not being indifferent, and so, I'd surmise, even harder to "groom" than I am.
I don’t think male homosexuality is subject to much social contagion. Female sexuality appears to be more mutable on average, and I think it was slightly more susceptible to social contagion in the era when it stopped being quite so taboo.
It appears entirely plausible that “I would like to be perceived as having a different gender” is extremely susceptible to social contagion.
So I think homosexuality and social transsexualism are radically different categories, and shouldn’t be conflated.
That's largely bisexual females. Every poll I've seen gay men tend to be 1-3% of males even in very liberal environments. You need to be more clear about what we are talking about, because most women do have bisexual potential.
What would you guess is the cause of the extremely high rate of homosexual behavior (often involving boys) in Afghanistan?
Are you suggesting that homosexual tendencies would be immoral to indulge? On what basis?
I think the statement is that just saying 'born this way' is no proof at all that the tendencies are moral, and therefore no answer at all to e.g. natural law arguments.
Ah, I see, that makes sense. I guess the argument selection feels a bit like a dog whistle, though. It could just as easily be said that 'not born this way' is no proof at all that indulging 'certain tendencies' is immoral, no? The point, that our genetic code evolves independently of morality, would be made either way...
Yes the point is equally valid either way. There's nothing about a particular individual's seemingly congenital desires that morally condemns or justifies that individual's actions. Libresco certainly is Catholic, and I believe holds the standard Catholic understanding of the nature and telos of human sexuality. By 'dog whistle' (usually a pejorative term) do you mean merely that her statement is congruent with that understanding? What is the dog whistle here?
Is 'dog whistle' typically a pejorative term? If so, I apologize. I didn't mean it in a pejorative sense, more so in the 'this is meant to gather support people who think LGBTQ people are immoral without too obviously provoking opposition' sense.
If anything, I'd say the use of 'certain tendencies [...] some of which would be immoral to indulge' here is pretty much a textbook example. I can't say with absolute certainty that the Libresco was referring to homosexuality here, as it likely alludes to many things more broadly as well, but it seems rather clear doesn't it? It certainly does to many of those replying.
"Dog whistle" literally refers to a whistle that produces ultrasound - frequencies too high for humans to hear but that dogs can.
A claim of dogwhistling is therefore a claim that someone's message has a hidden meaning only intended for some listeners. The classic example is politicians quoting the Bible on some topic; the highly-religious tend to be more familiar with the Bible than the irreligious, so quoting the Bible, as long as it fits reasonably well into the conversation, signals religiosity to the former while not being noticed by the latter.
SJ likes accusing people of dogwhistling racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia/etc. Most of the time, these accusations are not actually true (and a lot of the rest they're more in the category of "obvious but deniable" than "relies on ingroup knowledge"). As such, the term has gained a degree of notoriety.
I’m pretty sure Libresco is Catholic.
I think it's argued in this specific case because one of the main argument against homosexuality (in practice, not in abstract political debates) is "it feels unnatural in a way that I find suspicious, even if I can't fully articulate why". So you can go "no it feels weird and unnatural to you, but for the people who practice it it wouldn't be they're just born different ".
As C. S. Lewis wrote in his final essay "We Have No Right to Happiness":
"When I was a youngster, all the progressive people were saying, 'Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses.' I was simple-minded enough to believe they meant what they said. I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bridled. Absolute obedience to your instinct for self-preservation is what we call cowardice; to your acquisitive impulse, avarice. Even sleep must be resisted if you’re a sentry. But every unkindness and breach of faith seems to be condoned provided that the object aimed at is “four bare legs in a bed.”
It is like having a morality in which stealing fruit is considered wrong—unless you steal nectarines."
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/c-s-lewis-no-right-happiness/
This argument mostly works because of the hyperbole.
The actual rule is that more pleasure is good *unless* that somehow interferes with something more important.
>The actual rule is that more pleasure is good *unless* that somehow interferes with something more important.
It is debatable if one should consider stable birth rate and stable families as important, but the changes brought by the sexual revolution on the "more pleasure = good" basis surely seem to have interfered with them.
In the past people had 15 kids, 13 died in childhood, 2 survived. Today, people have 2 kids, 2 survive. We have stable birth rate with fewer kids.
The demographic statistics say otherwise. Many developed countries have fertility rate below 2, whereas developing countries have increasing populations.
The stable families on the other hand is about divorce and out-of-wedlock births. There surely is much more kids in single parent households than in the past.
There is a complication that it is difficult to pinpoint it as to sole causal reason, which IMO are multiple, not just the sexual liberation Lewis complains about.
But as I said, it is an debatable argument: there are plausible consequences (interference) to other good things.
What’s more important than personal happiness? And why?
Ask a parent.
I am a parent.
I know what *my* answer to this question is—I want Villam’s.
It should be pretty obvious why.
I see. Sorry, it read like a rhetorical question. I re-read it and it still seems mostly that way. You may want to expand a bit on your meaning in case other people misread it like I did.
I'd rather avoid a complex philosophical discussion. For starters, even "personal happiness" is complicated: one can have short-term pleasures and long-term goals, and sometimes the long-term goals require sacrifice of some short-term pleasures, so ironically even greedy personal-happiness maximization does not maximize the personal happiness.
The thing is, I find Lewis's quasi-religious preaching annoying, not only because I am not religious, but also because he even got the religious perspective wrong. I wrote a short answer that makes sense from *both* perspectives. But for a longer answer, I would have to choose one -- if I choose the religious one (maximizing God's glory, or something like that), it would be insincere, because I am not religious; and if I choose my perspective (a consistent extrapolation of the complicated human values), then the predictable reply is "well, that's your perspective, but Lewis was writing from the religious perspective".
And when it interferes with something more important, the impulse for that particular pleasure must be constrained, yes? Lewis's point is that our society give special treatment to judging "interference with something more important" when it comes to sexual desires than other desires. If I steal a car because I really wanted it we all agree that strong desire does not excuse theft. If I seduce another man's wife and steal her away from her husband than society is far more likely to excuse it by saying that I had a right to pursue sexual happiness.
As Lewis expands on in another section of his essay:
"The real situation is skillfully concealed by saying that the question of Mr. A’s 'right' to desert his wife is one of 'sexual morality.' Robbing an orchard is not an offense against some special morality called “fruit morality.” It is an offense against honesty. Mr. A’s action is an offense against good faith (to solemn promises), against gratitude (toward one to whom he was deeply indebted) and against common humanity.
Our sexual impulses are thus being put in a position of preposterous privilege. The sexual motive is taken to condone all sorts of behavior which, if it had any other end in view, would be condemned as merciless, treacherous, and unjust."
" If I steal a car because I really wanted it we all agree that strong desire does not excuse theft. If I seduce another man's wife and steal her away from her husband than society is far more likely to excuse it by saying that I had a right to pursue sexual happiness. "
Yes.
And this is a reasonable conclusion for society at large to reach, and a logical follow-up from the matters of the situation.
After all, if I steal a car, the car itself has no say in the matter. The car is not an agent in the world. The car has no free will. The car, forgive me, is not self driving. In a situation of seduction and elopement, several people are involved. Including, in this scenario, the wife who willingly leave her husband, consents to being seduced and willingly begins a process of wrecking a home. Eliding this facet reduces the comparison to a farce and a fiction.
When it comes to what we might call "intentional agents", their intentions and happiness rather matter.
It is, after all, why most of them do what they do. We judge them for it, too.
So indeed, there is fundamentally no analogous comparison between theft and a seduction. The two situations have remarkably little in common. Treating them as anything alike is poor reasoning.
Lewis is, for all his fine writing and sharp mind, incorrect here.
"Fruit morality" is different from "sexual morality". Simply calling it fruit morality does not make it fruity. A very, very large chunk of any legal system, philosophical system and societal system relies on this fact. I recall two individuals free willingness to steal and devour a forbidden apple as being somewhat of a central theme in the religion Lewis situates most of his views within. To declare such an act similar to a situation in which a snake forcefeeds poor Eve an apple would be, well, uh... fruity.
Presupposing that offenses against honesty have similarity to offenses against gratitude, good faith or common humanity is both malarky and terrible jurisprudence.
Indeed, we put sexual impulses in a position of preposterous privilege precisely because doing almost anything else would be inhumane. Because they belong in the same class of impulses wherein we put things such as "A starving man who steals bread" and "A slave who revolts" and "An unhappy partner who flees a relationship" and "A breach of contract by a business partner who finds out his business associates are using his products for malign ends". That is to say, intentional agents performing acts that increase their perceived happiness in contradiction to what might be technically illegal at the time. It might not reduce the illegality of the act, in the sense of the letter of the law, but it rather matters for every single thing we humans value.
>Indeed, we put sexual impulses in a position of preposterous privilege precisely because doing almost anything else would be inhumane. Because they belong in the same class of impulses wherein we put things such as "A starving man who steals bread" and "A slave who revolts" and "An unhappy partner who flees a relationship" and "A breach of contract by a business partner who finds out his business associates are using his products for malign ends".
...One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong...
On what level is someone getting a divorce because they're unhappy comparable to a starving man stealing food or a literal slave revolting against their masters? Wouldn't a more accurate comparison be someone stealing food because he's unhappy with the food he ordered, or an anarchist throwing Molotov's because he is unhappy that laws exist?
The fact that a car cannot consent to be stolen and a wife can conspire with a lover to abandon her husband doesn't change the harm done, or the violation of trust, or the broken promises. I have a car, and I am married, and let me tell you I would far prefer to have someone steal my car than convince my wife to break our marriage.
I have to agree, the two things aren't comparable: one is simple theft while the other is betrayal and abandonment: potentially even kidnapping in spirit, if she decides to take the kids with her. My two lovely girls and the wife I adore, gone: I would be devastated. A car can be replaced, but a broken family can't.
Yet (except for a few anarcho-communist types) nobody looks approvingly on car theft; yet in our society men and women are excused or even praised for committing far worse acts as long as they committed them in the service of pursuing sexual fulfillment and happiness. Imagine if a man swindles his customers, betrays his business partners, and defrauds his investors and then excuses it all by saying "I was unhappy as a poor man. So as an intentional agent I performed acts to increase my perceived happiness: isn't that what all we humans value?" Yet if a man swindles his wife with false promises, betrays his marriage vows to her, and defrauds her of the future he had promised her, it is apparently quite excusable as long as he was unhappy.
This would be a very good argument for why gratifying your sexual desires in ways that cause harm to others - such as rape, sexual harassment, and public masturbation - are bad. It would also be a good argument for why prioritizing your sexual desires in ways that harm yourself - sex addiction, porn addiction, spending inordinate amounts of time masturbating at the expense of other activities - are also bad (though obviously not nearly as bad as the former category, and not bad enough to warrant any sort of legal action to prevent it).
But progressives (and damn near everyone else) would agree that those things are bad, which leads me to suspect that Lewis isn't arguing against them at all. Rather, he's arguing against any consensual sex that occurs outside of heterosexual marriage, and possibly against all forms of non-reproductive sex even if they do occur in a heterosexual marriage. And for that purpose, it's quite a poor argument, because the analogies don't match. It's bad to steal food because that harms the person you stole from; it's bad for a sentry to fall asleep on guard duty because he's failing to do his job properly; it's bad to indulge in excessive overeating and substance abuse because those things are physically bad for your health. In all of those cases, there's a *reason* for people to restrain their own desires; it's only with sex that Lewis demands restraint for the sake of restraint unless a very specific and narrow set of conditions are met.
The specific essay, which I would encourage you to read, is actually primary about divorce. With a focus on divorces where a partner abandons the marriage because they've fallen in love with someone else:
"'After all,' said Clare. 'they had a right to happiness.'
"We were discussing something that once happened in our own neighborhood. Mr. A. had deserted Mrs. A. and got his divorce in order to marry Mrs. B., who had likewise got her divorce in order to marry Mr. A. And there was certainly no doubt that Mr. A. and Mrs. B. were very much in love with one another. If they continued to be in love, and if nothing went wrong with their health or their income, they might reasonably expect to be very happy.
"It was equally clear that they were not happy with their old partners. Mrs. B. had adored her husband at the outset. But then he got smashed up in the war. It was thought he had lost his virility, and it was known that he had lost his job. Life with him was no longer what Mrs. B. had bargained for. Poor Mrs. A., too. She had lost her looks—and all her liveliness. It might be true, as some said, that she consumed herself by bearing his children and nursing him through the long illness that overshadowed their earlier married life.
"You mustn’t, by the way, imagine that A. was the sort of man who nonchalantly threw a wife away like the peel of an orange he’d sucked dry. Her suicide was a terrible shock to him. We all knew this, for he told us so himself. 'But what could I do?” he said. “A man has a right to happiness. I had to take my one chance when it came.'"
Later in the essay he writes the following, which you may find relevant:
"And if you protest against this view you are usually met with chatter about the legitimacy and beauty and sanctity of “sex” and accused of harboring some Puritan prejudice against it as something disreputable or shameful. I deny the charge. Foam-born Venus . . . golden Aphrodite . . . Our Lady of Cyprus . . . I never breathed a word against you. If I object to boys who steal my nectarines, must I be supposed to disapprove of nectarines in general? Or even of boys in general? It might, you know, be stealing that I disapproved of.
"The real situation is skillfully concealed by saying that the question of Mr. A’s “right” to desert his wife is one of “sexual morality.” Robbing an orchard is not an offense against some special morality called “fruit morality.” It is an offense against honesty. Mr. A’s action is an offense against good faith (to solemn promises), against gratitude (toward one to whom he was deeply indebted) and against common humanity.
"Our sexual impulses are thus being put in a position of preposterous privilege. The sexual motive is taken to condone all sorts of behavior which, if it had any other end in view, would be condemned as merciless, treacherous, and unjust."
I would encourage you again to read the essay before making assumptions about what Lewis is or isn't arguing for. I would say that for sex the broad Christian objection to extramarital sex isn't restraint for the sake of restraint, but rather that sex produces children, human children are born helpless and require adults to care for them, and that parents have a duty to provide and care for their children. Marriage is a covenant between a man and a women that binds them to care for each other and for any children they produce. To have sex outside of marriage is to risk becoming a parent with a partner who may have no commitment to you or your children, and risks creating children who will be born without parents to care for them.
Lewis actually talks about this in a different essay, "Christian Apologetics" which was compiled from a speech he gave to Anglican priests about evangelizing to Englishman:
"A sense of sin is almost totally lacking. Our situation is thus very different from that of the Apostles. The Pagans (and still more the metuentes) to whom they preached were haunted by a sense of guilt and to them the Gospel was, therefore, "good news." We address people who have been trained to believe that whatever goes wrong in the world is someone else's fault—the capitalists', the government's, the Nazis', the generals', etc. They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world.
"In attacking this fatal insensibility it is useless to direct attention (a) To sins your audience do not commit, or (b) To things they do, but do not regard as sins. They are usually not drunkards. They are mostly fornicators, but then they do not feel fornication to be wrong. It is, therefore, useless to dwell on either of these subjects. (Now that contraceptives have removed the obviously uncharitable element in fornication I do not myself think we can expect people to recognize it as sin until they have accepted Christianity as a whole.)"
Of course contraceptives are far from 100% effective, and the growing population of single mothers and children raised in fatherless homes gives us a good sign that contraceptives have not completely gotten rid of the "obviously uncharitable element in fornication".
"They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world."
I understand why this seems blasphemous from a Christian perspective, but from a secular point of view, questioning the rules that you're expected to follow is just common sense. Indeed, it's a foundational principle of democracy, and thus of modern society and culture in general: we elect leaders who are expected to justify their policies with better arguments than "because I said so." Even in autocratic regimes, this is true to an extent; the whole reason that authoritarians rely so heavily on propaganda is because they still need to justify their draconian policies to the masses, even if those justifications are blatant lies.
