"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.
"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.
>There are distinct claims I make: homosexuality has an evolutionary fitness advantage. Pedophillia has no evolutionary fitness advantage.
How does that translate to "They aren't the same thing from a purely biological standpoint" ? Whether something is advantageous or not has nothing to do with whether it's nature or nurture (or politics).
>I am not taking a stance on morality.
You expressing concern about "Far right" people reading Scott's blog and agreeing with those things make me somewhat skeptical that you're completely value-neutral.
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.
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!
>"Homosexuals are pedophilles grooming your children" is right now, at this moment, spreading among the far-right.
There is a thousand thousand "Drag Show for Kids" and similar trends on twitter and tiktok already to fuel this, so I don't think the people who want to paint homosexuals as pedophilles are really in a deseprate want.
>He is of course opposed to negative coverage in large media outlets, and feels slighted by the NYT in particular. I do not care about that, and nobody really should.
Why ? I actually *do* really care about doxxing and the unfair treatment of ordinary people by those who wield a public pen. Scott is fortunately not exactly without power, but even he got his life intensely disrupted by the NYT. It sounds really tactless to say """Meh, so he quit his job and spent a year or so recalculating his entire lifestyle **Yawn** so what ?""". To say nothing of the countless people who got their life disrupted an order of magnitude worse and had nothing to do about it.
In contrast, I actually don't give the slightest shit about the latest panic about people equating homosexuality with paedophilia, 99% of it self-inflicted.
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.
The thing is, the word "harmful" here is doing an aweful amount of (undeserved) work. Comparing gays to paedophiles is not any more harmful than, say, (1) comparing right-wing advocates to facists, (2) comparing anti-abortion advocates to Al-Qaeda terrorists ("y'all Qaeda"), or (3) comparing parents concerned about their children's education (whether rightly or wrongly) to domestic terrorists.
Every single one of those groups rejects the comparison, every comparison is derogatory as well as violence-suggesting (what do you do to fascists or terrorists except spraying them with bullets ?), and yet I have never seen any objection to them from the same people who see comparing gays to paedophiles as beyond the pale.
Love it or hate it, you can say anything on the Internet. The entire success mythos of progressive ideology is that it started as a radical sect that initially parasitized the University institution then spread on to the Internet, becoming super-charged by the new medium's global interconnectivity. Feminists spent entire decades and several server farms to rage on men and their various behaviours and traits, comparing them to various repulsive and dehumanizing things in the process.
So it rings a bit hollow if, after all of this, after 40+ years of wokes\progressives freely dehumanizing their opponents and 20+ years of doing it on the internet, it's suddenly a crime to compare gays to paedophiles. Where was this decency when "Facist" was and is used to denote anyone who thinks "Woman" should only mean "Adult Human Female" ? Nowhere to be seen, as far as I can tell.
TL,DR; Meh, comparing gays to paedophiles is no big deal, and is no worse than what most movements on the side of gays themselves do.
>(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.
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.
You're literally suggesting being a cuck and supporting the bloodline of competing males was an advantageous strategy and that's why homosexuality exists?
The math doesn't even close to work out, how do you propose this altruistic behavior actually evolved?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That said, I do feel a ***tiny*** bit suspicious when the exact same people who say this then go ahead and appear Extremly Keen on teaching materials and storytelling that advertises and describes homosexuality in vivid details in schools.
Most of the time, the stated purpose is "So the gay kids don't feel like they don't belong", and this sounds like something very noble..... that a school shouldn't touch with 1000-kilometer pole unless in a sex ed class. (the material in which is approved through the various channels by lawmakers and parents, or their proxies) If *parents* themselves want their gay kids to feel like they don't belong, then you have a far bigger problem not fit to be solved with moral grandstanding and "My Way Or The Highway" thinking that those people often display.
Sometimes, those people slip and say their explicit purpose is "Normalizing" gay relationships, and at this point, I have to very politely ask "What is 'Normalization' exactly ? and how - when done to kids or early teenagers who can't think critically enough - is it that different from an accusation of 'grooming' ?"
(And 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.)
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.
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".
There is no straight agenda because people don't set out to include straight relationships in things deliberately. No one actually unironically says "I want to 'de-stigmatize' \'normalize' man-woman love, so I will include those 2 characters in my show for no other reason but to tell people how progressive I am and how much woman-man love is so much better". Do tell me if someone actually says that.
It's difficult to access one's inner judgements, but I suspect that I actually have no problem with gay relationships per se in kid's material or schools, or perhaps I have a small problem that is not enough to make me really oppose it.
But what's extremly creepy and unsettling about the modern LGBT++ movement is the cheery attitude of "We're Going To Plan Things From The Very Start To Include Gay Things, And Your Kids Are Going To Love It". What's extremly creepy is dressing like a drag queen and performing in a kids' event. I would be very curious to see what's your straight equivalent of that, or of a book that depicts oral sex between 2 character that is included in a public school's library. It looks like the strawman version of the gay advocate that resides in (e.g.) Muslims' heads, except it's actually true. And it makes hollow every promise of "Guys, we're definitely not going to glorify or teach homosexuality" that gay advocates have made since the 1990s or so.
If you don't like being accused of having an agenda, maybe... you know, just don't have an 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.
> 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?"
Both.
An example of the first category that I know of is a book like Gender Queer.
But the second category is also something I don't like. 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". With gay relationships, you're cornered by the fact that 2 gay people *don't* get together to make a child, so you're forced to either be incredibly vague about what's really happening or just lie, neither seems to be a good solution to me.
>Every book with a romantic subplot describes heterosexual relationships in vivid detail
Like I said, I don't think the 2 kinds of relationships are symmetric.
I will also modify my original reference to "Teaching materials and storytelling" to include the spoken words of teachers themselves, not just written printed materials.
>If you had a rule of not letting anyone talk about who they had a crush on
I mean, this rule already exists, it's just a vanilla part of being a decent teacher. I was talking about teachers and what they are allowed and not allowed to say or teach. I would **definitely** be suspicious as hell if a teacher is telling the kids about his or her crushes. One or two jokes are okay, but making it a consistent topic seems a bit off.
>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!
>Why do you have to talk about babies, rather than romance?
I can, but will pre-adolescents understand it ? I don't think they would. Babies (through the implicit reference of marriage) serve as a convenient euphemism for sex, one that you can trick a child into accepting as an answer.
Will a pre-adolescent understand romance as a distinct type of love ? How would they distinguish between it and vanilla friendships ?
>Two men who love each other like your mommy and daddy do
But this is the entire point, 2 men are not like mommy and daddy, mommy and daddy are a woman and a man. Am I getting hung up on a difference that pre-adolescent will not care about ? It seems to me like it's a pretty big deal.
>since "normalizing talking about these things" applies as much or more to kids talking to each other.
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.
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 think it actually fails miserably in this goal, and that furthermore it naively misunderstands the Abrahamic religions' point of view.
From the POV of Abrahamic religions, everything God creates is a test, He is the sort of asshole prankster who creates you with a desire to bed men then tells you you're going to a raging hell if you ever so much as think of doing so. A follower of those religions already believes that and has absolutely no problems with it, since God already did multiple things of that sort to them. A Muslim is already born to desire food and drink very much, yet Allah says that they're supposed to abstain 10-15 hours each day for a month, no reason, just to demonstrate their allegiance to Him.
So if a homosexual says "I was born this way", the Abrahamic religion follower would just reply "So what ? I was born with tons of desires and tendencies that God also tells me are a sin, and I try to comply as much as I can. I sometimes fail, but I never go as far as arguing that my failings be tolerated or even celebrated as equals to their opposites."
Theologians have differed on what exactly makes the Abrahamic God such an asshole, whether the various tests He makes up are really intrinsically "ethical" in a way that benefits us, or whether He literally just does it beacuse He feels like it. But the vast majority of rank and file believers model God as a sort of stern father : He doesn't give a shit about what you think is or is not fair, He doesn't give a shit about what you think is the correct course of action, He is to command and you're to obey His command.
It seems hopelessly naive to try to reason about such a model with "Well, is God so cruel so as to create me with lust for men and tells me I'm going to hell for indulging it ?", the unironic and straightforward answer is "Yes", He *is* in fact exactly that cruel (or appears to be), and you should shut up and follow His rules regardless of anything you empirically see in the world or believe in your head.
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.
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.
Competing for mates isn't easy, especially as a man. People saying exclusively gay men would be just as reproductively successful have to give some serious proof.
I like Robin Hanson's explanation for falling fertility as being the product of evolution encoding absolute wealth as the sign that you should have fewer kids and invest more per kid with the hopes that one kid becomes king and thereby you have lots of grand kids, when in reality it should have encoded relative wealth as that is what determines your child's chances of being king, but since most humans throughout history were dirt poor absolute wealth was a good enough proxy for chances of having a child be king. It seems to me a better explanation for the relationship between income and fertility than the classic Gary Becker - Jacob Mincer explanation of increasing opportunity cost and quality and quantity trade-off of children.
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.
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.
Weird. I swear it was on SSC a few years ago I read that the latest theory on homosexuality was that there is a "really really REALLY likes men" heritable trait, and that sisters of gay men tend to have lots of partners with the obvious follow-on of lots of children.
So the gay men are just getting the same trait as their sisters: they really like sex with men.
Then whoever wrote this thing that I was reading was concerned, since it didn't seem like the same sort of mechanism could explain lesbianism.
All this just hazy memory, obviously at least partially incorrect, so take it with all those usual salt grains.
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.
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 would consider this an obvious mental illness (women getting higher education and not dedicating themselves to their biological imperative) and it's causing society to collapse with women not having enough children.
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.
Not exactly addressing the point, but some thoughts:
If I could use gene editing to modify embryos of my future offspring, I think I would select against every mental disorder if possible.
I think that transgender people and pedophiles have more difficulty lives.
If given the decision between homosexual and heterosexual, I would choose for my offspring to be heterosexual. I think even many homosexuals would do the same, although I’m not certain of that.
If conversion therapy from homosexual to heterosexual were painless and possible, I would think insurance should subsidize it.
I don’t think homosexuality is immoral but I don’t think being anxious and depressed is immoral. It’s just I wouldn’t want to be those things and most people wouldn’t either. It seems to reduce quality of life.
Although this is kind of “word games” of a sort and there aren’t good exact definitions of ordinary language.
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?
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 one uses the criterion of hurting others, it surely hurts others, genes be damned
You're so confident about this, but a lot of hysteria around the topic is actually a recent invention. If anything is a social construct, it's the modern hysteria around and redefinition of the concept of "rape", which has not been about "consent" historically.
It takes two to tango, forced copulation only works if the female also evolves to reward it, and they often do, since it's one way to make the male proves its fitness.
“ 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.
But I Do Want A Purely Biological, Apolitical Taxonomy Of Mental Disorders, now I'm pretty unusual in this respect but that's fine with me. I haven't actually read Thomas Szasz but this seems to get at a similar point (he made lots of points) he was making (and maybe Caplan), that is in the public conscious the term mental disorder has been too medicalized that is it carries the same sort of weight/sense as medical disorders as opposed to being explicitly there for pragmatic purposes such as social control. Not sure if this is a correct interpretation of Szasz but I recall him saying something similar in a interview. Personally I think a lot of people conceive of mental disorders in a way similar to evil spirits in the mind (sort of abstract maybe physical like entities, similar in some respects to many Platonist or realist positions in philosophy). I think a lot of people would object to this characterisation but it's the general sense I've gotten looking at people, a good example in my personal life would be when my school counsellor told me that the WHO just classified gaming disorder as a thing (something she and others thought I had), her reaction seemed not to be consistent with the view that the WHO thinks gaming disorder is a new social problem that needs to be tackled or something similar rather her reaction seemed more consistent with the view that the WHO after doing extensive research discovered some part of (or thing in) the brain that proved gaming disorder was a real thing. For her I was not just a child with unusual and perhaps counterproductive habits/preferences rather I had this thing in my mind that had been suspected to exist and had recently been discovered to exist, that needed to be removed/fixed. I should also add that I don't think pedophilia in the contemporary ordinary language meaning of the term is a "targeting error" that is it seems to be not only consistent with but a fairly obvious prediction of evolution by natural selection. Of course with respects to the technical meaning of the term that is, a strong persistent or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent individuals, the view that this is a targeting error seems very likely but of course basically no one uses the word pedophile like this and the broadening of the term is only increasing over time.
I should clarify that the first sentence is mostly separate from everything else, but to elaborate further, yes I actually want to "call a bunch of perfectly fine things that don’t deserve any stigma “mental disorders”, and make everyone mad at you, and have everyone end up thinking you’re even more political than the DSM." I personally care more about modelling the world for pragmatic purposes than what others would think of my model, also I need not share my model of the world and so most of the backlash can easily be avoided in everyday life.
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.
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.
at least going off of Michael Seto's given age ranges mesophilia (40s-50s) in men is a targeting error and perhaps even the later parts of teleiophilia (20s-30s) and obviously nepiophilia (toddlers), none are in the DSM but perhaps there are pragmatic reasons to consider them disorders, although I think broadly defining that which is a disorder as that which is evolutionarily harmful probably doesn't make much sense especially when you realize that which is evolutionarily beneficial changes across time and culture. Although it would be pretty funny to declare men who are NOT psychopathic hebephiliac polygynous rapists optimising for gene pool influence as mentally disordered. As for the political aspect of what gets put in the DSM, the controversy between Richard Green, Ray Blanchard, James Cantor and the authors of Rind et al. might be a interesting read.
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 could be worth exploring exactly why can't they be treated just like any other stressed person.
We don't treat the depressed victims of racism by giving medications to change pigmentation or encourage them to change their name (or abandon culture) if the discrimination is based on ethnicity/ancestry/culture. We also don't tell someone who has some issues with having two arms to cut off their arms. Depressed short people should wear stilts? Depressed gingers should dye hair? On the other hand, depressed bald people - wigs, hair growth treatments?
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.
The explanation for homosexuality I’ve found most interesting is that the combination of genes and in utero hormone exposure that cause homosexuality at the extreme, lead to higher reproductive success at lower levels. For example, if your goal was to have as many surviving defendants as possible, would you trade a 3% chance of a child being gay if it came with a 6% increase in the rate of your children reaching adulthood - assuming the world that held for most of human history where child mortality was extremely high.
Do you have a pointer for more about this theory? It's not obvious to me how the survival advantage would work. Would the same mechanism also produce 3% of individuals who are aggressively anti-homosexuality and react with violence to try to suppress any evidence of its existence?