The issue isn't even about "whether [God] can be acquitted for creating such a world." It's more about the fact that a God who expects people to follow his arbitrary rules simply because he'll punish you otherwise would be the absolute worst kind of petty megalomaniacal despot. It would make him *morally worse than Dracula,* because at least Ol' Vlad was ostensibly acting to protect the people of Wallachia from the twin threat of foreign invasion and domestic crime. And death by impalement, while horrifically cruel and gruesome and sadistic by human standards, is still an infinitely more merciful punishment (and I mean infinitely in the most literal sense!) than eternal damnation. This conception of God, which the more brutish, reactionary, Levitican Christians seem intent on reifying and deifying, is more akin to Darkseid from DC Comics than to any sort of All-Loving Creator - just about the absolute furthest thing from any benevolent divinity that I would consider worthy of worship.
Granted, a lot of Christians will claim that God's rules aren't arbitrary because "He knows what's best for us," or because God IS goodness in some abstract way. But that's only convincing if you're already 100% convinced that Christianity is true and correct in all particulars. For anyone else, "the Christian God says that it's wrong to be queer" carries as much weight as "the Unitarian Universalist God says that it's perfectly fine to be queer," or "the Goddess of Love and Pleasure says that it's actively good to be queer," or "the Jewish God says that it's wrong for men to be queer but fine for women," or "the (Iranian) Islamic God says that it's wrong to be homosexual but fine to be transgender," or "the Cathar God says that it's wrong to have any kind of sex at all, even if it's for reproductive purposes in a heterosexual marriage." Or, for that matter, lovely claims like "Moloch says it's virtuous to throw infants into the furnace to satisfy his all-encompassing hunger" and "Huitzilopochtli says it's virtuous to commit ritual human sacrifice in his name so he has the strength to fend off the Eternal Night." Who's to say which is *really* best for us?
"Of course contraceptives are far from 100% effective, and the growing population of single mothers and children raised in fatherless homes gives us a good sign that contraceptives have not completely gotten rid of the "obviously uncharitable element in fornication"."
Is this really your primary objection? If there was a new form of contraception that was 100% effective and so cheap, commonplace, and simple that almost everyone used it all the time, would you change your stance here? Does this mean that you support homosexuality, since it can't result in unwanted pregnancies? Or that you actively encourage men to get vasectomies and women to get tubal ligation surgery, in order to ensure that they don't produce any illegitimate children? Or, at the very least, that you support extensive sex education programs in school that teach about preventive methods like condoms and birth controls, since those have been statistically proven to reduce teen pregnancies more than abstinence-only courses?
No, the effectiveness of contraceptives are not my only objection. My point was simply that characterizing Christian restrictions on sex as "restraint for restraint's sake" is not accurate.
"They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world."
Of course! If there had been some supernatural entity that was responsible for the human condition, that was the author of the "thousand shocks the flesh is heir to", it would be hard to imagine a sufficiently severe punishment for it. That anyone would choose to be civil to such a thing, let alone obey it or worship it, strikes me as deeply alien.
Do you feel the same way about your parents? They are directly responsible for your existence. Even if they did not choose to conceive you, if existence as a human is as evil as you put it (so evil that "it would be hard to imagine a sufficiently sever punishment for" creating it) then wouldn't your parents be guilty for not drowning you when you were a newborn?
That anyone would be so ungrateful for the gift of existence as you are strikes me as deeply alien, yet we're both here.
I think you misunderstand the thrust of the "Born this Way" argument: It is very specifically a rebuke to the traditional Abrahamic view of human development, not an assertion that being born with a tendency makes that tendency unobjectionable. The Abrahamic faiths demonize homosexuality and maintain that it is a choice, something outside of God's plan for Creation. Now obviously, from a materialist standpoint, there would be no sound reason for demonizing homosexuality, even were it a choice, but it is useful, in seeking to dissuade others of their religiously-instilled prejudice, to be able to point to the innate nature of sexuality, thereby showing that their reason for shunning homosexuality is at odds with reality. Why would a God that hated same sex-intercourse create the New Mexico Whiptail Lizard?
I would say this is a very poor and inaccurate description of those religions. Most adherents would explicitly disavow your position as at best a bad misunderstanding, at median a heresy, and at the worst, a bad-faith polemic.
By the same token you might ask "Why would a God that hated murder create chimpanzees?" Or "Why would a God that hated rape create ducks?" (I had a few pet ducks as a child and let me tell you, they are not gentle lovers).
The born this way argument was meant to soften the hearts of religious people by communicating to them that they did not choose to have these sexual desires, and are physically incapable of changing them. That makes homosexuals easier for religious people to tolerate: it casts them as unfortunates instead of hedonists. But it doesn't change anything about the morality of homosexual acts from the religionist's perspective, just how sympathetic the person performing the acts is.
Essentially, there is nothing morally wrong with being a pedophile. Acting on this predilection may be, depending on the prevailing legal/moral views. Legalities are an entirely different matter.
I’ll bite that bullet: yeah, there is something morally wrong about being a pedophile. It is morally wrong to sexually fantasize about children. Indulging this lust in your heart is corrupting, and the only proper response is for the afflicted person to condemn their own thoughts as perverted, cruel, and unworthy.
I do not consider pedophilia to be special in this way. It is also wrong to fantasize about robbing and murdering. I do not consider persons who properly condemn their own desires about these things to be acting wrongly.
What's the point of making up thought crimes?
> It is also wrong to fantasize about robbing and murdering.
So I guess most of entertainment (video games, movies etc.) is out?
I think he means it in a more serious way, like "planning out the details of a crime" that you might actually commit? If not, then I think he's wrong about that too.
I’m sorry, maybe I don’t understand—do you go to movies because you have a more or less lifelong desire to see people murdered? You purposefully seek out movies to gratify and satiate your desire to see people killed?
I do, in fact, think that films which obviously glory in violence or crime are pretty vile, and to go to a movie to enjoy watching someone simulate murder is a pretty nasty habit.
Its not weird if you consider it's probably rooted in religious thinking and most people are religious. If god exists and he makes you a certain way, that way is probably divine right?
Yep, if someone is born attracted exclusively to children, they just have to be incels. Which is perfectly doable - despite huge amount of (non-pedo) incels in the present, there's no plague of rapes.
Isn't the whole "born this way" just part of false dichotomy, where it's supposedly in opposition to "it's a choice"?
Which is silly - I would imagine the larger part of my preferences for _anything_ are neither inborn nor chosen, but an effect of the environment and events in my life. Studies also support this for homosexuality.
("Born in the wrong body" seems to be the same kind of thing.)
"the relevant difference between homosexuality and pedophilia is moral, not biological." (edited for clarity) <- I believe this is how you quote it out of context.
“Commenters on Astral Codex Ten have made inflammatory statements such as ‘the relevant difference between’ “ etc.
Thinking a bit more about it, Scott has already come up with a superior solution years ago - just write inflammatory sentences in pig latin.
"he further followed it up with a lengthy comment on the moral qualities of torture. 'I believe most people break under torture', went the comment."
also, his pseudonym has 14 letters, which is a not-so-subtle reference to "14 words"
Well, I learned something new and unpleasant today.
I didn't realize the white supremacists or the ADL types went in for numerology.
N this N was N a N great N post N.
The inserted 'N's make parts of this virtually illegible. Honestly, at this point, does it really make a material difference to you if some media outlet takes something you said out of context, yet again?
I didn't find them that bad and in fact found it kind of funny in small doses. I definitely wouldn't want to read more posts with this as a common technique though.
Catching them at it might be fun.
I wonder if this is a difference in decoding or reading method and Scott just didn't think it would be difficult to read with the Ns. I don't perceive much difference in the sentences with Ns vs the sentences without; I think that, prepared in advance to ignore them, my brain mostly ignores them the way you'd ignore periods or underscores.
My experience was the same as yours. I didn't find them detrimental.
I was expecting N’s instead of spaces, which would be very hard to read, but we got N’s with additional spaces, which turned out to be much easier to read.
From the description in the opening paragraph, I thought he meant he would literally replace spaces with Ns, aNbitNlikeNthis. So I found what he actually did strikingly readable compared to that.
I find it amusing that Scott is basically attempting to reverse engineer the writing that gets inserted into media pieces. It's the same vibe as hacking the universe by brute-forcing the names of God.
STILL 👏 A 👏 LOT 👏 LESS 👏 SILLY 👏 THAN 👏 WRITING 👏 LIKE 👏 THIS 👏 AS 👏 CERTAIN 👏 KINDS 👏 OF 👏 PEOPLE 👏 ON 👏 TWITTER 👏 ARE 👏 WONT 👏 TO 👏 DO
Let's👏talk👏pockets👏pockets👏sold👏separately.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adPXDTvADD0
I'm in love with this thread branch.
Easier to read than the 'N's, though.
Strong disagree.
Yeah, I have a much easier time filtering separators that I don't process as symbols. I could work with emojis, Chinese characters, hieroglyphics, silent punctuation marks...but I can't not read letters.
How did all those people make it through elementary school without learning that it's one clap per syllable?
I found them to be perfect legible, and a totally reasonable precaution.
I would not describe them as either "perfectly legible" or "totally reasonable" but I've made my thoughts clearer in another post.
It has the same vibe as the old disclaimers you'd find on pirate BBS relying on "the Internet Privacy Act signed by Bill Clinton" that prohibited all law enforcement or public safety personnel from visiting the site, "not even firemen".
Really? I found it very easy to read still. Wonder what type of difference this is.
After the first half-sentence or so I was able to read those passages fairly normally, though my brain did seem to maintain a "this is an N-sentence" flag in the background. Hopefully if this continues for a year the next SSC survey will help find what correlates with difficulty or ease at reading these passages.
Have you ever delved into likely theories of what may driv emale obligate homosexuality? Do you find Greg Cochran's 'germ' theory plausible? https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/greg-cochrans-gay-germ-hypothesis-an-exercise-in-the-power-of-germs/
I think "what drives homosexuality" is a different question from "is homosexuality increasing now"?
What drives homosexuality is *probably* (no evidence for this except what makes sense to me) the fact that it's very hard to fit an imperative like "have sex with women, women are people with such and such characteristics" into DNA in a way where it unfolds and is readable by the brain. Whatever system implements this is some kind of dumb hack, similar to the thing where birds identify their mother by having a red spot on their heads, and if a human wears a red spot on their heads the birds will think it's their mother. But much more complicated and multidimensional. Probably this mechanism fails sometimes producing various unusual fetishes or sexualities.
There's probably some base rate of this system failing. It seems plausible to me that it could fail more often now, either because of germs, pollution, or whatever. It also seems to me like this system could be very dependent on social context, and in a social context where people are often gay, the system gets confused more often. But this is all speculation. I remember Cochran had some good evidence, but I can't remember what it was.
Going by wild extrapolation from stereotypes, such a theory seems to predict that brothers of lesbians would be unusually eager to commit to long-term romance and cohabitation with a woman... which I suspect might be difficult to measure accurately, due to various confounding factors in the cultural context. Not exactly strong evidence against, at least.
Historically rich men had more kids than the poor ones due to widespread polygyny and better childcare. Europe was an outlier by practicing monogamy since the beginning of history.
Even in contemporary US men in the top 0.1% of wealth have higher than average fertility. Fertility is generally decreasing with wealth but the pattern changes at the highest levels of wealth.
I strongly doubt evolution could encode anything as complex as "absolute wealth" OR "relative wealth" into our brains, especially not in the mere 4000 years that wealth (as an abstraction that goes beyond "has a full belly") has existed.
We do seem to care an awful lot about relative wealth. I don't think we instinctively care at all about absolute wealth, since just about all living humans are far wealthier than our ancestors. Even extremely poor people who struggle to find enough food seem to be doing better than their ancestors in an absolute sense.
We could care about relative wealth in primitive environments, and likely did. If you have a tribe of 100 people and the chief and his family eat 20% of the food available while the rest of the tribe starves, people are going to care about that a lot.
What do you think of the theory that bisexuality is an adaptive sexual strategy (increases the number of possible partners, makes you “better at sex / seduction”) but that exclusive homosexuality is sort of bisexuality cranked up to 11 as a byproduct of getting too many bisexual genes (sort of like sickle cell trait, or your theory that things like autism and schizophrenia are the maladaptive long tails of otherwise beneficial distributions)?
I think I’ve seen it observed that historically gay men actually had a pretty similar rate of reproductive success to purely heterosexual men, and therefore our intuition that a “gay gene” must by necessarily be something heavily selected against by evolution.
That sounds pretty nonsensical to me.
For starters, if bisexuality were adaptive, then we'd expect to see a lot more bisexuals. Instead bisexuality (especially among men and not among girls-who-are-totally-bi-because-guys-think-it's-hot-and-they-made-out-with-their-friend-at-a-party-one-time) is even less common than homosexuality.
I think you’re applying present-day gay culture too much to the question. Historically “exclusive homosexual” would have been more rare and gay men would (out of social obligation etc.) ended up having enough sex with women to father children, and same-sex coupling could have some other adaptive role that made it stick around.
We aren’t 100% bisexual because it could be maladaptive for a couple reasons - “too much of a good thing” where a heavy dose of “gay genes” makes you uninterested in the opposite sex at all, plus probably sexually transmitted disease being more common among those with more partners.
It seems pretty obvious to me that girls who are bi enough to make out with other girls to turn guys on are evolutionarily well adapted.
Also, I think bisexuality is more common than you think. Among millennials/early gen-Z in broadly "liberal" contexts (I'm an American grad student), I estimate that about half of my friends will claim to be bi in private conversation, and there's no strong male/female bias there. More specifically, I estimate that a majority (51% or more) of humans are Kinsey 1-5, but for social reasons they may behave and/or publicly identify as "straight" or "gay" or "bi" somewhat independently of biological/psychological predisposition.
The actual Kinsey reports say that >60% of postpubertal women are Kinsey 0 and something like 50% of postpubertal men are Kinsey 0.
Whether 1 and 5 should count as bisexual is also pretty dubious.
>Instead bisexuality (especially among men and not among girls-who-are-totally-bi-because-guys-think-it's-hot-and-they-made-out-with-their-friend-at-a-party-one-time) is even less common than homosexuality.
The Kinsey Reports disagree with you. Scoring 2/3/4 is more likely than scoring 5/6 for both sexes.
>I think I’ve seen it observed that historically gay men actually had a pretty similar rate of reproductive success to purely heterosexual men,
Do you meant that "gay men were forced in sham marriages because of homophobia, and therefore had to reproduce"? Well, many societies in Asia never had any laws against homosexuality, China and Japan copied these from the west.
Also, given that child mortality was high and picking optimal time for conception was unknown then, just replacement level fertility would requre quite a lot of sexual acts, why a man probably wouldn't do it he doesn't enjoy it.
“ gay men were forced in sham marriages because of homophobia, and therefore had to reproduce” Yes, and many of the women had to engage in less-than-enthusiastically-consented sex too. And a lot of the marriages between pure heterosexuals were for reasons other than maximum sexual compatibility. The past kind of sucked for sexual freedom. My point here was not to debate sexual morality but just to raise a theory I’d heard about why a drive toward homosexual behavior might have been adaptive evolutionarily despite facially being the opposite.
“ why a man probably wouldn't do it he doesn't enjoy it.”
The point of the theory is that most of them were at least a little bi, and therefore enjoyed it well enough. “So exclusively gay they never have sex with the opposite sex” would obviously still be evolutionarily maladaptive, hence me characterizing it in this context as “too much of a good thing”.
Compulsory heterosexuality has historically been enforced by a lot of mechanisms other than criminal law. These include but are not limited to:
1. Family/tribal expectations. Arranged marriages are extremely common throughout history in most of the world. While marrying a different opposite-sex partner was sometimes an option, marrying a same-sex partner was not, and refusing to marry incurred huge social costs.
2. Gender roles. In nearly all societies, boys and girls traditionally learned different skills as children; both sets of skills were essential to survival in the preindustrial world.
3. Children-as-a-resource. While contemporary societies tend to see children as at best an investment and at worst a burden, children in preindustrial societies were seen as positive contributors to the family from an early age. A child as young as five or six can contribute more than they consume in a hunter-gatherer or subsistence-farming family. Adult children and their children were the main sources of support in old age. So even if they managed to overcome all the social obstacles, a same-sex couple (or worse, a single individual) would start off materially worse off than a fertile opposite-sex couple, and would fall further behind with age.
Some societies did create alternative niches for people who were unable to fit into their standard roles, from monk/shaman/priesthoods to third-gender ceremonial roles to professional soldiers to various ad-hoc allowances for solitary life as a hermit/seer/herbalist/midwife/whatever. It seems likely that people we'd recognize today as Kinsey 6s and binary trans women disproportionately occupied those niches. But so did people with psychotic disorders, autism, extreme trauma, etc. and...really there just weren't enough people living alternative lifestyles in most societies to account for everyone we'd expect to struggle with being 'normal.'
Rome is an interesting example, where it seems that sex between men was fairly common, and not particularly remarkable, except that if you were in the “receptive” role it was considered “unmanly”.
For a citizen male, you might have a male slave (Rome ran on slaves to a pretty wild degree) known as a concubinus that was a designated lover prior to marriage. He was supposed to set him aside after marriage - but the master engaging in sex with the slaves (of both sexes) after marriage seems to have been very common anyway, and so long as the “marital duties” were performed, again not considered particularly remarkable or scandalous.
Which provides another niche for Kinsey 6s, namely providing a sexual outlet for Kinsey 2-5s as a slave and/or prostitute. Not a particularly pleasant niche, but there were worse ones in Rome…
For most of human history it's probably far more a case of "we expect you, like everyone else, to marry and have children for the sake of the tribe", because this is what matters socially.
Some cultures add draconian rules against homosexuality to this, while others don't care what you do in your free time as long as you do your part for the continuation of the society.
Anything that diverts your effort toward matings that can't produce children will be selected against vs just matings that can.
> I think I’ve seen it observed that historically gay men actually had a pretty similar rate of reproductive success to purely heterosexual men
Nonsense. Heterosexuality is not some default lowest-energy state. It's an adaptation that evolved because selection favors it.
Male obligate homosexuality is both common (3% of the population?) and bad for reproductive fitness (in Australia, only about 10% of gay men are fathers, vs 60% of men as a whole). So it does pose a certain paradox.
Lots of male animals will have sex with other males - but they still breed with females. It's very odd for male to completely ignore females and only want males. As far as I know, we only see this in two animals: humans and sheep.
Fetishes and paraphilias are different: a man who's into women dressed in latex still probably passes on their genes. They're not quite an evolutionary paradox in the same way.
Obviously nobody's found a gay germ, so Cochran's theory is a bit speculative. His thinking is that it might not even be a germ but an immune reaction that messes up some part of the brain (similar to how narcolepsy is believed to be an autoimmune disease).
Could be there's separate "attracted to males" and "attracted to females" circuitry latent in everybody, so to speak, and some other shift in brain development glitched out the system which ensures the opposite-gender attraction circuit installs and activates, causing it to fail a significant percentage of the time, but said mutation simultaneously provided such an overwhelming fitness advantage for other reasons that there was never sufficient cause to evolve a patch. After all, human brains and skin clearly have key differences from their close relatives in the primate family, even before birth, and that seems to have something to do with their rapid spread across such a wide range of environments. Sheep neurobiology I'm not as familiar with.
“10% of gay men are fathers” - is this piece of present-day information useful though? Effective birth control means a lot less unplanned births than would have common in an evolutionary context. Also, if you’re only surveying men who identify as gay, as opposed to all men who have ever had sex with other men, you’re going to entirely miss the “adaptive bisexuality” of the theory I’m proposing.
It's not really a paradox at all.
It would be a paradox if gay fathers had a high chance of passing on their "gayness". But they don't! I don't even think that having a gay father increases your odds of being gay whatsoever.
So, this leaves three options that I can think of. Either
A. Being gay is some kind of accident that wasn't intended by the body to be passed along, like autism.
B. Obligate homosexuality is cultural (unlikely but possible)
C. There's some benefit to the community that someone is an obligate homosexuality (also feels unlikely to me, but also possible)
And who knows, maybe I'm totally wrong on this.
I also think part of what may make homosexuality different from other paraphilias is that the target you end up on still *is* a legitimate target both in terms of evolution/genes and in terms of social scripts and culture, just not the intended target for you.
Like, if there are genes for mate targeting in humans, presumably there are genes for targeting men and genes for targeting women (or some much more complex process where the same genes lead to different behavior in the presence of different hormones or etc.), so it's easy to understand how the 'wrong' set of extremely common, normal genes get expressed in someone. Or if genes interact with society and culture during upbringing to define your targets, it's easy to see how growing up in a culture where you are exposed to both scripts for targeting men and scripts for targeting women, you adopt the 'wrong' one, or both.
Whereas there are hopefully no genes and no social scripts for targeting children at all, or for targeting animals or dead people or any other paraphilia. Which makes it seem like maybe a different mechanism could be in play there.
One of Kinsey's big mistakes, I think, was defining attraction in terms of hetero/homo ratio, rather than "attracted to men" and "attracted to women" as fully independent variables.
Yeah, I agree, sexual preference is encoded via some glitchy system. The glitchiness probably also accounts for kinks. Whatever tells people to have intercourse with others can very easily slide sideways a bit andalso tell them to whip others, get whipped by them, seek out partners wearing latex, pee on partners, etc etc.
>fit an imperative like "have sex with women, women are people with such and such characteristics" into DNA...
It's far more complicated than that, because whether it's "women" or "men" seems to be largely-though-not-entirely driven by prenatal hormones (1), and whether it's "girls/boys" or "men/women" seems to be driven by a maturation process that's at least somewhat susceptible to environmental effects (2).
So the DNA has to encode, separately, "have sex with people" as a switch that gets flipped on at puberty regardless of sex; "those people should be female" as a switch that gets toggled on by prenatal testosterone; and "those people should show X degree of sexual maturity" as a slider that adjusts automatically with age but is partly-sensitive to environmental cues.
This sort of flexible, multidimensional system is even harder to encode than just "have sex with women," and introduces a whole bunch of additional failure points. Most human sexual "targeting errors" seem to revolve around those switching failure points, where an individual's pattern of sexual attraction would be normal in a differently-configured person (4).
1. Check out sexuality findings on girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia and girls with complete vs. partial androgen insensitivity syndrome: prenatal testosterone is quite clearly involved in directing sexual attraction toward women, and there's a dose-response relationship. On the other hand, cisgender non-intersex lesbians and gay men exist.
2. It's normal for preteens to be attracted to other preteens, but abnormal for adults to be attracted to preteens; whether~it's~normal~for~adults~to~be attracted~to~mid-teens~seems~to vary~by~culture~and~the~age~of~the~adult (3).
3. Whether an attraction is 'normal' is orthogonal to whether acting on it would be morally-permissible. It's normal to be attracted to an adult whose judgment is impaired by alcohol/drugs/severe active mental illness/severe intellectual disability, but unethical to act on it. In contrast, it's somewhat abnormal to be attracted to a same-sex adult, but nearly all secular ethicists agree that it's ethical to act on same-sex attraction under the same constraints that apply to hetero relationships.
4. We really don't see a whole lot of targeting errors at the baseline "have sex with people" level except where we've intentionally created objects to fool the targeting system, like porn. Errors that would be relevant in the ancestral environment, like bestiality, are very rare. The most common failure mode at this level is asexuality, which is a switching error: normal in young children but not in adults.
Similarly, it's quite hard to fit an imperative like "eat sugars, fats, and proteins, which are identifiable by such and such characteristics" into DNA in a way where it unfolds and is readable by the brain.
Which is why, of course, 3-4% of the population is afflicted by pica and routinely starves to death.
Pretty sure "attempted to eat something inappropriate" is a major factor in infant morality, yeah. Among adults. ingestion of dangerous neurotoxins such as capsaicin and ethanol is so frequent that deliberate lifelong avoidance would be more noteworthy than occasional short-term incapacitation.
No, in fact, "attempted to eat something inappropriate" is not a major factor in infant mortality. Did you bother to look before bullshitting?
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf
2011 US statistics on infant mortality: 23,907 dead, 52 from "Accidental inhalation and ingestion of food or other objects causing obstruction of
respiratory tract". 0.2% of all infant deaths.
Preindustrial infant mortality rates were far worse, a significant portion of which was attributable to diarrhea from foodborne illness. Modern understanding of necessary electrolyte mix for rehydration therapy, toys designed to avoid choking hazards, and various other public health measures allowed those mishaps to become less frequent and more survivable, by orders of magnitude, but the kid's own taste buds and instinctive responses don't deserve much of the credit for all that.
Oh, but Scott, I do want the taxonomy that correctly identifies mental disorders the way your N'd statements above do. I want that very much. That would be psychology finally getting off its ass and doing something useful. You could have a dual-classification scheme: 1) is this maladaptive in the patient's current environs? and 2) is there reason to think it's biologically maladaptive in the EEA? In the case of your two listed sexual targeting errors, the answer is overall yes to 1 and 2 for both.
2 is honestly mostly pointless, but it might be nice to identify situations where the disorder is understandable for deep reasons, like hoarding, which is obviously an adaptive trait that agrarianism beat into our ancestors over millennia, but which has aged out of usefulness in developed society.
With hoarding you have to draw a line between hoards that are useful in rare situations vs. hoards that are useless. Keeping 20L of water in the cupboard is of positive mean value, but a lot of people would label it "maladaptive" because recent experience will usually show it not being useful.
I think the line is normally drawn at "impacting the rest of your life". If you have 200 porcelain dolls neatly in display cases, it's a weird hobby. If you have them strewn over every flat surface such that most of your house is unusable, it's hoarding.
You're sidestepping the normative question. It's relevant to ask "SHOULD this be maladaptive?". If you treat current environs as immutable, you come to pretty unintuitive conclusions like "wanting to leave a cult is a mental illness" (environmentally maladaptive because it's not very fun to live in a cult if you don't want to, biologically maladaptive because leaving a group that feeds you is always a bad idea in the EEA).
On the cult point, I think one of the diagnostic criteria for any "disorder" has to do with whether this is a pattern or specific to a situation. It's highly adaptive in modern America to leave cults, but I do think a pattern of leaving every group you join over and over does probably point to an illness that would satisfy both criterion 1 and criterion 2 in my comment. Similarly joining lots of cults over and over.
I will continue to sidestep normative questions, that's the only thing to do with normative questions, is-ought etc.
It seems to me that calling something a "disorder" is in and of itself making a normative claim, generally some subset of "they ought to behave differently", "society ought to accommodate them", "someone ought to give them a helping hand", etc.
Looking back at your post, I see that you haven't made any specific ought claims. I may be assuming too much about your position. If that's the case, do you mind explaining how you would define a "disorder" in solely descriptive terms?
A disorder means they're upset enough about it (or someone else is, to force them) to see a psychologist/psychiatrist. It doesn't matter if that ought to happen at all, but I personally think it would be more useful (in my own observed preference, whether that preference ought to be met or not) if the diagnostic those professionals used was more like the one I suggest.
Someone being upset about something - i.e. something is causing them psychological distress in the jargon of a clinician - such that they believe something should change is pregnant with oughtness. They are saying "I ought to be different than this." A desire is a mental state that some state of affairs should obtain.
You really can't escape the judgment, "This is bad and it should be different."
Aside from the symptoms specific to each disorder, the DSM leans heavily on two other things -- causes distress to the person and impairs functioning in key domains (work, school, relationships, causes legal problems).
Both distress and functional impairment import a lot of historically and culturally specific factors that suggest various kinds of "ought" to people.
I can't help it that so few other people are error theorists. I just do my best. Tautologically-speaking, that is.
I think it depends on the cult. Heaven's Gate is bad for your Darwinian fitness, other cults could quite plausibly be good for it.
How on Earth is 2 useful? We could also ask if it's biologically maladaptive in first century Rome, but only a few historians are going to care about that question.
Why think there is one EEA? Surely at least some of the traits we share with other mammals were adaptive in the Cretaceous mammal environment even if they’ve never been adaptive since. There’s no reason to think lactose tolerance and sneeze reflexes and all the various sexual instincts we have were adaptive in the same environment.
Tagged "a post I will regret having written" I assume.
Why do you think so?
On Slate Star Codex, "things I will regret writing" was his tag for anything culture-warry/politically controversial.
Ah, I see - thanks!
I think in the future you should use a marker other than "N". Having the word "a" surrounded by Ns looks like "N a N" which makes me think of NaN, the floating point number value. And "all N things N" makes me think of a mathematical theorem.
Maybe you can use the Hebrew letter aleph, or one of the weirder Greek letters like the one that's not Zeta?
I can imagine that going badly. What if the journalist's computer can't render the aleph, so it shows up as little squares or something? The journalist might recognize it as a formatting issue but not realize that there's supposed to be something there, and just remove them to fix the formatting issue.
It's 2023, everybody's computer has supported Unicode for the better part of a decade now.
Yes, but it provides an excuse to remove the letters in question and take the quote out of context. Why make it easier to do so?
Someone called me?
Personally, I would like to note that he replaced " " with " N ", not with just N as he said he would.
So long as he doesn't use U+1F44F CLAPPING HANDS SIGN for that...
What's the point of using that? Are/were there literal automods on Twitter?
no it's just for emphasis
Wow, that's obnoxious.
My impression is that the intended meaning is "this should be obvious but you're so dense I need to shout and clap my hands in order for you to listen", never mind that the actual statement is usually something not actually anywhere near uncontroversial.
I read it more like a junior school teacher leading an alphabet chant. Imparting basic information in a patronising manner when directed at adults.
I suggest "N" should be avoided because you know, there is the controversial "letter-between-M-and-O-word".
Fully agreed. Trying to come up with fully biological explanations for human behavior seems to be mostly some kind of "Hard Sciences Fetish", a silly attempt to remove humanness from human behavior. In the end of the day pooping is completely biologically determined, but if you pooped your pants on a board meeting that biological explanation wouldn't go very far.
Is it purely biologically determined when potty training is mostly universal?
you'd lose a lot of status for pooping your pants in a board meeting even if you were suddenly in incredible GI distress and there was nothing you could have done to hold it.
I mean, I think the status loss would be a lot lower if the poop were full of blood - sufficiently bad medical emergency trumps most other considerations
Scott, any opinion on the rapid rise in teenage girls claiming gender disphoria? It certainly looks like a social contagion.
Almost all mental phenomena have some element of social contagion, see https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us for more.
Incredibly interesting post.
"[...] everywhere from Abhkazia to Zanzibar, 1% of the population gets schizophrenia. (the most significant exception is certain groups of immigrants who move from developing to developed countries - expect a blog post on that eventually)"
Did we get that yet?
Probably the same level of underlying condition as always, latching onto a new imprecise term to describe it (might have been normal body dysmorphia/anorexia 50 years ago, might have just been called 'hysteria' 200 years ago, etc).
'Social contagion' suggests to me that a new problem is being created, which I don't believe; the term 'gender dysmorphia' spreading as a meme to classify an existing problem, I buy.
So you think it's a set of kids who would have been messed up in some way involving their body image, and they just grabbed the current label for it?
https://scitechconnect.elsevier.com/rates-of-left-handedness-downs-and-ups/#:~:text=Through%20the%20centuries%2C%20right%2Dhandedness,%2D4%25%20of%20the%20population.
I think the rate of left-handedness explains this phenomenon. Simply put, when left-handedness was seen as wrong/evil, the rates where 1/6th of what they are today. I feel the increased rate of people identifying as gay/transgender is most likely explained by this.
Now, is it the total story? I dunno. That's just my guess.
Since homosexuality pretty clearly is a mental disorder (in addition to the obvious evolutionary mismatch, there's a very high rate of comorbidity with other mental disorders), the problem here seems straightforward. Psychiatry is under the influence of politically motivated activists. As is the rest of the academy. As long as that continues to be the case, squaring the circle of empirical science and politics will be impossible. Indeed as you note, politics and science are intrinsically irreconcilable, so a better way of putting it is: so long as ideologically motivated actors insist on twisting science into pretzels to conform to their preferences about how the world should be, attempts to develop things like biological taxonomies of mental disorders are doomed from the outset.
The solution is quite obvious but a lot of people won't like it.
How is the notion of a 'disorder' not inherently political? If you assume to know the purpose of humanity you're basically starting a secular religion.
Even if you can demonstrate that certain men have evolved to rape that doesn't mean we want to encourage the behavior.
Without any normative statements at all, psychiatry will be reduced to statements of predictive value and that's it. The notion of 'disorder' will disappear.