I’ll try and find a good summary. As a thought experiment (not an actual theory I don’t think) consider that testosterone is immunosuppressive. If a gene mutation occurred that reduced one’s susceptibility to the immunosuppressive effects of testosterone that could result in increased survival for you and your offspring. But, as is often the case, the gene that causes a benefit can, under the right circumstances have a negative impact. One could imagine that the gene that mitigates against the immunosuppressive nature of testosterone could also interfere with other aspects of hormonal influence under the right circumstances. Evolutionarily a gene that increased immune strength that resulted in 6% greater survival overall would propagate even if it resulted in homosexuality 3%.
Sure it’s plausible. As we find out more about genetics we find more and more examples of genes that provide a benefit coming with an evolutionary cost. The most well know example of this is sickle cell disease. Having the sickle cell trait provides protection against malaria. But in 0.2% of those who have the sickle cell trait it progresses to sickle cell disease.
Malaria is an unusually impactful & recent disease. We can also clearly see the genes for protecting against it. There's no proposed pathogen whatever imaginary (GWAS hasn't found it, and we already knew concordance was low as one should have expected a priori) "gay gene" is supposed to protect against.
"You would wonder about heterozygote advantage, something like sickle-cell. But you would learn that you need a big advantage in order to generate a high frequency of a trait that reduced fitness so much – and big advantages are hard to find. The only known cases of such strong heterozygote advantage in humans are all defenses against falciparum malaria, which is a hell of a disease. And those defenses are limited to populations that spent a long time exposed to falciparum malaria – tropical and subtropical regions of the Old World. Moreover, any such gene would have an easily recognizable Mendelian family pattern , even if it had partial penetrance for some reason – and homosexuality does not."
I didn’t claim it was offering protection against a specific pathogen. Maybe this is a better example:
<I> This raises the question of why such a potentially devastating, often lethal disease is still hanging around plaguing humanity. We know from an abundance of recent research that schizophrenia is heavily genetic in origin. One would think that natural selection would have eliminated the genes that predispose to psychosis. A study published earlier this year in Molecular Biology and Evolution provides clues as to how the potential for schizophrenia may have arisen in the human brain and, in doing so, suggests possible treatment targets. It turns out that psychosis may be an unfortunate cost of having a big brain that is capable of complex cognition.</I>
1% is way too high for de novo mutations. Achondroplasia is 1/20k. Also, you wouldn't see much (measured) heritability if it were de novo mutations. Cochran and Ewald put forward schizophrenia as highest candidate for cause by infection.
That's almost certainly at least 10x too high for spontaneous mutation. The general rate of non-heritable birth defects is usually around 0.1% at most and often closer to 0.01%:
To be more precise, heterozygous sickle cell trait protects against malaria. Homozygous sickle cell trait is what causes sickle cell disease. This is a pretty well known example of heterozygote advantage. Cystic fibrosis is another example, though I forget what the heterogyzous form protects against.
What's wrong with a variation on the Grandmother Effect (the argument that menopause exists because at some point it benefits the family gene line more for a woman to focus on the welfare of her grandchildren than to bear more children herself)?
We are very social species, clearly the survival of any particular gene line depends not only on the sheer number of children with that line, but also the efforts of parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, et cetera to defend and advance the welfare of the family. If it's advantageous for a woman to switch over from child-bearing to grandchildren-protecting at an age when she is still quite physically capable, why would it not be an even greater advantage for some of a child's uncles to be homosexual, and be inclined to defend and advance the interests of the family as a whole (instead of focus on personal procreation) while even younger, and even more physically capable? Fathering young children takes a huge amount of energy. If some of the uncles can devote their energy to discovering how to smelt iron instead of finding extra antelope legs for their own kids, that's potentially a big win for the tribe.
The rate at which uncles discover how to smelt iron is going to be too low to have a persistent genetic effect over generations. Plus, you need selection at the level of the gene rather than the tribe to explain a genetic effect (genetic group selection flounders amidst free-riders in the group).
Humans are a "very social" species, but nowhere near a eusocial species. It is always going to be to one's genetic advantage to have more children of your own rather than a sibling's children. This is why grandmothers are focused on their own descendants, not that of their siblings!
> she is still quite physically capable
No, her physical capability is declining with age, to the point where it will be her accumulated wisdom rather than physical capacity that can do the most for her descendants. The hard-off of menopause is distinct from that gradual decline, but the preceding decline makes the Darwinian math work.
> Fathering young children takes a huge amount of energy.
The fundamental difference between males & females across species is that sperm is cheap while eggs are expensive. Gestating and then caring for a helpless newborn is even more expensive. Polygamists have fathered lots of children in their old age.
1. You took a metaphor ("smelt iron") literally, either missing the point or constructing a strawman.
2. I don't find it credible that natural selection operates only at the individual gene line -- that would make the existence of social species that don't consist of clones hard to explain. Humans are not fruit flies.
3. I disagree it is always an advantage *to a particular gene line* for an individual to bear more children. I think you are conflating success for a individual person with success for his assorted genes. Competition does not occur entirely at the individual level -- if it did, sexual reproduction would be rare and most species would reproduce asexually, which preserves the individual (in the sense of that exact configuration of DNA).
4. Not sure with what you disagree about menopause, because I can't parse that sentence in a way that makes sense.
5. Humans are not fish, not even gorillas. Historically, human fathers invest a great deal of energy in their offspring, almost as much as mothers when they are young, and arguably more than mothers when they reach adolescence. The polygamy example (or the emperor with the harem) is an exception that proves the rule, not evidence against it. If this were not the case, monogamy would not be as much of a rule as it is, the social opprobrium attached to male infidelity would not be as common as it is,
And, finally, overall, you are mostly taking issue with various subpoints of the main point, which isn't really an argument that's worth having to me. I may well have adduced flawed evidence in support of the hypothesis, or I may not state it as well as I might, but editorial critique of its presentation isn't of interest to me. What would be, is an effort to fully grasp the nature of the hypothesis, and find major weaknesses in it -- what broad implications does it have that are contradicted by evidence and experience? What mechanisms does it presuppose which we know don't exist, or which might be too unreliable to function as necessary? In what way might it contradict other broad conclusions we can make about the way evolution shapes a species? Stuff like that.
1. If discovering new ways to smelt iron is a standin for all kinds of technological discovery, it's still vanishingly rare. Physical anthropologists looking at the tools of paleolithic humans see enormous amounts of time with minimal technological change. The Australian aborigines never invented the bow & arrow, much less any metalworking, during all their time there. The Tasmanians actually went backward technologically relative to the Australians.
2. What's so incoherent about a social (not eusocial) sexual species for whom selection operates on individual gene lines? Fruit flies aren't clones either!
3. The common explanation for aesexual reproduction evolving into sexual reproduction is "Red Queen theory": pathogens are constantly evolving, so their hosts have to run as fast as they can just to keep up. Sex shuffles up the genes to reduce vulnerability to pathogens. This is why we see it in non-social species as well, like both fruit flies & fish that lay unfertilized eggs and never even have to interact with their mates.
4. A woman's fertility declines over time. This means the payoff to attempting to have a marginal child also declines with age. The older she is, the more knowledge she also accumulates. Eventually she can ensure more descendants via devoting effort to her existing descendants rather than having a marginal child, menopause forces her into that strategy. Men do not have menopause, and are able to have children at much higher ages.