That's a good point. But then, what is the ideal against which we should compare?
Ideal itself is political. At least when it is applied to people. Ideal is a kind of an abstraction, but this abstraction doesn't work for people. Oh... People tried. For example they tried averages, and have found that there is not one pilot was average[1]. There was another story about Average American Woman, with a few contestants over all the America.
Mathematically speaking, if we have a bunch of points in R^n, with each coordinate in an interval of -1..+1, than all these points fall into a n-dimensional cube with side of 2. But if we define "ideal" or "normal" or call it as you like as a points with distance to the center less than r, then this rule will define a n-dimensional sphere. But when n approaches infinity the "volume" of a sphere divided on the "volume" of a cube goes to zero. It doesn't matter what the value of r. It is a nice visual metaphor of a problem.
But it is just a part of a problem, because there we silently assumed that all parameters have a normal distribution or something like it. It may be not normal, it may be bi-normal, or m-normal. Or normality can be fractal, how can we we know? And in R^n with a sufficiently large n, to look to our limited brains as infinity.
When we start talking about "ideal human" we are already made a political decision to ground all our morality and politics on a bunch of simplifying assumptions, which we cannot clearly state, and which clearly is a threat to an external validity of our theories about people and societies. It is one of the reasons to abandon the very notion of "normal" or "ideal". To free our minds from those silly assumptions that Ancient Greeks endowed us.
There are ways to think about disorders without resorting to "ideal". We can judge the impact of a person's mental condition on his life and on those who is around him.
[1] https://worldwarwings.com/no-such-thing-as-an-average-pilot-1950s-study-suggests/
Hmm, I hadn't really considered the concept of a disorder as normative; if you had asked me to define "mental disorder" I would have said something like: "A condition of the mind which is unusual."
But it seems to me that that would be precisely the way to write an apolitical diagnosis manual. Make no judgement call about the desirability of conditions and leave that up to the patient to decide.
If unusualness were enough, then perfect pitch would be a mental disorder.
You could define it that way if you like, but you'd then need to fill up the DSM with clearly-beneficial and clearly-benign trivialities.
I think you'd need to throw something into your definition about interfering with your ability to live a normal life. Perfect pitch doesn't, but homosexuality does.
Extending your argument in the obvious direction, it seems clear that having perfect pitch could well be debilitating for someone who doesn't have perfect control of their sound environment. I've met several people who wear earplugs as a matter of course to try to regain more control over their aural inputs. I've also observed people with an unusually sensitive sense of smell experiencing distress in ordinary environments, which often contain unpleasant smells at low levels that most people don't notice or can easily ignore.
That's a question of priorities, not empiricism. A value-neutral catalog of well-characterized psychological anomalies could include advice for each - folks with depression or schizophrenia respond well to particular types of therapy and/or medication, folks with perfect pitch or color-number synesthesia have a potential advantage in certain tasks and thus might want to consider related careers, etc.
I'd bite the bullet and define mental disorders as something like "a pattern of thought or behaviour that consistently causes distress or harm to the individual or to other people" (seems to be pretty similar to the definition I looked up) - variation is natural and there's nothing wrong with being unusual, it only causes problems if you can't function in society.
It's pretty hard to function in Afghanistan's society right now if you're a woman interested in higher education. If your interest is too strong, you might even find this causes you severe consequences. It's not hard to imagine a group of people describing the desire in a woman for higher education based on this abnormal behavior that invites negative consequences a form of mental illness. Heck, that this mental illness exists can then be used to justify the need to discourage a desire in women to have higher education.
This is an extreme enough of an example to our sensibilities that it probably reads as absurd, but it does get at an important notion that we're always making these implicit judgments about whether it is reasonable or not that some set of thoughts or behaviors are disrupting a person's capacity to function in society, and sometimes these calls end up being in enough of a grey area that it isn't obvious.
I realise this definition could obviously be abused in cases like that (e.g. in the Soviet Union, only the mentally unwell would question Communism - and they were treated accordingly! ) and I'm not intending to justify that - this is more of a descriptive rather than prescriptive position.
I think it's productive to consider how many psychiatric problems might be conditional on the social setting people find themselves in, ultimately people have to choose whether to change themselves or to change society.
I fully agree with the concept of disorder being inherently political / ethical rather than biological. Where it gets interesting is on things where culture is changing or where you think it *should* change.
Perhaps having some behaviour causes trouble because of how others treat you. That makes it a disorder because it objectively messes with your life and causes serious problems but the reason it does so is just because of unnecessary bigotry or feelings of isolation, so it's a disorder that shouldn't be.
Calling it a disorder is part of what makes it a disorder in this case. Sticking it in a book of disorders perpetuates the reason it is a disorder but leaving it out means you've left out something that is objectively a disorder currently for political / ethical reasons.
Lying & cheating are things we discourage, but aren't considered a "disorder".
I hesitate to engage with this but I would like to suggest that a high rate of comorbidity with other mental disorders is NOT a good argument for considering something a mental disorder, particularly in the case of homosexuality.
First, it's probably obvious that you could certainly find a number of spurious correlations between certain behaviors/preferences (e.g. owning a dog, disliking the outdoors, etc.) and depression. Doing so would not immediately make it "obvious" why these things should be considered mental disorders.
Even in the west, oft considered "the bar" for social progressivism, the massive stigma faced by many young people coming to terms with their sexuality offers a far simpler explanation for the emergence of depression, substance use, suicide, etc. Culturally accepting attitudes are heavily linked with the remittance of these issues. The most immediate study that jumps to mind showed that the establishment of same-sex marriage resulted in approximately 134,000 fewer teens in the US attempting suicide each year.[1]
I also don't think that, evolutionarily, the picture is quite as simple as you are imagining it. It is probably true that, in general, a sexually reproducing animal that is exclusively homosexual will have limited direct reproductive success. In the case of humans, this is a bit less true, as there are many homosexual men and women that, due to stigma, suppress that aspect of their identity and start families. There are also other indirect factors to to be considered.
Finally, I don't really see a clear reason why reproductive fitness should be the sole determinant of whether something is a disorder or not...
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5848493/
The purpose of the sexual instinct is reproduction. If the sexual instinct is redirected away from this such that it becomes much less likely, something is pretty clearly malfunctioning. Since the sexual instinct is psychological, and not say, gastrointestinal, it seems clear that it meets the criteria for a mental disorder on those grounds alone, regardless of whether in some cases those so afflicted manage to reproduce despite this.
Comorbid mental disorders are very widespread in homosexuals. Maybe that's a spurious correlation and maybe it's not. That's worthy of investigation at the very least, unless you're scared of what might be found because your ideology tells you the wrong answers are a no-no and it's more important to you to be nice than to be correct. But then it's already been determined on an a priori basis that homosexuality isn't a mental disorder, so it's a moot point.
Malfunctioning from an evolutionary point of view, perhaps. But why should we care about evolution's POV other than instrumentally? Thanks to culture and critical thought, we don't have to be slaves to the evolutionary imperatives of nature.
As individuals, having children gives meaning and purpose to life in a way like no other. It's something that can only be experienced firsthand.
As a society, having a stable, if not growing population, and as many children as possible raised in stable homes is very much in the common interest.
Same sex couples are perfectly capable of raising children, ex: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4091994
Adoption is the most obvious source of children but there's no reason a same sex couple couldn't find a surrogate or donor, either, other than stigma and such. Not only that, but plenty of closeted men and women do go on to successfully raise families.
Human offspring have been raised primarily by a female parent since the dawn of humanity. Why has it, in the space of about 15 years, suddenly been decided that mothers are no longer important for raising offspring? There have been absolutely no scientifically rigorous studies in that respect. We have preferred to run roughshod over the question in order to make sure nobody feels bad about themselves.
by this logic, should not wanting to have children in general be considered a mental disorder?
Calling it a mental disorder is probably not appropriate, but I'd say that calling it unvirtuous is appropriate.
Are you responding to Alexander? How does your question follow from his logic?
Antisocial behavior perhaps, if antisocial were not confounded by the existing ASPD. Perhaps unsocial or countersocial, or some thing which acknowledges it as unhelpful to the social order while not equating it with "psychopathy."
Right, we don't have to be slaves to biology! Just because the purpose of the digestive system is to provide nutrients to the body doesn't mean there's anything wrong with eating indigestible objects if that's what I want to do.
Actually I am pretty sure that replacing macronutrients (at least those of carbohydrate variety) with non-digestables (a subset of non-soluble dietary fiber) would make quite a large portion of «food as actually consumed in the well-off countries» healthier.
(I remember to have personally seen _some_ 90+% fiber products sold as food inside EU with explicit high-satiation-low-caloric marketing, but unfortunately these are not yet popular enough to have large-scale cost efficiencies)
Fiber helps the digestive system accomplish it's purpose of providing nutrients to the body more effectively. The same wouldn't be true if you were eating shards of glass, or rocks, or hair.
My main point is that by the "we don't have to be slaves to biology" standard disorders such as Pica, or Anorexia, or cutting, would not be valid. Why should we care is someone prefers to eat wood chips and rubber bands? You do you girl. /s
Was this inspired by Crimes of the Future?
No, just by Pica.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)
Though based on the plot summary its a decent exploration of what happens when we are no longer "slaves to biology". Namely that it's horrifying and disgusting.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/fiber/art-20043983
Your Diet Coke, sir....
> Why should we care about evolution?
If in a hundred or so years the western societies have been replaced by more tyrannical cultures that did keep up the birth rates, was feminism et alea than successful?
Don't you think you end up with a paradox if you don't care about evolution? Assume you're a feminist and claim to care deeply about women but achieving your goal causes the long term extinction of your culture that gave women a lot of freedom, did you then really care about women or was it just about the selfish rush of endorphins?
Conversely, if those more tyrannical cultures can't maintain the loyalty of the people who build better machines, to the point that they face crushing defeat on the battlefield despite theoretical superiority in budget and number of troops, has that focus on biological reproduction truly been an asset to their survival?
I asked why we should care about evolution *except instrumentally*. Apparently, replies ignored that. Of course you have to pay attention to the effects of evolution and take them into account. That doesn't give them any moral weight. In the case at issue, IF homosexuality is an evolutionary error, why should we care about that if we no longer need worry about women having lots of children?
I think evolution is what gave our morals weight
We are literally evolved creatures, are we not? Seems we should pay great heed to the directives of evolution. The hardware we run on is quite important, as is its intended mode of operation.
As I said, we should pay attention to evolution and take into account the effects the results of evolution have on us. For instance, a paleo diet makes sense (however you define that) because if you ignore our dietary evolutionary history, you are likely to experience bad health results. We should pay close attention to evolution when it comes to physical, health-related effects. When it comes to behavioral effects, we need to know what evolution "wants" and then decide whether than matches what we want. If it doesn't, and we accept any consequences, there is no moral imperative to be a slave to evolution. You mention the "intended mode of operation" but there is no intended mode. There is only the outcome of evolution. That's a fact but it's not a moral fact.
Should we let woman who need C-sections die, rather than performing surgery?
Because, if you think about it, for each woman who requires a C-section that we save, we're letting her pass on her genes, raising the rate that it will be required in the future.
So, of course, the only solution is to let them all die, right? We must pay great heed to evolution, after all. And why stop there? Having braces makes people who would look ugly look perfectly normal, meaning that their genes are more likely to being passed on. So, we should obviously ban braces.
Do you see why we shouldn't pay any heed to evolution, now?
Good examples. A less drastic one: I am very fair skinned. Given Barnes' apparently unlimited respect for the random outcomes of evolution, I should stay inside, and absolutely never go hiking here in Arizona (which I plan to do tomorrow.) I say: The hell with evolution. I do what I want while acknowledging evolution by hiking while the UV index is low, or covering up, or wearing UV blocker and by wearing sunglasses.
I like this logic. If a woman declines to have sex with me, then her sexual instinct is misdirected, something is malfunctioning, and she clearly meets the criteria for a mental disorder.
You know what else has an evolutionary purpose? Infanticide of the offspring of other males, to make a female available to bear your own offspring.
I hate to say this, but your latter statement isn't as ironclad an example as you seem to think.
Some people do actually want to have a lot of offspring, irrespective of whether they'll know them. One of the better means to do this in the modern world is to become an IVF doctor and surreptitiously replace other people's gametes with your own. This is no hypothetical; there have been real cases of this - and importantly, they tend to take years to be detected, which means the babies can't (all) be aborted.
Punishing this with a jail sentence or even execution doesn't really work, because by the social-Darwinist logic these people tend to follow, they still come out ahead with their 400 babies - more than they could have had had they not done the crime and not been punished.
There is, of course, one way to ensure that no-one can profit by doing this. It's not done in the modern world, because we consider deterring crime less important than avoiding punishing the innocent, but there's a legitimate tradeoff there.
I think you may have misunderstood my implication with that example, but i admit it isnt especially clear. It is only supposed to point out the flaw in valorizing reproductive instincts for their evolutionary purpose, as most people find this behavior in other primates disturbing.
I don't think I did; it's just that if I see a "A because B" argument in which B is wrong (or in this case, dubious), I tend to object even if I agree with A. As I said up the top, I was objecting to your example - not, particularly, your conclusion.
Honestly, the first one isn't a great example either, but for the opposite reason; reversing the sexes would make it hold water from an evolutionary point of view, but as written there's the issue that because pregnancy takes time and resources women are incentivised to be somewhat selective with whose semen winds up inside them.
That is to say, your examples are intended to be things that are favoured by evolutionary incentives and offensive to morality, but in the first case, while horrid, it's not actually favoured by evolutionary incentives, while in the second case, while certainly evolutionarily favoured, there are some significant asterisks on its offensiveness to morality (I would have used the ordinary adultery situation, but one could argue that that's outdated by paternity tests even if in practice they're rarely used). Ultimately, however, I do agree with the conclusion that evolutionarily-favoured =/= good.
Not having your offspring in particular may be more adaptive than you give it credit for.
credit where credit is due, this is a good one. and you may be right! i wont reproduce regardless of anyone elses decisions, though. it would be reprehensible, given the risk they would take after me in certain regards.
Nonsense, female selectivity was favored because it's adaptive.
+1
Behaviors that maximize your number of offspring are not the same thing as maximally morally good behaviors, at least according to approximately any moral systems people actually try to follow. A successful serial rapist in a place with no abortion, a fertility doctor who puts his own sperm into all his female patients, a smarmy dude who knocks up a long sequence of young women and leaves them each with a baby and skips town, a soldier who manages to do a lot of raping of women in conquered territories, a new husband who murders his wife's children by another man--all these are good strategies for maxing out your number of offspring (at least in a world without laws and police), but none of them are morally desirable.
And yet, civilized countries will at least try to prevent their soldiers from doing that, and jail or hang the ones they catch doing it.
>The purpose of the sexual instinct is reproduction. If the sexual instinct is redirected away from this such that it becomes much less likely, something is pretty clearly malfunctioning.
Attraction to menopausal women ("MILFs") is mental disorder, got it.
I mean....
I don't think MILF is used to mean "menopausal." Plenty of babies come from sleeping with your 35-year old wife who's already given you a couple kids and maybe has stretch marks and some extra pounds on her.
Yeah, the archetypal MILF is either Stifler's Mom (from "American Pie"), played by a then-38yo Jennifer Coolidge, or Stacy's Mom (from the eponymous music video) aka then-34yo Rachel Hunter.
They might not be optimal from a how-many-healthy-babies-can-I-expect standpoint, but being a "mom" is evidence of fertility and also of a husband a man can cuckold to for extra offspring with minimal paternal investment.
Have rates of depression gone down as society has become more accepting of homosexuality?
Absolutely! That initial paper I linked showing reduced suicide rates state-by-state as gay marriage is legalized has some great references included. Here is a longer paper which talks about minority stress in detail as a model for understanding the higher incidence of mental health issues in LGBTQ people: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2072932/. A good way to find extra resources is to peruse or search through these articles and look at the citations they use when discussing issues you're interested in.
Here is a newer paper evaluating the effects of an increases in cultural acceptance on LGBT youth and their mental health: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4887282/.