5. The amount that human fathers invest in their children varies, with some not really doing so much at all (including not actually having any such role as "father" or being recognized as one). I recommend reading Henrich on the cultural evolution of fatherhood. Polygamy is not an "exception", it is the norm across cultures. It's merely the case that the atypical monogamous Roman/Christian civilization was extraordinarily successful and suppressed others. The norm among Australian aborigines, for example, is gerontocracy where the older men hog the women. I've linked this elsewhere in the thread, but Misha Saul has recently been writing about the emergence of monogamy out of a norm against it: https://kvetch.substack.com/p/wife-economics-and-the-domestication
If you want a broad critique here it is: we know heterosexuality is adaptive, and it results in more offspring for obvious reasons. A priori we shouldn't expect homosexuality to be genetic, as natural selection would suppress it too much, and indeed both twin studies & GWAS find low heritability. People will sometimes bring up things like sickle cell anemia where genes are beneficial in some cases while obviously reducing fitness in others, but that's an unusual case where malaria (note: a pathogen) is a VERY LARGE driver of fitness and became common relatively recently when trees got cleared to create standing water for mosquitos to breed in. So you need something of that scale for the downside of a gene not to minimize its frequency, and there is no plausible way for "gay uncle" theory to work because these uncles don't act at all like ants or even wolves assisting in the raising of nieces/nephews, which makes sense when you think about it since homosexuality is not how those caregivers of other species wind up in such roles (effort devoted to mating would of course reduce what they can provide to their relatives). But do we know of situations where people devote lots of effort toward mating without producing children (and without birth control being the explanation)? Yes, in the "sterility belt", caused by STDs. Diseases will reduce your fitness, as it's no skin off their back, and per Red Queen theory that effect will persist even as we evolve to resist them. And that damage doesn't even have to be to the advantage of the disease, as polio doesn't spread after it reaches the brain to paralyze you (that's just a side effect to no gene's advantage).
...reordering a fairly significant and universal human social guiderail so that a privileged set of rule makers don't get targeted by hedonist activists would seem a poor way of doing health care, but here we are.
I think this is a solid assumption in the narrow view that doesn't take into account the tradeoffs that have to happen for this individual to arrive at this "solution" to his problem. But if you zoom out from the individual, the assumption that "getting other people to pay for things that are good for this guy is good" starts to look less and less sound, and leads to bad outcomes.
>If this is accurate, the N relevant N difference N between N homosexuality N and N pedophilia N is N moral N, not N biological. Both are sexual targeting errors, but one re-targets sexuality onto other people who can consent and won’t be harmed, so it’s fine. The other targets people who can’t consent and will be harmed, so it’s bad.
The fact that you said this shows that either you didn't even have serious doubts about it or you're just lying. Maybe you lied in order to make people think their way to the truth more efficiently than if you had told the truth, but I don't see how they would, besides by your inviting a tiny number of implausibly courageous souls to object to it.
I don't want to spend too much text telling you how viscerally bad it made me feel that you said this; the sheer hopelessness that overcomes me when I think that you of all people cannot discover, through curiosity or by simply attending to the neurotypically-unspeakable strangeness of the world, the totality of clues on this matter.
How many characters short should my paragraphs be? How many paragraphs per post can I give you that you won't reject them for being too long? Will you just round me off as crazy if I have a mountain of anecdotal clues that humanity is collectively delusional about this topic? If our epistemic institutions and socialization are riddled with incentives to be carelessly misleading, it does not make reality and its clues any less real!
This is vague enough that I can't tell which of the various ideas in the quoted paragraph you think is clearly wrong. (Pedophilia being immoral? Homosexuality being moral? Either arising from a sexual targeting error? Gay sex being (usually) consensual & harmless? Pedophiliac sex being nonconsensual & harmful?)
2. Children will (without qualification) be harmed by sex with pedophiles
3. Pedophilia is (without qualification) immoral
Surrounding claims in this topic that are wrong:
1. All children are conveniently stereotypical children
2. If children thought having sex with adults — with social consequences equivalent to those that an adult would face for having homosexual sex — was a real possibility, they would want it less frequently than adults want to have homosexual sex
3. The children who are not conveniently stereotypical children are not multitudinous and their interests are not important
4. Something remotely bad or immoral has happened if a child has confident, consensual sex with an adult and their social world doesn't punish them for it nor convince them it was a bad thing or they have some reason to be traumatized about it
5. People who have a fixated attraction to children are more dangerous or malicious than blacks who wanted interracial marriage with whites in states where it was illegal in 1960
I disagree that all those claims are wrong. In the 70s, there were some groups in Germany (affiliated to the green party) who honestly believed that sexual relations between children and adults would be good for the children. So they had sexual relationships with children, and they undertook great efforts to make sure that it was consensual, that everything was in a positive, caring atmosphere, and so on. It was not secret either, since it was accepted within their social groups. At least one person even published a book about it.
In retrospect, this didn't work out at all. A lot of these children got psychological problems. After growing up, many of them said that it was bad for them, and that they wished that these things had not happened. (Though they did acknowledge that the adults had acted in good faith.) Even some of the adults say in hindsight that the concept has failed, and that a lot of their believes during the adult-child-relationship (that sex is nice and beneficial for both sides and that the children actually wanted that) had just been wishful thinking.
My bottom line is that children don't have sexual drive before puberty. Adults can make children do and apparently even "want" lots of things, because children want to be liked by the parents. But if it is about sex, then the adult is not acting in the interest of the child. The idea that a pre-puberty child can have confident, consensual sex with an adult is an illusion. So my default assumption is that consensual sex between adults and children is potentially harmful. Not every single child will be harmed, but adults can't tell apart in which cases it is harmful, and the rate is high enough that it should stay generally forbidden.
Things do change a bit with puberty, but I still think that it makes sense to generally forbid this up to a certain age. Children are almost always in a much weaker position, and the risk that adults just impose their own desires onto the teens in a harmful way is way too large. Even if the adult have no bad intentions.
As for the later distress of the pedophilic relationship, and that one of the children did write a book about their history - do you remember the source for an evaluation, and post the author and title of the book? (I haven't read the whole investigation report yet, in case it's in there)
I completely agree on the missing sex drive before puberty and being unable to give consent to an adult - although I dislike the proxy of "age" as the legally determining factor of being able to give consent, it's the best we got.
I think the question isn't so much that these desires don't exist at all, as that they are not mature. I wish there were a way to phrase this without sounding like a psychoanalyst because I disagree with that lot in most of the specifics, but my strong intuition is that the harm caused by """consensual""" pedophilia is, among other things, that it messes with the kids' still-developing mental structures around sex before they've actually matured.
I first ejaculated from masturbation when I was 6. I loved taking as many opportunities as possible to miss out on family outings so that if I was left at home I could walk around the house naked. It made me extremely happy every time I did it, and I felt sexually aroused.
I often had fantasies that I would meet someone else, maybe a princess, who had in common with me a secret love of nakedness and putting one's "private parts" in weird and satisfying places. No one knew this about me because, well, I was shamed for nudity and my parents often hit me over things that seemed even smaller and less deviant to me, so why would I reveal this as well?
What I did was obviously innocent, and because my siblings also reacted with shame to my nudity, I came to suspect that children everywhere lacked the cleverness to doubt adults and create secret, controlled moments of daring lawlessness.
If that makes me a sociopath, it is a tragedy of inconceivable loss that we are not all sociopaths.