Something to keep in mind is that these cultural changes are very recent. As a 25 y/o, gay marriage was legalized in the US when I was a senior in high school. And, just because gay marriage is legal, that doesn't mean that negative views on homosexuality or the damage they cause will have disappeared completely overnight (although we are making pretty significant progress).
That first paper was not relevant to changes over time. The second posed it as a problem for why there are still such mental disorders given improvements, but didn't seem to actually go into whether the rate of such disorders has changed.
OK, I would consider a reduction of roughly 134,000 teen suicide attempts per year in a single country a relevant change over time. You are free to peruse these articles and their references more carefully if you would like. Really though, the burden of proof is on you for someone who is now apparently suggesting the rate of such disorders has not changed and will continue to remain unchanged in spite of such evidence.
Suicide rates went up semi-continuously from 1999 to 2015:
https://www.depressiontalk.net/wp-content/uploads/suicides-in-rural-america-increased-more-than-40-in-16.png.webp via https://www.depressiontalk.net/depression-rates-through-the-years/
If you go further back (though more coarser grained) you can see that suicide rates were declining between 1950 and 2000, then increased up through 2019:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187465/death-rate-from-suicide-in-the-us-since-1950/
If we focus on teens specifically (suicide rates are highest for people of age 85+, lowest for the lowest age groups including teens), the bottom comes between 2005 & 2010, but increased between then & 2015:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
Aside from suicide, depression & mood disorders have increased in adolescents & young adults between 2005 & 2017:
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/abn-abn0000410.pdf
Staying awake until midnight and being able to focus on boring paperwork for several hours are also obviously disorders.
The DSM at least makes a half-decent attempt at defining mental disorder, RDoC and HiTOP don’t even bother articulating a coherent notion of psychopathology nor do they address the demarcation problem. I am convinced that there is no value-free biological answer to the demarcation problem. I reviewed some of the philosophical issues around this in a journal article “Mental disorder and social deviance” for International Review of Psychiatry: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09540261.2020.1815666 (you can access pdf here: https://www.awaisaftab.com/uploads/9/8/4/3/9843443/aftab___rashed_mental_disorder_and_social_deviance_irp_2021.pdf )
Isn't the main difference that pedophilia is a criminal act if the desire is acted upon?
I don't really understand why homosexuality wouldn't be classified as a paraphilia (aside from influential people who were into it successfully lobbying to have it reclassified). "Can consent and won't be harmed" does not seem to be a consistent delineation between paraphilia and "variants of normal sexuality." Case in point, coprophilia/coprophagia is still classified as a paraphilia in the DSM. "Men kissing men is okay but poop is icky" is hardly a consistent principle. Same case for zoophilia.
Yes, my point is that "criminal act" is a political category, not a biological one.
I agree that "paraphilia" is a useful category, although not as well-defined as people might like (is oral sex a paraphilia? should anyone care about that question either way?)
Point taken on soft borders to what is or is not a paraphilia. One could conceive of a threshold, e.g. something that <10% of people engage in or something that one has an inordinate obsession over. Something like oral sex could be a paraphilia in one generation but not in another.
On parapahilia, they would only require psychiatric treatment if:
1. the behavior would be criminal if indulged in
2. it interfered in the patient's ability to function and/or achieve goals in life (e.g. get married and have children).
Destigmatization, however, strikes me as a much less good idea. Stigma and shame are incredibly effective at discouraging unwanted behavior and highly preferable to any coercive alternative the government would come up with if too many people are causing trouble. Getting men to stick around and raise the children they father has been one of the great accomplishments of civilization, and I suspect that stigmatizing non-marital and non-reproductive sexuality has played an important role in that (if nothing else, family breakdown has strongly correlated with the sexual revolution). I would invoke Chesterton's fence before getting rid of any stigma.
Of course, this whole issue is about gradually coming to terms with this particular fence having long crumbled, around the time that no-fault divorce was normalized, and that there's no getting the horse back into the barn.
Meh, the horse was gotten into the barn in the first place. It could happen again. A world of falling population is gonna be weird, lots of potential for things to shift in unexpected ways.
It could, certainly, but that would probably be a new barn with new fences. Morality rested on the legitimacy of religion, which is in decline in the civilized world and unlikely to recover, and what would eventually replace it is anyone's guess.
Christianity may be in decline, but the functional components of religion remain in demand, namely 1) an explanation of the unknown/unknowable, 2) a moral system, and 3) a ritual system that gives life meaning. In the West, we are used to these three functions coming as a bundle, but they don't have to be (cf. Confucianism).
The past few years we have seen quite a bit of what is effectively religious fanaticism coming from secular movements. I wouldn't write of religion categorically.
There will certainly be new fences built. Mankind will relearn forgotten lessons, the hard way if necessary.
I suppose, but I wouldn't assume that attitudes toward sexuality can only change in one direction. Given how many new taboos have popped up around race in the past few years, it's not hard to imagine that future generations might have different attitudes towards casual sex and single motherhood.
The illegitimacy crisis has only gotten worse since Moynihan rang the alarm in '65. At some point, people who say they care about inequality might actually take a serious look at family structure.
> I suspect that stigmatizing non-marital and non-reproductive sexuality has played an important role in that
If you are talking about the western world then I think you misspelled "stigmatizing female sexuality". A woman who had sex before marriage became a "fallen woman", a man who had sex before marriage might risk being party to a shotgun wedding in some circumstances (depending on the power ratio of the families involved). High status males impregnating some servant girl and then firing her in shock over her immoral behavior seem to be a common trope.
Personally, I would rather live in a society where I would have some risk of my parents divorcing during my childhood than in a society where any missteps during my teens could exclude me from "polite society".
Even for pedophilia, I don't think the level of stigmatization our society has is optimal for minimizing the amount of kids being victimized. A rational approach would treat it like pyromania, perhaps: "Sucks for you that you have impulses which are very incompatible with life in our society. We will try to help you control them. If you act on them, you will be fully on the hook for the lives you destroy. There may be some jobs which we would prefer you not to take due to your inclinations, but otherwise we will judge you on the crimes you commit only."
Also, I can't help but notice that some organizations which are notorious for having covered up a lot of sexual abuse cases are very big on stigma and shame.
For a crime with little stigma attached to it, look at tax fraud. Do middle class people (1%ers are a different can of worms) file their incomes correctly because they would be shunned by their peers otherwise? In the words of Dave Barry, "We'll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail." The "coercive alternative" the government came up with mostly seems to be working ok.
Is 50% a chance of divorce that you are okay with? Or a 70% chance the parents were never married to begin with?
Cause that is what you got.
That approach to pedophilia could be a slippery slope. If same-sex attraction wasn't taboo 500 years ago, but actual sex acts were treated the same way as in our timeline, do you think there would have been more or less gay sex in the last 500 years?
The western norm of monogamy requires constraining powerful men from doing what otherwise comes naturally to them:
https://kvetch.substack.com/p/wife-economics-and-the-domestication
> High status males impregnating some servant girl and then firing her in shock over her immoral behavior seem to be a common trope.
I've heard the first half of that trope, but not combined with the second half.
I've heard of the similar but meaningfully distinct combination where it's eg. the teenage prince knocking up a serving girl and then she gets fired when his parents find out. The actual father doing the firing would be odder - stories of mistresses and bastards often involve the father providing at least a modicum of financial support for the rearing of his children.
Putting a 10% threshold makes it an even more blatantly political decision.
If criminal law were the main difference, shouldn't the ICD say that depending on where you happen to be located, paedophilia might be healthy and homosexuality a mental disorder or it could be other way around?
If something is criminal, then it automatically becomes something that interferes with the patient's ability to function and therefore should be treated. If it is not criminal, then whether treatment is necessary depends on how the paraphilia is affecting the patient's life.
"If something is criminal, then it automatically becomes something that interferes with the patient's ability to function" - depending on how much the law is enforced, how good the patient is at bribing officials, how skilled the patient is at avoiding detection, etc., etc., etc.
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229/ref=asc_df_1594035229/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=316705607905&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=8413346490457717980&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9010632&hvtargid=pla-491595017886&psc=1®ion_id=674469
If you just optimize for truth and don't get irrationally angry at things you like sharing categories with things you don't like you are able to just wipe all of these downsides away like so much irrelevant screeching. Sure, homosexuality is a mental disorder, it has a clear downside if you would like to have biological children with your preferred partner. It shares a category with pedophilia as well as being unreasonably kind and self sacrificing. This is not a category on the moral dimension.
Optimizing for truth is nice, you spend far less time playing naval gazing word games terrified that the total nonsense you made up so that you could have your cake and eat it too comes back to bite you.
I don't think there is a "truth of the matter" on what is or isn't a mental disorder. Is video game addiction? Is playing video games at all? Is being annoying on Twitter? Is wanting to be divorced even though your relationship is going sort of kind of okay but isn't interesting anymore? Categorization has to depend somewhat on questions about what categories it would be useful to put things in, because it's underdetermined by purely epistemic factors
(Zack to show up and object in 3. . .2 . . .1. . . )
But these questions can be answered empirically with a consistent definition. These definitions might be arbitrary and not cleave reality at it's joints as much as we'd like but we wouldn't get so many weird edge cases where we try to stuff morality into the same pipe we push truth through and up forced to compromise one the other or both. And it's not like the watchers on don't know it's a farse, is there actually a human alive who has read the trans section of the DSM and couldn't tell some tomfoolery was afoot?
I'm not sure how to answer that - maybe I would understand better if you gave an example of such a definition, that carves out something sort of similar to our intuitive category "mental illness"?
From your post the DSM is trying to at least three things.
1. Be an accurate taxonomy of mental disorders
2. Minimize stigma around these disorders
3. Use the influence gained by 1 to force insurance to provide care
Your point seems to be the be that we can't just focus on 1 because then we risk 2 and 3. But it seems to me that the actual proposed purpose of the DSM is 1. 2 and 3 are not really the job of the people who compile these lists. And they can't help but corrupt the process.
Uh, what? The *current* purpose is 3, whatever the DSM was originally intended for. And you might want to rephrase 3 as "Use the influence gained by 1 to force insurance to pay the psychiatric industry". (It's never been clear to me how much of psychiatric "care" really improves the problems.)
Well if the purpose is 3 then a lot of the other designs and complaints don't make a lot of sense. It would be better formulated as a list of treatments with a totally separate list of conditions with which to reference. So the condition list may include an entry for homosexuality but the treatment list may have nothing in reference to it. Or I guess negative references like "don't do conversion therapy, it doesn't work". The problem is that this one thing is trying to do three or more things and it's causing it to fail at all of them.
Most political discussions are not about matter-of-facts, but are fights about definitions.
Is gun control good? Yes, certainly and obviously, if you use the right definition of "good".
Is gun control bad? Yes, certainly and obviously, if you use the right definition of "bad".
The issue is that politics needs to come up with decisions. We need to decide whether and how we act. Should we be more or less restrictive on guns? In which way exactly? If you and I use different definitions, then we both can have great edifices which are internally totally consistent. But they are not consistent *with each other*. And as soon as we try to agree on some action (a law or something), we will just clash as hard as before.
<irony> Unless you finally realize that your definition is silly and stupid and adopt my sensible definition, of course. <irony off>
Scott pointed out how that is true for the DSM: writing stuff into the DSM has consequences because it determines what insurances cover for.
I guess my preference eis that the DSM be a source of shared truth, to which aim it needs to be as politically neutral is as possible. If it takes a political position then it becomes the domain of one political group and you really can't fault the other political group from ignoring it as corrupt. Once you start justifying corrupting the sources of consensus reality to suit your political aims there really is no limit. Why not simply define opposition to your political aims as a disorder demanding removal from society?
Worse than that, if it takes a political position then it becomes the domain of one political group and you really can't fault the other political group from taking control of it to push their own political position.
"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."
In all likelihood, the APA originally intended the DSM to be purely descriptive. But since the diagnoses have de facto ramifications on cultural-stigma and insurance-policies, it's become a battleground between outside interests. Your advice is how the DSM ended up like it is today. "Wouldn't optimizing for truth be so much more efficient without worrying about politics?" = "wouldn't my metabolism be so much more efficient without an immune system weighing it down?"
How long do you think an explicitly politicized DSM can stand? You don't have to flip a whole lot of beaurocrats to have some heinous right wing influence. You're building weapons of a tyrant, eventually one will come around and show you how they're used.
If it's just about insurance, that seems like it could be dealt with on an empirical basis: here's a list of known psychological anomalies, with corresponding conditional probabilities of related life outcomes, and tested prevention strategies for obviously undesirable stuff - partly through proxy variables which also seem like worthwhile goals for other reasons, such as positive social ties and self-reported life satisfaction as a proxy for suicide prevention.
Some such strategies will involve specialized skills and tools the person involved couldn't reasonably be expected to take care of by themselves (due to various combinations of specialized skill, the need for an outside perspective, and simple expense) but are nonetheless recognized as a net benefit to society, so in such cases formal diagnosis serves as a qualifying factor for subsidized and/or mandated treatment.
Ignoring the political, truth avoiding, socially complicated aspects of human culture isn't optimizing for truth, it is avoiding truth. The truth is what you're offering won't work because people by and large are not built to prefer it. Please stop pretending like this is something that can be ignored or waved away.
Trying to control and influence the political and social realm by gerrymandering what should be neutral definitions can't help but further confuse discourse. I resent the assertion that we need the people who define terms to carefully protect us from ourselves. Does it not frustrate you that you cannot actually trust these lists to be accurate when accuracy might interfere with the interests of an unelected group of people? Are you sure these people will always use this truth bending influence in your favor?
Oh, I absolutely agree, but "If you just optimize for truth and don't get irrationally angry at things" is naive, harmful, and absolutely not brave. "Acknowledging that humans don't optimize for truth and that they get irrationally angry at things, here's a complicated, difficult solution I think can help some people work around these human weaknesses and biases" is better on all counts.
“Optimizing for truth” makes sense if words have a meaning independent of how we use them. The question here isn’t “what things fall under the category “mental disorder” that we found on a tablet at Sinai?” The question is “what is helpful for us to call a “disorder” in decisions involving treatment and insurance?”
You'll find very diverse opinions on what helpful means if that's your goal. I get the impression a lot of people here consider increased access to be a costless good. But beyond that I'm pretty sure the DSM isn't actually primarily for determining what insurers should pay for. I think it's specific purpose is to outline disorders and potential treatments and regulators/insurance groups use it to determine what to cover. We're basically hacking the truth values on a config file for ideological reasons. But feeding untrue things into this black box might have consequences.
The point he's making is that many of these people aren't hacking the truth values, because there are no hard truth values about mental disorder. The brains are real, but the labels and clusters are social constructs for social purposes. Alone on an island, you will have one or another set of mental tendencies and no reason to label yourself. In society, whether we put you in the same bucket as Steve and Alice has to do with *what we want the outcome of that bucket to be*.
If you're properly familiar with statistics and p-values, please consider this analogous to p<0.05. It's *not the truth*. It's a decision criteria which is beneficial. What most of us are doing here is trying to decide the beneficial decision criteria, and of course, there are disagreements about the criteria because there are disagreements about ideal outcomes, never mind the vagaries of the actual minds under investigation.
I’m not convinced Twitter is any better for you than meth
Indeed. Surely the measure of the harm of addiction is how much it prevents one from functioning in daily life, as well as any physiological damage from consuming whatever substance.
And indeed, a large proportion of the DSM's diagnostic criteria for addictions of any kind emphasize these aspects.
I’m not convinced meth is worse for society than twitter.
I think that if the number of people who used twitter started using meth you would become convinced pretty darn fast.
According to quick Google searches for the US:
Approximately 1.6 Million meth users, 77.5 Million twitter users - that's about 48x more twitter users.
Among the 1.6 Million Meth users there were about 23k overdose deaths in 2020.
23k times 48 makes for about 1 Million deaths/year if all twitter users started using meth.
In 2020 about 3.4 Million people died in the US. So twitter-to-meth would up the rate by about 30%.
Of those 3.4 Million, about 1 Million die of cancer or heart disease.
Probably motivates less theft of copper wiring.
But might well motivate far more theft of shareholder value.
Journalist: "We can't edit quotes!" Editor: "We can selectively pick fonts for emphasis and readability! Use a transparent font for N and say that you blipped out the N-word."