I suspect your experience is significantly atypical. As such, while I am in principle sympathetic and would - all else being equal - be in favor of a counterfactual where you were able to meet someone with whom to express shared interests in a healthy and mutually-beneficial way, unfortunately all else is not equal. Childhood tragedies which are more common and no less severe have to be considered a higher priority. I mean, given the option, you'd probably also prefer that your parents didn't hit you at all, right? Institutions and norms involved in reliably preventing that would surely result in other effects on social contexts and developing minds, potentially rendering impossible, or unnecessary, any hypothetical methods for someone like you and a "princess" to safely find each other.
I agree that it was a general public discussion. But I think the Greens were more involved than other parties. The Greens had official party organizations that lobbied for that.
I tried to find some sources, and found a few in this article (might be paywalled):
For the book, I probably blended several things into one. I have not read any of the original sources, but here are concrete links that I can extract form this and some other articles:
- There is the biographical novel "Das bleiche Herz der Revolution" by Sophie Dannenberg. The author was sent into "Kinderläden" in her childhood, and the book is based on her own memory and on interviews with her mother and other children and parents of that time. She does not describe direct sexual acts, but makes clear that even the "soft" forms of sexual infringements were traumatizing for her, e.g., having to present herself naked to other adults. In a later interview, she said "objectively it was abuse, subjectively (for the adults) not".
- There is the report "Kindererziehung in der Kommune" in "Kursbuch 17" from June 1969. As far as I can tell, this is basically a diary of the life in the so-called Kommune 2. In any case, it contains descriptions of very explicit sexual acts (though not intercourse) with the small children (3-6 years). The article cites a former members of the commune with the statement that at least one of the children looks back "mit Grausen" (with horror) to the time. This statement is not specific to the sexual acts, but in general to life in this commune.
- The "Konkret"-publisher Klaus Rainer Röhl wrote several articles in which he propagated consensual sex with children. Later, his two daughter accused him of child molestation, so obviously they were not agreeing in hindsight with what happened.
- There are quite a few books from that time which do not report a specific biographical story, but advertise sexual intercourse with children in general terms. E.g., the Handbuch in positiver Kinderindoktrination ("It's no less valuable if intercourse happens during cuddling."), or "Die Lust am Kind" by Dieter F. Ullmann (member of the green party). Helmut Kentler, a psychologist and professor for pedagogics, was an authority in this milieu, and has written lots of texts. He openly confessed that he placed difficult homeless children with pedophiles, because those would endure the difficulties of dealing with those children in exchange for sex. He was convinced that non-violent sex does not harm minors. In all these cases, I don't know about reports from the children. (Though Ullmann and Kentler were convicted of child abuse in several cases, so protocols might exist.) https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/sexueller-missbrauch-das-berliner-paedo-problem-a-1124210.html
- An interesting case, for which I also don't know the hindsight opinion of the children, is the Schülerladen "Rote Freiheit" at Kreuzberger Oranienplatz in Berlin, which provided daycare for ~15 children of age 8-14. The protocols of a few months 1969/1970 were leaked, and contained "sexual exercises" and "fuck lessons" on the schedule, as well as details on how these lessons looked.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to post this, that's a lot to go through, and not an easy topic to say the least... The articles are indeed paywalled, I'll see if I can get them from an alternative source.
There are many serious problems with your detailed just-so story, as is typically the case with age reductivists. Millions of age reductivists with internet access would have stories just as detailed and erroneous as this one. If the internet had been invented in the 1800s, American Southerner race reductivists would have just as detailed and erroneous stories about why slavery is necessary and for the good of the slave.
You have not yet demonstrated that you are exceptionally discriminatory or principled as an age reductivist, nor that you are exceptionally discriminatory or principled as a single-quality-reductivist of any sort. You failed to imagine and suggest a better way for the world to be that would involve fewer moral sacrifices taken at the expense of discounted groups.
"It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination."
— Christopher Hitchens
Convince me that I should care to explicitly scrutinize the details of what you, a single-quality-reductivist, have to say on this topic.
>In retrospect, this didn't work out at all. A lot of these children got psychological problems. After growing up, many of them said that it was bad for them, and that they wished that these things had not happened. (Though they did acknowledge that the adults had acted in good faith.)
Since Calvin won't, I will; there's a causality issue here. Are the psychological problems because of the sex, or are the psychological problems because society expects the sex to cause psychological problems? Being fine with something that society assumes traumatising is, ironically, frequently traumatising, which unavoidably taints any attempt to test whether X is traumatising within a society that already believes it is.
This is not restricted to child molestation, of course. It's a huge squirming can of worms in almost every case where trauma is socially expected - rape, corporal punishment, war, gender non-affirmation...
There are so many possible confounders. Maybe the adults involved, sympathetically, made a huge deal of everything and kept suspiciously discussing with the children if they were causing trauma, causing them to think about trauma in connection with the sex all the time.
I agree, this makes it very hard to discriminate those things. The book of Sophie Dannenberg (see comment above, and I haven't read it myself) seems to indicate that she already found it traumatizing at that time, when her parents and her most direct environment tried to make it a positive experience. But this is weak evidence, there are all kind of reasons why she might still have been influenced by the culture, or why she even got this wrong in hindsight. Or why "presenting yourself nude to others although you don't want to" is on the same level as "having to kiss your aunt although you don't want to".
The standard argument isn't always that children lack a proper understanding of sex to consent or that they lack sexual desire. The reason minors can't legally consent to sex with adults is the same reason that prisoners can't legally consent to sex with prison guards and soldiers can't legally consent to sex with commanding officers: the power difference is so great that they can't freely say "no", and if they can't freely say "no" then their "yes" has no meaning either.
This standard reasoning ignores the fact that semi-intelligent children know that an adult who consents to have sex with them is unstoppably fucked as soon as the child wants to make a public fuss about it, and the midwit children can be informed of this simple fact as well, and so actually the child is at an enormous power advantage over an adult where sex specifically is concerned.
Children get their world knowledge from the adults. If the adult who has sex with them tells them that something terrible is going to happen *to the child* if they say anything, the child will believe that, plain and simple. This is no speculation, it is literally how 90% of child abuse goes.
And not just children. Just looking at some recent cases of sexual abuse in sports, this still works way too often for 20+ year olds, e.g. diver Jan Hempel. The trainer convinces them that their career would be over if they told anyone.
This is a gross misconception of child knowledge and the typical family.
Parents tell their children to fear pedophiles and to scream if an adult is touching them. Parents also tell them not to say bad words, not to eat candy, not to watch Yu-Gi-Oh because it's Satanic, etc., and sometimes they punch or spank them if they're slightly too rude.
If the parents have a lot of rules that never lead to anything bad when they're violated in private, and they keep acting like villains from Disney movies to them, and the other kids in the neighborhood seem to know way way more about adult topics and seem happy and socially fine, a semi-intelligent kid is going to start asking themselves what's the point of all the fuss.
And then when that semi-intelligent kid starts asking for reasons, and the adults say "because I said so; I'm the parent and you're the child, so you do what I say, that's how this works," that kid is going to think "I see. So this is a mean relationship, not a nice one."