The underlying issue is that having a mental disorder doesn't warrant stigma, while having an untreated mental disorder which poses a danger to oneself or others *does* warrant stigma proportional to the likelihood and magnitude of danger posed.
Please go ahead and label things mental disorders that you want to have treated by mental health professionals. Please don't stigmatize any of them any more than is necessary. I recognize that this is a hard problem that we don't and won't agree on the boundaries of. This does not absolve us from making our best efforts.
Do those seeking treatment whose symptoms are still poorly controlled and potentially dangerous warrant as much stigma as those not seeking treatment? Is it cooperation with mental health care that removes the need for stigma, or treatment success which neutralizes the condition? It sounded like your rationale was partly based on the danger of the outcomes posed, and partly based on the need to incentive treatment. (I raise this point in part because, in dichotomizing treated and untreated mental illness for moral shaming purposes, the not uncommon outcome of underwhelming treatment success is often overlooked. I think people tend to want this distinction to do a lot more philosophical heavy lifting than it can.)
The value of any stigma is the amount of harm prevented, less the amount of harm caused.
That harms caused are substantially easier to measure than harms prevented does not absolve us from making our best attempts, but should result in extending as much grace as we can to those whose estimates differ from our own.
[edited to add: that people may grant different weights to different harms should also move us to extend grace where possible, while nevertheless aiming for what we think is best]
Have you read the HiTOP proposal? Unless I missed something, the HiTop is not proposing a strictly biologically based taxonomy of mental disorders at all nor is anyone serious.
The DSM and any future taxonomy can effectively distinguish between pedophilia and homosexuality and the other conditions you list with the harm criteria, which requires the presence of distress, impairment in functioning, or involvement of non-consenting victims.
I'm not objecting to HiTOP, I'm objecting to the way it was described.
I agree that the harm criteria is useful, but this is a social rather than a biological criterion, which is my point.
"The authors of these apolitical taxonomies want an incoherent thing. They want something which doesn’t think about politics at all, and which simultaneously is more politically correct than any other taxonomy."
So they add a social/cultural/political criterion but they don't want to think about politics?
You're right, that was incorrectly phrased insofar as it was about authors, and I'll edit it out.
Ok but "DSM alternatives say this all the time. ... Let’s replace it with our purely biological, apolitical taxonomy of mental disorders!”"
Who says this? Is it anecdotal? It's not in the post you linked. It's not in the any of the alternative taxonomies I know. No scientist and clinician I know says this. If anything the HiTOP and others are openly and explicitly pushing for culturally-sensitive categories. The RDoC might have flirted with the idea but it is not meant to replace the DSM in clinical practice. It might be useful to provide a link or replace the fake quote by a real quote.
Why doesn't the real quote I included by a HiTOP promoter talking about the DSM homosexuality as a strike against it count?
Your real quote seemed to be missing the "therefore, we want something apolitical" part. So I went back to the linked blog to see if that was really the author's conclusion from that example.
And it wasn't. The author's conclusion was "we need to be careful about labelling harmless behavioural quirks as problems."
Taking "we need to be careful" as a political statement, the author is endorsing a politically-informed classification, not an apolitical one, and would full-throatedly endorse putting homosexuality and pedophilia on opposite sides of the diagnostic divide for precisely that reason.
I agree that the way it was worded in this post was too strong, but a weaker version could definitely be substantiated (it also isn't quite so wrong then).
An example from a very short search:
Shortcomings of approaches to classifying psychopathology based on expert consensus have given rise to contemporary efforts to classify psychopathology quantitatively. In this paper, we review progress in achieving a quantitative and empirical classification of psychopathology. A substantial empirical literature indicates that psychopathology is generally more dimensional than categorical. When the discreteness versus continuity of psychopathology is treated as a research question, as opposed to being decided as a matter of tradition, the evidence clearly supports the hypothesis of continuity.
source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30229571/
Then again, from the conclusion:
The HiTOP Consortium formed as a way of addressing this need for breadth and coherence, closely tethered to data. However, HiTOP, like endeavors before it, is a consortium of human clinicians, scientists and scholars, each with their own unique perspectives, in addition to their shared goals. Although focused squarely on the role of data in adjudicating nosological controversies via its principles, how will HiTOP navigate new evidence, which, after all, is not self-interpreting?
> *takes shot*
> Ctrl+F N
> bring it on
Kudos for this. BTW, companion issue, so to speak:
- Homosexuality: "Born this way" good.
- Gender: "Born this way" bad.
Any comments?
As I understand it, transgender people regard themselves as always having been the gender they are now. So, for example, a transgender woman appears from the outside to have changed from a man into a woman, but from her own point of view she has always been a woman or girl; her outward appearance has changed to match her true self. So she was born a girl, even though the doctor marked her down as a boy on the basis of her groin.
In what way could a boy possibly be born a girl or vice versa? What is the evidence for that? All we know is that some people really don’t like their bodies --they’re obsessed and distressed by their physical embodiment in the absence of any problem or defect.
People who are addicted to cosmetic surgery (like Michael Jackson) have a similar problem. Was Michael Jackson “born that way”? Did he always know he was “really” a person with a narrow pointy nose?
That’s what “wrong gender” comes down to: “I really, really don’t like my body,m.” Or are you making claims for a gendered essence or soul -- and what’s the evidence of that?
> That’s what “wrong gender” comes down to: “I really, really don’t like my body,m.” Or are you making claims for a gendered essence or soul -- and what’s the evidence of that?
If you replace "soul" with "mind", this could mean that wanting to be a certain gender (having that anatomy, or fitting into that social category) is an inherent characteristic of that person's brain, neither naturally transient nor mutable by modern technology.
If you want to claim it’s an inherent characteristic of that person’s brain (in some sort of physical, medical, real-world sense) then you’d need some evidence. Good luck.
If you just mean that some people really really wish they looked a certain way, like,
*Olympian Jenner wishes ** had been born female.
*Michael Jackson wishes he had been born with a narrow pointy nose.
* I wish I had my 20-year-old body back.
…then we’re just talking about wishes. People can wish for a whole lot of things that they will never have. It doesn’t mean there’s a physical part of their brain wired for “narrow pointy nose” or “hotter younger body.”
Gosh maybe I was never meant to be a middle-aged frump! My brain says that my 20-year-old body is RIGHT for me. It feels much more AUTHENTIC. And I’m not even kidding. The way I used to look is the way that feels like the “real me.” But I’m never getting that back and I can’t waste time being too broken up about it.
If people’s disappointment about their physical embodiment causes them significant distress, therapy and some self-acceptance related to physical reality might be a better bet than drastic cosmetic changes.
It doesn’t mean people can’t be feminine guys or masculine girls or even “non-binary” behaviorally. It’s healthy to be whoever you are.
It’s where people start playing elaborate games of pretend, taking not-medically-indicated hormones and having not-medically-indicated surgeries and demanding the general public to say and do certain things where it gets kind of …emotionally unwell.
What happened to “Be Yourself”? It was all the rage in the late 20th century.
> People can wish for a whole lot of things that they will never have.
> The way I used to look is the way that feels like the “real me.” But I’m never getting that back and I can’t waste time being too broken up about it.
But plenty of people claim to have transitioned and been more comfortable in their new bodies. I'm not sure how to square that with your claims - do you think these people are just lying, or what?
As a corollary: If the tech really did exist that could make you physically 20 again, would you go for it? If you believe that it's currently impossible to "become" the other gender, do you accept a possible future in which that changes and you start being pro-trans?
I think this logic would argue that we should ban all plastic surgery, or at least make it as demanding and difficult to get as gender affirmation surgery.
I’m not sure that follows. I personally think cosmetic surgery, unless it’s correcting a defect (like a cleft palate) is unethical but I wouldn’t ban it for other people, just because I personally think it’s the wrong move. Getting black-out drunk might be the wrong move too but I don’t suggest banning alcohol,
Some people, no doubt, want to look different and I don’t suggest we stop competent adults from messing with their own health and own bodies.
I’m just suggesting we understand that there’s no such thing, literally, as being in the “wrong body” and a trans person seeking surgery is no different from anyone else who wants to radically alter the way they look.
I would suggest that if you want to radically alter the way you look (at a “Michael Jackson” level or a “trans person” level) you might have other complex emotional issues underlying your extreme displeasure with your body. You might. Those might be worth examining.
If I were a cosmetic surgeon, I’d probably see a fundamental difference between someone whose ears stick out and wants them pinned back, and someone who wants multiple surgeries to look like the other sex when probably they’re never going to look like the other sex, and certainly they will never accomplish being the other sex, and in the bargain they are likely to destroy their sexual functioning (depending on the surgery).
This level of human unhappiness is very serious. I don’t mean to trivialize it. I don’t think our present ways of addressing the unhappiness are very helpful, though, and I think they deserve an evidence-based look.
I would guess the argument might be more along the lines of "If actresses who had had a boob job insisted that it was immoral and possibly illegal to refer to the fact that she was once a B cup instead of her current D, that would be absurd and wrong."
At least some trans people would disagree with you; they'd argue that gender dysphoria is a very different feeling as compared to e.g. hating your body for being fat. They describe dysphoria as a persistent feeling of wrongness; kind of like a missing tooth, only extended to your entire self.
AFAIK we currently do not have a fully working biological model of gender; however, there's some evidence to conclude that some differences in gender (as opposed to sex) might be neurological, not merely psychosomatic.
They can describe it any way they want. I feel sorry for people who are suffering whatever the cause.
It has been documented since at least the 1950s as a particular challenge for the “gender doctors” to deal with; that many of these patients give oddly cookie-cutter responses to justify why they want what they want — almost as if reciting talking points. Back then, the doctors noticed that what the patients said was often at odds with what the families remembered.
Parents are now noticing this same phenomenon in distressed teens — they say their teens often seem to recite talking points which are at odds with what the families remember — “always played with opposite sex toys” for example, when the parent remembers toys stereotypical of both sexes being in the home, and the child mostly chose to play with toys stereotypical of their sex.
It’s very complicated. People are often not the best reporters of their own experience when they think there’s something they need to gain or achieve.
There are also numerous examples of online spaces where “trans” people encourage others to lie in certain ways to get what they want, including “I always felt this way” and including threatening suicide.
In no other complicated mental health context do we simply take what the patient says at face value.
I am interested to see what evidence there is for “gender” being “neurological.” I haven’t seen it.
Certainly people’s personalities and preferences vary. There are little boys who have always preferred “girls’” toys or clothing or activities, say.
That is authentic to who they are. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s probably wired in, the way our other preferences and personality traits are wired in.
Indeed it might be a normal and understandable wish, if you seem to fit in more with the girls, to wish you had been born a girl yourself.
If there were a magic wand to turn such a boy into a girl, you can understand why he might want to avail himself of the magic. Wouldn’t that be nice.
But there is no magic. There are just cosmetic procedures: medically unnecessary hormones with non-trivial health risks and clunky surgeries with often-bad outcomes.
No one really believes anyone changes sex. They only change appearance. Why do they change appearance? Because they were really unhappy with how they looked.
Instead of encouraging gender dysphoric folks to come to terms with reality (yes that’s a natural wish, but your body is what it is, and there’s no wrong way to be a boy/man) and instead of encouraging society to be more nurturing to and accepting of feminine boys or masculine girls, we have culturally adopted a truly crazy-pants, not-evidence-based belief that someone can “be” the opposite sex “on the inside” (because we persist in confusing gender stereotypes and gender performance with bodily sex, it seems) and we offer truly horrible body modifications that promise happiness and often fail to deliver.
Well, if you asked people to describe their headaches, they'd give cookie-cutter responses as well; in fact, there are diagnostic tests based on this fact.
I acknowledge your point about appearance and social contagion; but trans people maintain that at least *some* (not all !) of them do experience gender dysphoria that goes beyound mere fashion. Left untreated, this persistent sense of physical wrongness reduces their quality of life to the point where some of them do, indeed, commit suicide; hormonal and surgical treatments are significantly more effective at alleviating this condition than psychotherapy.
Granted, self-reporting is a relatively weak form of evidence, but I don't see how you can throw out gender dysphoria without also throwing out headaches and the Pain Scale.
Ultimately, IMO all of this comes down to medical technology in the end. We need better technology to detect neurological causes of headaches and gender dysphoria; and we need better technology so we can alleviate these conditions. We've made some progress (especially on the headache issue), but not nearly enough. Meanwhile, we should work with the imperfect tools that we've got.
The way a lot of things are gate-kept, scripted responses are a reaction to doctors who'll dismiss any patient that doesn't exactly tick their boxes in order. I know not much about gender dysphoria, but I have extensive bitter experience with the phenomenon as it relates to chronic illness
I think you may be onto something. I've had what you could call gender dysphoria, or at least gender incongruent feelings and behavior, since about four years old, and at this point I've been on HRT for just over two years.
From what I see, it appears that some people's desire to protect the feelings of trans people (or just a desire to protect their own reputations) causes them to accept certain ideas without due scrutiny. For example, that a trans person "really is" their desired sex or gender, that the desire is persistent across a lifetime, that it's not socially spread to any significant degree, that gender dysphoria is drastically unlike other body image disorders, and that the motivation is always wholly separate from sexual or paraphilic desires. My own experiences have been much more complex than these sorts of politically correct platitudes can describe. So this means either people who aren't "really trans" according to the ideology are able to easily get HRT (it took me two weeks), or it means that some of what we've been told to believe about trans people is wrong.
Now, do I regret taking HRT, consider it immoral, or plan to stop? Not particularly. I've already tried just about every other solution to my problems short of jumping off a bridge (and I came close to that a few times), but none of them worked. And as a mentally competent adult I strongly feel that I have the right to make my own medical decisions. However, I do believe there are good questions to be asked about the ideology of the movement, and about the implications of propagating these ideas in everything from philosophy to sports.
I really appreciate you sharing these thoughts and it’s so helpful as I continue to try to clarify my own thinking.
Re “And as a mentally competent adult I strongly feel that I have the right to make my own medical decisions. However, I do believe there are good questions to be asked about the ideology of the movement, and about the implications of propagating these ideas in everything from philosophy to sports.”
I agree. Ironically the “most authentic seeming ‘trans’ person” is the person who is thriving and happy with their decision.
And when I look around, especially at the crop of teenagers who presented a whole new trans demographic in the last ten years or so, I see people who are mired in other types of extreme unhappiness or other types of mental health struggles, who believe that gender is the solution to their troubles.
Something is just not quite right in the way we’ve oversimplified “trans” for the public.
Yes the goal is to be kind, compassionate, respectful. And yet with the oversimplification of what “trans” is (such that the general public believes without too much thought that there might be some kind of true “wrong body” condition—- or they think of it vaguely as “another kind of gay” — and so if same-sex attraction is biological, they suppose “trans” is too) I don’t think we do the amazing diversity of people who fall under the trans umbrella any favors by oversimplifying.
A young lesbian who was always gender nonconforming and who is anxious and unhappy about her same-sex attraction and who wishes quite earnestly (impossibly but earnestly) that she were a boy is quite different from an awkward teen boy on the autism spectrum who obsesses over video games and anime and wishes quite earnestly (impossibly but earnestly) that he were a girl because it’s so easy for girls to get laid, and they’re not expected to be masculine.
And those kids in turn are quite different from a fully grown adult who had gender incongruent feelings since age 4 which never went away.
And that person is quite different from a grown man who’s addicted to weird porn and who gets sexual thrills from cross dressing, from using women’s changing rooms, and from imagining himself as a woman.
Those are four very different people with four very different sets of needs. They don’t all fit neatly under a category of “people in the wrong body called trans people.”
Oversimplification — with thought-stopping slogans like “Trans women are women” — doesn’t serve anyone well.
If gender is defined by self-identification, then how can a baby be born with a gender? Wouldn't it follow that people only acquire genders after they're old enough to understand the concept?
a lot of trans people use the terminology “assigned gender at birth” (agab) to refer to their birth gender. they don’t believe babies are born with genders and instead that they’re “assigned” genders by society, sometimes incorrectly. once someone gets old enough to understand the concept of gender, if they think their gender is the same as the assigned one, then they’re cis, and if they think their gender is different, then they’re trans. not saying i agree with this worldview, it’s just the one most trans people have
A baby is born with a sex, not a gender.