When my daughter was 5 I decided to give her a little psychological booster shot regarding getting in the car with strangers. We'd already had the talk about who counted as a stranger, the importance of not getting in the car with them, ways to say no to them, reasons not to get in the car with them, etc. She understood all that just fine, and could recite all the main points herself. So I decided to do a little role play. I explained to her that just to give her some practice we were going to pretend that I was a stranger inviting her into my car. Her job was to say no, then leave the area, just as we'd talked about. She understood all that just fine too. So I drive around the block, pull up next to her, roll down the window and say "Hi there. Listen, I've lost my puppy. Will you come with me and help me find him?" She stood there uneasily for a little while, twirling her hair and looking embarrassed and confused. Then she said, softly, "OK," and got in the car.
Later she explained that if a real stranger had asked her to get in the car with him and she had said no she was afraid he would get mad at her and say that she was rude. My daughter was not a hyper-obedient child, just average, but she had been raised to be respectful of adults, and of course I made sure that she was only around adults whom she should respect and obey --- my friends, my family, her teachers, etc. She had never been in a situation where the certified right thing to do was to just tell an adult "nope," and walk away while they were still talking to her. When asked to do that, even in a pretend game, she couldn't bring herself to carry through.
Kids up until age 10 or so are also easy to convince that they will get in big trouble if they spill the beans about sexual abuse. They all know that what is happening between them and the abuser is unusual, weird, and against the rules, and they have no real-world experience to guide them regarding who is going to get in trouble if people find out.
Kids have enormous power advantage over adults where beatings are concerned too, especially beatings that leave marks. Just 2 days ago heard about an 11 year old who went to the police and showed them the bruises from his aunt's latest beating. The aunt quickly lost custody of the kids and they were placed in foster care. But kids who bust their caretakers for beatings are as rare as hens' teeth -- and that's despite the fact that beaten kids, unlike sexually abused kids, cannot be silenced with threats that they are the ones who will get in trouble if the truth comes out.
Is all that enough reasons to change your mind?
Oh, and one more point. I find your multiple remarks categorizing children by intellectual level -- "midwits," etc -- repulsive and wrong-headed.
Your daughter is unspeakably adorable and I hope she's always safe and sound.
I disagree with the commenter you're replying to, but I dislike you taking their (wrong) view of the situation and turning it into a personal advice that they didn't ask for.
I think the issue of consent is perhaps the most interesting, where from a extremely naive autistic sense it seems obvious that a 3 year old girl can consent to providing a man a hand job and enjoy the entire process. Yet in the eyes of most people this is completely outrageous and more importantly, factually false with respects to giving consent.
Which raises the question what exactly is meant by consent, is it simply saying yes, is it saying yes and having a particular part of the brain reach a particular level of development, is it saying yes and having the earth orbit the sun some particular number of times, is it saying yes plus not having particular intoxicants in your blood stream etc. etc.
Whilst it is possible to imagine a sufficiently complicated nominal or reductionist account of consent such that it appears to perfectly match ordinary language uses of the term, this is clearly not the conception of consent people actually subscribe to, even if some more physicalist minded people defer to such an account when provoked they don't actually believe that's how consent works.
The way in which people actually conceive of consent is analogous to a non naturalist account of moral properties perhaps even explicitly reducible to some sort of complicated deontological statement. As such to people who are unable to perceive of such properties ( or in their eyes, don't suffer from moral hallucinations) the language and peoples beliefs about consent seem nonsensical and vice versa.
I should also add that much of the comments seem to address attraction to prepubescent children even though most people don't use the term pedophile like that and many of the inferences people make using the technical definition obviously can't be broadened out to encompass the normal usage of the term. Also many of the various forms of evidence offered to support or attack claims about harm from such sexual relationships are usually very weak and have obvious problems if you read further, nevertheless its interesting that people ignore perhaps the best data we have on the matter which is the widespread instances of child marriage in places such as India that are in living memory.
TBQH I thought of mentioning the "well, societies have done this before" point, but there are some annoying counterarguments like "maybe they were all traumatised and didn't notice"; Bret Devereaux, for instance, basically makes that argument regarding Sparta in ACOUP. I think that counterargument's kind of eye-roll-worthy, but nonetheless I'm not a psychologist or historian and didn't feel like I needed the point enough to wade into that swamp.
>If I understand journalistic ethics correctly, they can’t edit the sentence to remove the Ns - and if they kept them, people would probably at least wonder what was up.
You don't understand journalism ethics correctly. And again, you're behaving like a quokka. When they quoted you out of context before, they were *intentionally misrepresenting* you. Anything that a layman would call ethics has already been violated. When they say that they didn't change the words, that's an *excuse*; they say that because a ton of people who like to make excuses for journalists will say "sure, they didn't change any words, so they're not lying". (See also, previous Scott article denying that the media lies).
It's conflict theory all the way down. Whether they would remove extra N's is not based on "journalistic ethics"--it's based on "if we removed the N's, and got caught doing so, would there be backlash that inconveniently calls us liars". There won't be such backlash, so the journalists will have no problem removing the Ns.
So the header should be «I am willing to accept Peter Thiel funding a libel lawsuit for edited quotes if he ever picks a bone with a media outlet that has quoted me out of context» instead?
I think you are assuming that every ethical question here is binary, and either everyone will feel constrained or no one will. In fact there are at least some relevant journalists for who me the removal of the N’s is going to remind them of their scruples enough to stop them, which wouldn’t have been stopped by the presence of a disclaimer a few sentences before or after.
Should we consider transexuality a physical disorder rather than a mental one?
From my point of view, a transgender person's mind is fine. Their body just doesn't match. That sounds physical, not mental to me.
Perhaps the DSM is the wrong place to define it, and doing so elsewhere would avoid the need for the "this is bad and should be covered by insurance" and "this is not a mental disorder" inconsistency.
Well, the body "is fine" as well, so that's not a good reason to assign responsibility to the body rather the mind.
Generally (and I know this is philosophically nontrivial), I would say that it's the mind's job to deal with the world as it in constructive ways, with the body being part of the "world" in the broader sense. If the mind is not happy with what it sees, possible steps can include changing the body ("Looks like I'm getting fat - time to hit the gym and rethink my diet!"), but obviously there are maladaptive ways to change the body that are correctly identified as mental disorders ("Looks like I'm still fat despite only weighing 85 pounds - time to go throw up!"). Chopping off perfectly functional reproductive organs and signing up for a lifelong subscription of hormones falls firmly in that category IMO.
(Quick nitpick: A treated transgender person's mind is fine. An untreated person is in a whole lot of distress, similar to how a person losing a leg or two will likely be distressed and depressed-- and hence have a mental struggle that they need help with, even though the cause is clearly physical.)
But ignore that nitpick, I absolutely think people need to talk more about the physical side of gender dysphoria. I just learned this week that a minimum of 25% of trans men that have had hysterectomies were incidentally discovered to have Never Had Correctly Working, Functional Uteruses In The First Place. All this fuss over sex vs. gender, and there aren't even working sex parts! Frankly, the topic is worth a big "what the fuck"? (This minimum of 25% could be a small estimate as well, as these were incidental observations required to perform a hysterectomy, not full exams.) There is absolutely a physical problem going on here.
I don't think "gender dysphoria is a mental disorder but transgender isn't" is really a contradiction. The two are different conditions - if you successfully transition, you no longer have dysphoria but you're still trans.
In the studies I have read, the number of people still experiencing symptoms of distress post gender treatment is approximately the same as the suicide rate in the cis-population: 3%. An estimated .1% of those people were misdiagnosed with dysphoria and de-transition while the others are experiencing multiple highly distressing problems.
(This makes dysphoria treatment ten times more successful than wisdom tooth removals!)
Presuming a perfectly biological taxonomy is impossible, how much politics is ok and what are its limiting principles?
I mean, I get it, pure political neutrality is a myth, but on the spectrum between a purely biological taxonomy and a purely political taxonomy, where do we fall and what determines that as we change the taxonomy? Because the logically consistent thing seems to be a political knife fight to the bottom but that's not, yet at least, what I see and biological realities seem to be driving a lot of it. For example, while the exact dividing line on when someone goes from "weird" to "mentally ill" seems pretty socially constructed but people in the midst of a psychotic break are pretty unambiguously "wrong" or "off". At what point on that line, or similar lines, does the biological reality outweigh political considerations, if it does?
“Political knife fight” sounds like you imagine political discussions as inherently being zero sum. When you’re talking electoral politics in a two party system, it can be. But “political” is everything about how we live together. The ideas of free speech and of private property are both deeply political ideas, and while we may disagree about some of the details of each, there is very widespread agreement that some version of each is an important part of the social consensus of how we live together. Ideas of illness and health are like that.
I, uh, may be missing the point you're trying to make.
Like, yes, there is social consensus on some aspects of illness and health. I don't think anybody can look at a kid with severe autism and think that's a normal, healthy human being.
Having said that, those aren't really the areas under discussion. When that social consensus breaks down, as it very clearly did under both Covid and the current transgender debate, then politics begins to intrude, specifically because there is no social consensus to reference. What's most interesting to me, and what I'm trying to get at, is the area between things that politics/CW have absolutely eaten, like transgenderism, and things where there's a firm social consensus, like severe autism, and you get into this grey zone where politics and biological facts both wield influence. And I'm trying to understand how practitioners navigate this.
Since this post is a can-of-worms-a-thon anyway, shall we open another one? How about "some degree of stigmatization of mental disorders is beneficial for society"?
I see some indications that the pendulum has swung from "mental disorders are bad, having them is a disgrace, we should not talk about them" to "mental disorders are cool and interesting, and we need to announce we have them (even if maybe we actually don't)"... which leads to impressionable young people brainwashing themselves into displaying (and probably feeling) ADHD, PTSD, ASD, gender dysphoria etc - to their own and their families' detriment.
Of course it sucks for someone who genuinely has a mental disorder if society stigmatizes them or doesn't even know what the issue is, but from a utilitarian perspective, if the alternative is to multiply the number of sufferers, maybe it's the lesser of two evils (or we should at least think about finding the optimal middle ground)?
This is a useful question. Probably a number of traditional stigmas are in place not because of wanting a few to suffer social insult on top of injury, but because having a few struggling was better that this being a widespread vice.
Well, the reason why "pendulum has swung" to a place where some people are incredibly supportive and even celebrative, is that it was in the place of stygmatization at first.
So even if it contributed to the increased rate of occurance of mental illnesses and not just decreased rate in false negatives, it would still be the result of the stigmatization.
What we want is neutrality, not stigmatization in such situations. If there is no controversy about being X than there is no coolness in being X.
> I see some indications that the pendulum has swung from "mental disorders are bad, having them is a disgrace, we should not talk about them" to "mental disorders are cool and interesting, and we need to announce we have them (even if maybe we actually don't)"
Maybe so. But is that, in fact, wrong? Can we think about this? This reminds me of https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/ . Whether a mental oddity is a harmful disorder or a fun quirk is situation-dependent, not absolute. If you're a caveman, having a strong sensory aversion to fur is going to be a problem. In the 21st century in the developed world, it's indistinguishable from any other preference about clothing styles. Plausibly we are, or are fast becoming, a sufficiently comfortable society that a lot of the social reasons why having certain conditions sucked are evaporating, hence the need to also deconstruct the social stigma around them.
(Being transgender is an example of that: it sucks if you're in a society that won't accept you and doesn't have the necessary tools to help you transition! But being trans within a welcoming and helpful community, with the ability to transition exactly how you want, isn't just neutral: it is in fact awesome. Trans people in welcoming environments talk all the time about "gender euphoria". More people in 15th century Geneva becoming trans would be bad for them; more people in 2023 San Francisco becoming trans will quite plausibly improve their life satisfaction!)
Freddie deBoer, who has spent time in a mental institution, argues here that homelessness is both inevitably going to be stigmatized and SHOULD BE because it has bad consequences:
I am confused by this, because whatever you think of ADHD fads, it seems like depression symptoms and PTSD symptoms are often unavoidably displayed by the sufferer of those mental illness. They do not seem like the sort of thing you can acquire by means of thinking that it is cool and interesting and somewhat fashionable. It is fashionable to try on self-diagnoses (people are always in need of ways of explaining themselves to themselves), but it is decidedly not fashionable to be a sobbing wreck who hasn't showered for two weeks and done laundry for even longer, or to suddenly freak out when your neighbor starts her lawn mower.
What benefit does stigmatizing either depression or PTSD bring, unless you mean for it to encourage sufferers to seek treatment by means of tough love? It may cause the opposite in marginal cases, since sufferers who are able to hide their illness may do so, and refuse treatment. Would you stigmatize cancer in the same way?
My proposed solution is teaching people some form of mental health preparedness prior to the acquisition of mental illness (knowing what to do when you get depressed or have been exposed to serious bodily or emotional trauma is a valuable life skill! Knowing what to do when you start having voices in your head might also be one, not sure?) If it's scary to tell people that you're having voices in your head, you might not get treatment until it's really really bad and hard to deal with and maybe harder to treat?
Can you replace the word “stigmatized” with a more detailed description? That is, do you want us to help provide people with alternatives to this behavior, or tell people they are bad people for having this behavior, or discourage people from mentioning to anyone that they have this behavior, or give people medication to stop the behavior? Any of those could fall under the term “stigmatization” but some seem more productive than others (and some might even be completely counterproductive).
- discourage bragging about having the condition, or using it to score oppression points
- encourage people with the condition to seek therapy (whatever seems promising - behavioral therapy, medication...)
- remind people that the behavior can cause problems or be a nuisance for other people, and encourace them to get it under control as far as possible
Having a mental disorder does not make you a bad person. Intentionally or negligently putting an unnecessary burden on other people because of it, does.
So, you want to encourage people to ask for help with their mental health issues, so long as they're appropriately ashamed about the burden they're putting on other people by doing so?
Makes perfect sense, that definitely won't discourage people from seeking help at all.
No, I want them to seek help with their issues such that they feel better AND put less of a burden on others in the long run. Seeking help requires accepting that having these issues is a bad thing, not a cool entry in your twitter bio. Is that clearer now?
Psychologist here. Lots of people with a problem that is *not* a mental health problem also brag about their problem, use it to score oppression points, fail to get help, and make themselves a nuisance to other people, and doing that stuff is quite unfair on the part of the person with the problem. We've all seen people who are having trouble getting a job do that, and people going through a bad divorce, people with asthma, people with an obnoxious boss, etc etc. I agree that having a mental health problem does not entitle someone to intentionally or negligently put the burden of the problem on someone else. My experience, though, is that a LOT of people with a mental health problem regard the problem as their ugly secret and tell very few people about it. Many I see have literally never told anyone about their weird fears or their secret belief that they would be better off dead. I certainly have also seen people who are quite flamboyant in their mental illness, and believe the world owes them all kinds of things because they have it, but it's not the norm.