And, if we are half-ways sane as a society, we will start using exclusively biological sex as the basis for all legislation. Gender has become a meaningless concept...
Who are you asserting believes both things?
I think generally there's two varieties of pro-trans/pro-non-binary positions here:
1. Gender is innate, but doesn't always align with ones sex (or "assigned sex at birth.")
or
2. Gender is sometimes innate and does show up in early childhood, but in other cases it doesn't. It fundamentally doesn't matter when different gender presentation shows up, identification today is what is important.
I suppose you could summarize 2 as "Gender: 'Born this way' bad", but I think it's more complex than that.
The difference has nothing to do with how you're born. It's about whether what you *are* matches up with what you *want to be*. Your simplification is technically correct, but irrelevant. You might as well say:
- Homosexuality: "Sexual attraction" good
- Pedophilia: "Sexual attraction" bad
and you'd have about as much of a point.
Can you point to someone who has that particular combination of views? The Lady Gaga style pop-LGBT activists often say “born this way” about both (eg “I was born gay and took u til I was 15 to realize” or “God made me a woman but put me in a male body at birth to test me”). Plenty of academic lgbt activists deny “born this way” about either - instead they say “this doesn’t hurt anyone so let us do it”.
To expand on this... though it feels better leaving it as a minimalist pun. I am pointing out some inconsistency here. Not that any one particular person would necessarily need to hold both views at the same time. But in analogy to Scott's post: we can't really have it both ways. Either celebrating the fact that one is born with a particular combination of mind, sexual attraction, and biological sex, whether matching "society" 's expectations or not. Or, repudiating what one was born with and celebrating the idea that mind, sexual attraction, and appearance of biological sex are and should be changeable at will.
It seems easy (for me) to empathize with someone who is homosexual, because I, too, seem to be innately, immutably, attracted to a gender, in my case to women (whether or not it is 100% innate, my point is that's how it feels).
Similarly, I feel like it's easy for me to empathize with a trans person. I really strongly feel that I am male! I identify with being male, and want people to treat me as a male. Admittedly this preference has been shaped by my life experience ... but imagine if that feeling were innate (which maybe it is somewhat, who knows)! It would really really suck if, as a child, I felt I was male, but my parents and everyone insisted on treating me otherwise, making me dress up as a girl, etc. How humiliating! And the only reason they can give that they treat me like that has to do with things called "genitals" and "chromosomes" that I don't really understand....
Anyway, not even saying any of the factual claims here are correct. Just that like ... in theory it should be easy to relate to someone who has a really strong identity of being one gender and wants to be treated that way. Because we all feel that way, right? Most of us just feel that way in a way that lines up with our genitals and chromosomes ...
It seems easy, for me, to empathise with someone who is homosexual since I also experience sexual attraction, and to what kind of person will always be personal. So I accept others' attractions as well.
But I find it difficult to empathise with transgender people, or with cisgender people who are strongly rooted in the external trappings of their "gender". I feel my biological sex, male, but I don't feel strongly being part of a gender. Gender is a social construct: a set of specific expectations of behavior styles, clothing styles, hairstyles, which are all dramatically different and changeable depending on culture and times. And I have lived in too many cultures to take any particular fashion, or behavior style, as a marker for "men" or "women". From childhood on, I never understood why men and women should either dress differently of have different kinds of jobs in life, or why there should be any other differentiation between men and women than their sexual characteristics, primary (genitals) and secondary (breasts, beards, etc). Perhaps this is because I was raised in a household full of women with strong classical feminist characteristics who thought the same - that "women can do everything men can do". And what I observed at home was not "women doing this and men doing that" but "adults doing this". The only adults around me happened to be women, that's all. Had my family "raised me as a girl" they would have raised me exactly the same because no one forced the idea on me that girls and boys were somehow fundamentally different except for their bodies.
To me, the difference between men and women boils down very strongly and almost purely to biological sex. I am attracted to women, whether short or long hair, dress or jeans, heels or slippers. And of course, in the nude there is nothing but biological sex characteristics left. Gender disappears in the nude. The only thing left is genitalia and what you can do with the equipment on hand.
What attracts me to people is their personality, looks, and yes, their biological sex markers and genitalia. Their external gender trappings are meaningless to me. Same for myself: I feel equally at ease in jeans and boots (like Western Cowboys) or in sarongs as slippers (like Indians or Indonesians). Wearing a sarong doesn't make me feel like I'm wearing a "skirt" (which it is) or "being a woman" (which it isn't). I've often had long hair while my wife had a crew cut. I wear earrings more often than her. Sometimes I sport a thick beard, sometimes I don't. When my wife wears a dress and lipstick I feel like she shows up in drag, because she never does that normally. When I first started wearing a suit regularly, I too felt like I was showing up in drag, though I am more used to it now. All of this is gentle, entertaining cosplay to me, that has nothing to do with my identity.
Actually, I can't even identify with the idea of identity. I am me. Identity, as understood by the current gender discussion, is the attempt to place oneself in a group of people with similar characteristics. I feel no need to do that. I feel no national identity. I feel no ethnic identity. I feel no gender identity, though I feel sexually male. I don't want to be part of any particular pack of wolves. I am perfectly content in this.
I agree with the thrust of this post, as nicely summarized by Leah Libresco Sargeant in her comment.
That said, if you're concerned about a comparison between homosexuality and pedophilia being taken out of context, it seems prudent to at least to give that comparison a thorough examination. Much has been written on how
some rate of homosexuality may be evolutionarily adaptive, but to my knowledge there is no equivalent corpus for pedophilia. Of course, setting out to prove such a theory would be somewhat taboo, but so was the earlier research on homosexuality - to the extent that it lacked an implicit or explicit condemnation of homosexuals - and yet the work exists. I certainly don't see how sexual targeting of sexually immature individuals could be adaptive.
I don't think any of this stuff is actually evolutionarily adaptive. I think the "let's prove that all of this weird stuff is evolutionarily adaptive" research direction was mostly a dead end, although there are some things close to it that I believe are true (some mental disorders are the more-extreme-than-the-design-specs versions of good traits).
I could make a dumb hand-wavy argument that there are ten genes involved in attraction, you want to be attracted to pretty young people (eg late teens) because they're the most fertile, so it's good to have one or two genes out of ten predisposing you to attraction to youthful traits, but some people accidentally get 10/10 of those genes and get attracted to literal children. But I think this is giving the genome too much credit for making perfect sense. What I actually believe is something like what I explained here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/you-dont-want-a-purely-biological/comment/12193145
Guys are attracted to "pretty people in their teens".
Women like men a twitch older than they are themselves.
I think that's true in a statistical, probabilistic sense, that is that these are the peaks of distributions.
But an awful lot of men's attraction does age with themselves and an awful lot of older women are attracted to young men ("cougars").
I'm in my late forties, and I very rarely find myself personally attracted to a woman under her mid-thirties - women in their twenties come across as kids, and tend to trigger fatherly, protective reflexes rather than sexual ones.
But how much of this is the product current legal and social norms, that is both, what would the distribution look like in various historical environments, and what would peoples "natural inclinations" look like in the absence of any sort of social environment (in so far as that is a meaningful question).
I also think you overstate the degree to which as a matter of fact men's attraction does age, that is peoples revealed preferences with respects to pornography is quite telling, the cougar phenomenon is most prevalent in material featuring young looking men, that is the Jimmy Michaels and Jordi El Nino Polla etc. 's of the world as opposed to older actors. I could go on listing a great number of caveats and various ways in which pornography is biased but perhaps the most important takeaway is that "teen" porn and "teen" porn featuring older men sells very well even to older men (maybe especially), I also find it prudent to add that a significant percentage (maybe a majority) of mainstream pornography clearly presents women in such a manner as to provoke a "Pedophilic" response (clearly attraction to under 18s and maybe further), that is the women are physically immature, dressed immaturely, and behave immaturely, with great attention taken to exaggerate these facts further I.e. camera angles to make the actress appear even smaller, and a title to match.
From what I can tell only especially neurotic feminists have made a great deal out of this fact, with people interested in understanding sexual attraction ignoring this and other obvious lines of inquiry.
I like your profile pic, definitely a cute anime (Hinata best girl). I'd recommend following Aella (also goes by knowingless), she's definitely interested in that topic from a generally rationalist perspective. And while she was and is a sex worker at times, I wouldn't particularly call her feminist so much as curious to the point of lacking that common normie human feeling of wincing away at uncomfortable truths.
I've seen a taxometric study that came to the conclusion pedophilia was dimensional. I've also seen a taxometric study that came to the conclusion pedophilia was categorical.
At a wild guess, this could involve different definitions of paedophilia. There are 12-year-olds who are obviously post-pubertal, and if you count those as "paedo" when scoring then you're guaranteed to get a "dimensional" result since the enormous tail of "ordinary" sexual attraction will wash out any categorical signal.
It could just straight-up *be* dimensional, but if it's categorical then dumb studies would still falsely get "dimensional".
There's a reason why we use the same word “love” to talk about parental relations and couple relations. We also use “kiss”, “hug”, etc.
There's probably a large number of genes that are involved in both kinds of relationships, so it's no wonder that some genes might end up being used out of context.
The evolutionary adaptation you're looking for is: “let's encode several features with the same gene because it's easier that way” or “let's repurpose this existing feature for something related because that's easier that reinventing the feature from scratch”.
Pedophilia seems obviously more adaptive than homosexuality:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/pedophiles-are-long-term-maters.html
Given how obvious this is, its quite telling that almost none of the self described "evolutionary psychologists" and such have attempted to meaningfully talk about this fact let alone elaborate on in, especially compared to the various untenable theories attempting to argue that homosexuality is adaptive that have seemed to reach the mainstream.
It reminds me of a since deleted meme that I believe (not 100% sure) Diana Fleischman posted online a quite a while ago making fun of Canadian psychologists James Cantor and Ray Blanchard for trying to get the DSM-V to list hebephilia as a mental disorder.
I wonder if openly confronted any of theses people would be willing to bite the bullet given the current cultural environment and where its likely to go in the near future.
In before the hit piece gets written with "Scott Alexander wrote: "from a biological point of view, homosexuality and pedophilia are probably pretty similar. Both are “sexual targeting errors” [letters removed for clarity]."
On a more serious note, are we thinking about mental illness incorrectly? As far as I understand, physical illnesses are *diagnosed* by their symptoms - mental illness are *defined* by their symptoms. [This is because a mental illness is a malfunction of the mind, and the mind is not an organ, but a function.]
It is perfectly cogent to speak of a broken bone that is not causing symptoms, but it would be meaningless to speak of mental illness that is not causing symptoms.
If so, the criterion for "mental illness" should not be the underlying biological cause, but rather a superset of symptoms.
A reasonable candidate seems to be a way of thinking that causes a person harm. A broader definition might be a way of thinking that causes a person or others harm.
A corollary, is that all discrete mental illnesses would be thought of as clusters of symptoms all of which are gradational, rather than binary. Diagnostic criteria would thus be useful for convenience, rather than as observations in a Bayesian framework used to diagnose a physical condition. [e.g. if the "illness" is a broken bone, one could have a list of diagnostic criteria such that it is sufficiently unlikely that someone would have some number of symptoms without the underlying cause of a broken bone. But in the case of mental illness, there is no objective "state of being diseased;" rather, there are experiences / ways of thinking that can be counterproductive and treated.]
A corollary would be that a given behavior could be a mental illness or not, depending on conditions. Perhaps there could have been a time or place in human history where kleptomania would have been a useful trait [assuming the definition that mental illness = detrimental to the sufferer, rather than to others]. There could also be times and places where it is a maladaptive trait.
This would seemingly go against the whole conceptual underpinning of the DSM as I understand it. But it would also probably go against these DSM alternatives, as I understand them.
I don't think it is useful to conflate biology and misfunction for the same reason - it misses the point, which is the impact on the sufferer [and others.] The distinction between e.g. pedophilia, which from a biological perspective could be looked at as an aberration, since it does not facilitate reproduction, and a compulsion to engage in heterosexual rape - not an aberration since it can lead to reproduction seems rooted in the state of affairs under which humans evolved millions of years ago, which seems unhelpful if the goal is treatment. Today, even ignoring the harm to others, being a rapist probably does not make someone any likelier to pass on their genes (as emergency contraception, etc. are available). And let's say some study would find that actually being a rapist increases the probability of passing on genes by 5%, would that be a reason to not treat it as a problem? If one uses the criterion of hurting others, it surely hurts others, genes be damned. And even using the criterion of causing unwanted effects to the sufferer, being a rapist causes all sorts of negative ramifications to the rapist (e.g. increases the chances of him being stuck in prison).
The reader may question this model on the ground that certain "mental illnesses" correlate to genes. E.g. someone with gene X is much likelier to have mental illness X, or vice verse. This fits with the model of the mental illness being an underlying characteristic, and challenges the mental illnesses merely being conveniently clustered symptoms.
However, I think that neither objection is a problem. As far as the first, it may well be that underlying phenomena affect the frequency of certain symptoms. But I think it is still useful to conceptualize the symptoms as distinct from the cause.
More importantly, the existence of correlation between genes and named mental illnesses does not prove that superiority of the "discrete illness" model rather than the "arbitrary but useful symptom cluster model," since we would expect the same effect with an actual arbitrary but useful symptom cluster model!
E.g. if we were to divide the human population into two groups - the worst 2.2% of runners, and the other 97.8% of people, it seems extremely likely that we would find systemic genetic differences between the two populations. That doesn't mean that "WorstTwoPointTwoPercentofRunnersism" represents a meaningful Platonic "syndrome" rather than an arbitrary, if perhaps useful categorization.
[The same could be said for observed differences in fMRI. They can correlate with diagnoses, even shedding light on them, without legitimizing the model of equating mental illness with physical illness.]
Is my way of looking at mental illness a useful model, and have I correctly understood the existing frameworks?
In general, a “syndrome” is defined by its symptoms, but an “illness” is usually defined by its causes, whether mental or physical.
“ If you call something a mental disorder, insurance has to cover treatment for it, which is good.
But if you call something a mental disorder, people will accuse you of trying to stigmatize them, which is bad.”
I kind of think we should just bite the bullet on the second part and say “stigma is bad mmmkay” and get on with it? The first part is much more important anyway, so it should dominate the “is it a disorder?” question. Lots of weird stuff in the brain - the stuff that creates problems for the sufferer or people around them are disorders.
Thus, homosexuality is not a mental disorder, because it requires no treatment - just go be gay. Pedophilia is a disorder because it often needs to be treated or controlled to prevent the afflicted from victimizing children. Gender dysphoria is a mental disorder, because it requires treatment (social and or physical gender transition). I get the urge to not call transgender people “mentally ill” but having already declared “stigma bad, mmkay”, it feels quite natural to say that a transgender person is “an individual who has undergone a successful intervention for gender dysphoria”.
If a thing in your brain will make you want to kill yourself if you don’t intervene, it seems very silly to not call it a “mental disorder”.
By those criteria, it sounds like there should be a diagnosis called "homosexual dysphoria" or whatever, that would be treated with conversion therapy. Clearly many (I would think most) people with homosexual urges would rather not have them.
At least in modern Western societies I'm pretty sure the vast majority of gay people are fine being gay. Medical case studies of homosexuals from back when the West was homophobic indicate that gays often or usually had a greater preference for society to change than for their desires to change. A few nowadays want to change, sure, but I'd say a fairly small percentage. They should be allowed to pursue conversion therapy , though I'm doubtful of its efficacy.
I'm skeptical of that claim (seems pretty hard to investigate), but, in any case, a vast majority of humans live outside the West, mostly in societies in which homosexuality is considered shameful.
Seems hard to investigate whether people mind being gay in modern tolerant societies? That seems easy, you can just ask....
In less tolerant societies , its harder to tell . But I think it's always been common for people to disagree with society , based on what I've read from people living outside the West, and what doctors said about their gay patients in the 19th century . What percentages , I dunno.
Re “This doesn’t seem especially destigmatizing to me - yes, you’re the wrong gender, but you’re crazy for being unhappy about it?”
Unless you’re willing to suggest that someone can be “in” the wrong body, Gregor Samsa style, how can anyone’s gender be wrong _except_ that the person be unhappy about it?
People’s bodies just...are what they are. If you’re a supermodel, you’re probably much more satisfied with your body than the ugliest person on the planet. Maybe the ugliest personal is even dysphoric about his appearance. But is either one of those people “in” the wrong body?
One is hard pressed even to find evidence that “Trans brains are different though.” Not really.
What could “being trans” be, other than a mental state characterized by emotional distress about one’s body? If one were cool with one’s body, one wouldn’t be trans. One would be gender nonconforming, which is arguably emotionally healthier than being “dysphoric” about the body one has.
In any case, emotional distress that disrupts one’s life is squarely in the domain of the mental health professions. So “being trans” (gender dysphoric) makes sense as part of the DSM.
Similarly, the reason homosexuality is not in the the DSM and pedophilia is, is because homosexuality rarely causes anyone any problems in the 21st century. You’re just gay or lesbian, you go along with your life, no mental health assistance needed.
(There probably is the rare gay or lesbian out there who is dysphoric about their sexual preference and who wishes they were straight. That would be something to explore with a mental health professional too, even if there were no specific DSM diagnosis for it.
But if you’re a pedophile, your desires are against the law, and if you’re a decent human, you realize they’re morally wrong too. No decent person wants relations with a partner who can’t consent, so if that’s what they’re wired to want sexually, I suppose this conflict would cause a lot of emotional distress -- again, the domain of mental health.
Maybe I’m missing something, but the distinctions don’t seem very challenging to make?
Is the person experiencing emotional distress that disrupts their life?
> But if you’re a pedophile, your desires are against the law, and if you’re a decent human, you realize they’re morally wrong too.
That understanding is politically (and especially culturally) conditioned. There have been human societies in which some of what we now think of as pedophilia has been neither illegal nor generally considered immoral.
> No decent person wants relations with a partner who can’t consent
A child, at least a more mentally developed one, is capable of understanding the idea of sex & of expressing their wishes clearly through words. "Can't consent" as applied to children just means that (modern American) society has agreed not to treat children's consent or lack thereof as significant; while a similar view has been common historically, it isn't obviously self-evident or logically necessary.
And in some cultures, it’s acceptable to cut off the heads of your enemies and do a dance.
I get it. It’s cultural.
Still, in our culture people are repelled by sexual contact with children -- really really repelled -- so whether you think the pedophile’s problem is “fair” or not, he’s still got a problem, right (?), because if our culture tells pedophiles they can’t pursue children as sexual partners, they’ll have emotional distress.
Emotional distress is the domain of mental health professionals.
The DSM doesn't actually categorize pedophilia itself as a mental illness. It instead has Pedophilic Disorder, defined as being pedophilia+they either did something illegal or are distressed about it.
I don't think the solution to the general problem of 'people who need treatment cannot get it paid for by the insurance companies unless what they are suffering from is classified as a mental illness contained in this book of mental illnesses' can be solved by playing Whack-a-Mole and rapidly patching the book to contain each new thing that people turn up in the doctor's office with. If somebody shows up in your office with a compulsion to steal Telsa automobiles and crash them into trees, the proper response isn't 'oops, not in the book', surely?
Kleptomania. Conduct disorder. Antisocial personality disorder.
There's always the "Not Otherwise Specified" diagnoses...
Excuse me. I'm interested in your opinion on a certain matter regarding one of the things you'd said in regards to this article. But I don't really...want to bring it up publicly, and it seems Substack has no private messaging function. I don't suppose there's anywhere I could contact you to get your opinion?
The insurance company test is (usually) two part:
(1) The member suffers from a health disorder as defined in the policy, and
(2) The treatment proposed has demonstrated efficacy in treating that condition.
Number 1 used to bar contraceptives (because the condition being treated was fertility, which is not a disorder) and still bars most cosmetic surgery, even if its a health treatment that would improve your life.
Number 2 means that the catch-all diagnoses don't always demonstrate that there's evidence that the proposed treatment is likely to improve the condition, at least without more data.
Thank you. (2) appears to make difficulties for people who have patients with conditions that are difficult to treat, especially if they want to try something new. Is that a problem in practice?
NYT are going to describe this as you dropping N bombs while comparing homosexuality and pedophilia.
Lol
Ever other word this monster says is the n word.
You're right! Is there no depravity to which Alex Scottish will not sink! 🤣
the "this is needed because else health insurance will not cover necessary interventions" is an horrifying kludge on multiple levels.
and proves too much: if a queer got deluded into believing social conservative memes, then treating their distress (with e.g. drugs known to delete libido) would be as justifiable as transgender treatments for dysphoria.
Ever consider letting Alex Anderscott co-write your blog? Last I heard he was hanging out with Tyrone Cowen.
You're confusing Alex with his son, Anderscott Alexson.
Completely agree with your take, Scott. There are many inconsistencies and absurdities in DSM. Some of the ones that I ruminate about a lot:
One intuitively plausible definition of illness is that it is something that causes the ill person to suffer, and many of the things labelled psychiatric disorders fit that criterion: Anxiety and depression, for instance certainly do. But then how do we think about disorders that do not cause suffering, or at least would not if the individual was allowed to act as he pleases, suffering neither interference nor censure? Homosexuality, pedophilia and in fact all of the paraphilias fall into this category. In fact, is there any reason to think that indulging one’s kink gives less pleasure than vanilla sex gives non-kinksters? Actually, my impression from talking with a lot of kinksters is that their sexual pleasure is unusually intense. It’s as though they’ve found the sexual motherlode. From that point of view, people with sexual kinks are exceptionally high functioning.
How about drug addiction? Seems like that some addictive drugs have quite a pleasant effect, and that people addicted to them would be content and able to function reasonably well if they were supplied with the gradually increasing doses they need to maintain the drug’s effect. Of course using the drug in ever-increasing doses will probably harm their health — but so do the surgeries and drugs required for changing one’s gender.
Should we think of gender dysphoria as a form of Body Dysmorphic Disorder? According to the DSM, surgery to change the defect that preoccupies people with BDD rarely decreases their distress.
Why aren’t the experiences small children have with doctors thought of as being similar to the experiences of sexually abused childen? I don't think I was any more horrified by doctor visits than the average preschooler, but I still have vivid memories of the horrors my pediatrician perpetrated upon me when I was a small child. I was often forced to be naked except for my underpants and felt vulnerable and embarrassed to be seen undressed. And even the underwear usually came off before the end. He stuck things into my ears and nose and throat that really hurt, and the things in my throat also made me gag and feel like I could not breath. He pushed down hard on sore injuries and poured stuff that burned into raw wounds. He jabbed me with spikes in the butt and pushed a glass rod up my butthole. He looked at my genitals. And all the while he acted friendly and plied me with candy and gave explanations for the humiliations and tortures he visited on me that somehow fooled my parents. I truly believe that I would have been less distressed by visits to the pediatrician if the doctor had, instead of doing medical exams and procedures, fondled my genitals and shown me his penis. Of course I do realise that child sexual abuse often includes other toxic elements besides fondling, etc. I am speaking here just about the effects of an adult imposing his will on a child’s body.
That's a pretty funny way of showing that context is everything.
It seems that deciding that homosexuality shouldn't be considered a mental disorder to avoid stigma its just as much a political decision as deciding that it is a mental disorder because of stigma. I suspect that some people just assume that an unbiased, apolitical process will just end up confirming their own political commitments because they believe that their own political commitments are unbiased.
" It’s just the claims to be able to avoid political bias in what is vs. isn’t a disorder that I find compelling."
... compelling? Or problematic?
Also, maybe the problem is that 'disorder' has a non-technical meaning. If we just called gender dysphoria a 'potential subject of treatment' or used some clunky term that didn't have a popular meaning and was awkward enough to not seep immediately into the popular lexicon then maybe that would buy us some time.
>We may want to categorize being addicted to meth differently from being addicted to Twitter, even if the neurobiology behind both addictions turns out to be similar, just because meth addicts have the bad luck to be addicted to something that’s really bad for them and for society.
I'm not sure whether the phrasing of this was meant to be subtly darkly humorous or not, but I can't help reading it that way.
I took it as a joke. Also, I wouldn't sleep on a future version of the DSM including compulsive use of social media associated with a list of problems this causes as a diagnostic condition. There are people who can't maintain their lives due to compulsive use.
Gaming disorder made it to ICD-11. Social media use disorder or Excessive Internet use disorder might be on its heels.
What if I want a purely biological, apolitical definition of mental disorders and I'm willing to bite the bullet of calling homosexuality a mental disorder?
Let's assume I don't really care if people are mad at me, I just want to have an accurate and consistent model of the world.
> I don't really care if people are mad at me, I just want to have an accurate and consistent model of the world.
That's a mental disorder.
Classified in DSM under Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Au contraire: feeling a compulsive need for others to like and admire you is a mental disorder; refusing to interpret what people say except in the most literal and least contextually informed way seems to be the symptom of a mental disorder; having opinions that some others disagree with and not being bothered about that is not.
lol
Agreed, Matthew: it is quite funny.
See my other comment. "A behaviour of a person inducing distress or harm to themselves or others" is the best for intra-personal problems, and I think works for inter-person problems very well (for most cases).
The boundaries are what constitutes as acceptable or inacceptable "distress" to others, and that's impossible to be looked at apolitically - I'm looking at you, "I'm offended for the minority, so you need to stop!" heckler at a comedy show!
What would a purely biological, apolitical definition of mental disorders that classifies homosexuality but not heterosexually as a mental disorder look like?
How do you define “mental disorder” in a non-political way that has accuracy conditions? I could define a “mental disorder” as a positive integer divisible only by itself and 1, and I get a nice precise apolitical definition (it’s either a prime number or 1) but it’s not a helpful definition for what I want to do with the concept. But lots of what we want to do with the concept of “mental disorder” is inherently political. So it’s going to be a partially political concept.
Bravo on the novel anti-out-of-context quote measure, I'm honestly very curious to see how it turns out.
>>To avoid that, I will be replacing spaces with the letter “N”, standing for “NOT TO BE TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT”. <<
Try "O" instead of "N" (standing for Out) because it looks a little more like a space.
Seems like it is a lot easier just to bite the bullet and say that, yes, homosexuality is a mental disorder, that DSM declassified for political reason. I mean, it is what the history books tell us happened, and homosexuality has strong loadings on mental illness symptoms, so it is rather obvious once you put on the evolutionary psychiatry glasses.
Another curiosity here is that the opposite of pedophilia, gerontophilia, is not in the DSM, despite also being a targeting error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerontophilia In fact, it might be a bigger error when men are doing it, as old women are never fertile and cannot become so, while girls might be, and at least will be at some later point.
Any male who doesnt encourage other males to be homosexual to reduce competition for females is mentally disordered. Also any male who spends his time complaining about the DSM not pathologizing sexual preferences he doesnt like instead of trying to impregnate any and all women he can.
At odds with Bentham's defense of pederasty:
http://paganpressbooks.com/jpl/JB-ESSAY.HTM
Were a man's taste even so far corrupted as to make him prefer the embraces of a person of his own sex to those of a female, a connection of that preposterous kind would therefore be far enough from answering to him the purposes of a marriage. A connection with a woman may by accident be followed with disgust, but a connection of the other kind, a man must know, will for certain come in time to be followed by disgust. All the documents we have from the antients relative to this matter, and we have a great abundance, agree in this, that it is only for a very few years of his life that a male continues an object of desire even to those in whom the infection of this taste is at the strongest. The very name it went by among the Greeks may stand instead of all other proofs, of which the works of Lucian and Martial alone will furnish any abundance that can be required. Among the Greeks it was called Paederastia, the love of boys, not Andrerastia, the love of men. Among the Romans the act was called Paedicare because the object of it was a boy. There was a particular name for those who had past the short period beyond which no man hoped to be an object of desire to his own sex. They were called exoleti. No male therefore who was passed this short period of life could expect to find in this way any reciprocity of affection; he must be as odious to the boy from the beginning as in a short time the boy would be to him. The objects of this kind of sensuality would therefore come only in the place of common prostitutes; they could never even to a person of this depraved taste answer the purposes of a virtuous woman.
A flaw in your argument. Gay men may have feminized brains and thus score higher in trait neuroticism, like women. But that isn't evidence of any significant genetic loading for mental illness, it could be loading for feminized brain structure. To the extent you call homosexuality a mental illness (because it may be more common for gay men to be anxious or depressed) it requires one to call being female a mental illness. It can be considered a darwinian disease as Cochran calls it, but you need to have a better reason why.
>>(a common claim is that the DSM says transgender itself is not a mental disorder, but the distress it produces is. This doesn’t seem especially destigmatizing to me<<
It seems straightforward to me, to understand this as saying that biased public reactions to trans people pruduces stress which is unhealthy.
Is being black a mental disorder (or, I guess, a skin disorder) if you live in a racist area? It sounds like biased reactions to your being black would produce stress, which is unhealthy. Would it be better to call it Racism Sadness Disorder, where the disorder is that you are stressed because of racism?
I think you *could* frame it that way, but it would be very unproductive and stigmatizing. But for some reason with transgender everyone agrees this is the nonstigmatizing way to do things.
If people can be diagnosed with dysfunctions (worse than average) that cause incompatibility with their local society, they should also be diagnosed with eufunctions (better than average) that cause incompatibility with their local society. Try Racism Sadness Meliorder, if we're in the mood to use Latin roots in new ways?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/melior
If a black person is stressed due to racism and sees a therapist, they might be diagnosed with depression or anxiety. That's plenty for insurance to cover a therapist and some SSRIs. Transgender people need specific treatments such as hormones, which I'm guessing is why they need a specific diagnosis. Otherwise stressed trans people could be treated just like any other stressed person.
The historical term was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania
Never taken seriously.
It was immediately (and rightly) mocked by folks opposed to the institution of slavery, but taken seriously enough by their political opponents to make it into reference books, even as late as the third edition of Thomas Lathrop Stedman's Practical Medical Dictionary in 1914.
Was Stedman a political opponent of folks opposed to the institution of slavery? Because otherwise I don't think his inclusion of it (with even his first edition being published well after the abolition of slavery) suffices to show that.
Samuel A. Cartwright, who invented the term, certainly was pro-slavery, but I don't know much of anything about Stedman, just got that reference from the wikipedia article. My point was that such textual persistence seems inconsistent with it having been "never taken seriously."
There is race-based traumatic stress, which is kinda close to what you're somewhat derisively calling "racism sadness disorder."
I think we could imagine a theoretical condition in which a person displays a symptom pattern specific to the experience psychological distress caused by racist treatment such that you name it its own thing with its own set of best practices for treatment. In the real world, I'm not entirely sure that would be justified, but insofar as you're proposing this hypothetically, sure, why not? It doesn't imply that the disorder is the person's fault anymore than PTSD subsequent to sexual assault should stigmatize the person with the condition.
How about the other direction--I assume people come to therapists from time to time because, despite their best effort, they can't help just fearing/disliking/being upset by blacks. It's hard to see that as a disorder, exactly, but you can see why people would want to find a way to stop feeling that way.
Outside of psychiatry, there are things covered by medical insurance that do not constitute a disorder. Anything that has to do with birth control or childbirth comes to mind.
Perhaps there should be a way to decouple "should be covered by insurance" from "constitutes a mental disorder"?
(Oh, and nothing will ever prevent people who believe they get to tell everyone what to think from quoting you out of context. Anyone who is happy to lie to get their point across will also think it's OK to misquote.)
Within psychiatry and clinical psychology it's not uncommon for people to have off-book treatment needs that get a catch-all diagnosis like "adjustment disorder" for insurance purposes. I think this is an open enough secret to not be a secret.
Anything that you're very upset about (or can convincingly pretend to be sufficiently upset about) can be treated as an "anxiety" or "distress" or similar.
I assume the problem is, then, that not every doctor does this for everything their patients need treated. Perhaps there should officially be some catch-all psychiatric diagnoses for things that need treatment but for whatever reasons aren't in the classification.
That exists, but insurance is tricky and it's safer to pick something that'll stick, but isn't wildly inaccurate. That's why a vague diagnosis like adjustment disorder can provide cover for a lot of off-book issues.