Should we likewise stigmatize physical disabilities, for creating objective difficulties for other people and to avoid encouraging malingerers and clout-chasers? If not, why not?
Let me rephrase that: should we tell people to be careful and avoid accidents so they don't end up disabled? Should we encourage physically disabled people who can benefit from rehab and surgeries to get their problems fixed as far as possible? Should we teach disabled people as many skills as possible, so they can live as independently as possible?
I think we should, and I think western cultures do that, for the most part.
Physical disabilities are a bit different from mental disorders insofar as it's harder to convince yourself that you have them if you don't, but the principle - convincing people that having them is bad, not cool, and you should avoid them or get rid of them if possible, is the same.
What's the equivalent of "be careful and avoid accidents" for mental health disorders? Are you going to tell soldiers "be careful about going to war zones, that's a great way to get PTSD"? Tell workers "don't get fired from your job, that really increases your risk of depression?"
I am not a professional, so if I am off-base, please chime in.
War and PTSD: step 1 - as a society, adopt an attitude of "war is a necessary evil", rather than "war is great for turning boys into real men" or "dying on the battlefield is a way to go to heaven/ Valhalla/ etc.". Step 2 - as a military organization, prepare soldiers that they may see and do horrible things, and that they may be terrified by what they learn about other humans and themselves. Offer counseling and therapy for those who develop issues.
Workers and depression: If at all possible, establish financial reserves and alternative career paths so you're not totally screwed if you end up getting fired. Prefer companies that don't habitually fire people for no good reason. Don't neglect your support network of friends and family (and church, if applicable) so you are not on your own when there are setbacks.
Generally:
- learn to identify sociopathic individuals, and avoid them if possible
- learn to identify sociopathic organizations (cults, radical political movements, abusive corporations), and engage with extreme caution
- monitor your own behavior for self-destructive habits before they turn into addictions or alienate your friends and family
- be aware that you are not invulnerable. Maintain some work-life balance, don't go overboard with drugs and partying, get enough sleep, eat healthy, work out.
That sounds like a generic recipe for a satisfied life, and in a sense, it is: avoiding falling off some metaphorical cliff is half the battle, and mental health issues constitute a good part of the most common cliffs.
I've personally never understood why the concepts of prejudice and discrimination, which I think are just as adequate to capture the social difficulties faced by people with disabilities as people with other non-normative identities, don't get used in this context.
Do you think working to reduce the prejudice and discrimination people with mental (or physical) disabilities face is also a worthy goal, and if so, compatible with the efforts you describe above?
> 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.
Can definitely see why you had to put those Ns in! Hope the trick works out for you. On the note of honosexuality being weakly linked to genetics, I thought that was actually quite strong. I remember studying that they found sex-linked genes on the X chromosome that could significantly predict it, also I recall that identical twins have very high chances of being gay if the other is (something like 50%), is that not true?
Thank you for those great reads. I guess my point is still that even at 25%, I wouldn't describe this as a weak link, so am wondering what lead Scott to describe it so.
I think there *is* and we should *strive* for a purely biological, apolitical taxonomy (I'll abbreviate with "pure") possible, but that we will never achieve it. Because humans.
Let's start with a definition of "behavioural disorder": "A disruptive behaviour, causing distress or harm for the patient or their surroundings". So a behavioural disorder is already defined in two different levels: the *individual level* and the *inter-personal level*.
On an _individual level_, we can and should have a pure taxonomy, as it helps an effective therapy of the patient - without some kind of stereotyping, every therapy would start from scratch; having a stereotype (or taxonomy) helps to differentiate possible therapy paths to choose from.
It's also very open to the individual context. A married patient being in love with another person and wanting to marry them can be a distress, no matter if you're living in a country where multi-partner marriages are allowed or not (distress of not wanting to hurt the first partner). Being monogamous but living in a polyamorous group can be as stressful as being polyamorous in a monogamous group. Note that this is still the individual level, because no other person is affected so far - it's just "in the patients head", and they need a way to cope with their own expectations, assessments and distress.
On the _inter-personal level_, it's a lot harder - and this is where it is indeed impossible to get a pure taxonomy. This again can be split into two subcategories: What _society constitutes_ as distressed and harmful for the individual, and what _society constitutes_ to be distressing and/or harmful for other people, where others have to be protected - in extreme cases "for their own good".
The latter first: A woman wearing jeans (and being comfortable and non-distressed about it) can be deemed stressful for the society by some societal power. Or at what age it is appropriate to take mind-altering substances, getting married, join the military (increasing the individual risk of getting killed by a few orders of magnitude!) or have sex... That's as political as it gets and we'll never have a pure taxonomy here for what constitutes as a behavioural disorder or not.
The former subcategory is harder, but it still would be possible to have a _mostly_ pure taxonomy. I agree that we'll never get 100% there, i.e.: At what distress level of gender dysphoria is a life-altering and permanent sex change okay? What security should be build into the evaluation process to ensure, that there is no less invasive way to solve a patients distress - or that the persons evaluating it are being driven by other means (being payed by the institutions performing sex change operations)? At what age do we deem a person capable of that?
As for the "we need taxonomy to decide what needs to be payed by society": that's unnecessary. Having a look at other countries than the U.S.A. with a free healthcare system, a behavioural disorder (on the personal level) is payed for without any taxonomy¹ - e.g. germany. And that's as pure of a taxonomy as it gets - you're in distress (mentally or physically), society should help you (happy workers are less sick and work better and so forth). The opposite part - society does not want to pay for a (ineffective) psychotherapy forever - usually has a process attached (again germany: there's restrictions on how many therapy sessions you can get before they need to be renewed, and after two renewals there's special review protocols, etc. etc.), and that process again will be different from society to society... But still: _taxonomy is not needed for insurance coverage_. That's just _one_ possible solution - and a bad one IMHO.
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¹ granted, the insurances will be more likely to ask for additional diagnostics, if the therapist applies for a therapy to be covered and only puts down the general category, but they'll have to pay nevertheless.
Well the Twitter individuals do get to keep their teeth. I’m not even going to try to make the case that society at large isn’t harmed by Twitter though.
I was under the impression that the DSM was primarily a tool for classifying various psychological ailments, and outlining the different methods of treatment for them. For this functionality, I see no reason why ethics or politics should play a role in the classification. Suppose a homosexual started talking to their therapist because they earnestly wanted to become straight. If there's it turns out that there's no relevant biological difference between homosexuality and pedophilia, wouldn't he be "treated" the same way a pedophile would be treated? What's so bad about having an entry in a mental disorder classification scheme that says so?
I agree that it's good to have a classification of mental disorders that prioritizes ethics and practicality, but I can also see value in having a more wide-ranging taxonomy of mental disorders that covers other ailments that aren't broadly stigmatized by society as "bad things." If people are uppity about the stigma behind the term "mental disorder," I suppose the classification system can refer to its entries as something else.
I have to admit this article was extremely unconvincing for me.
Suppose that there was a substantial minority of politically organized people born one-handed, say, 0.5 percent. Would you think it reasonable if they demand that being born one-handed should not be considered a developmental abnormality because it is not a moral/political issue?
To me, it is obvious that the correct stance towards it would be that it is in fact an abnormality, that this is important because not only they might need specific help for it itself, but developmental abnormalities tend to go together and we'd probably find a number of other abnormalities that this group will disproportionally hold, and they will need support for those, too. Any compendium of developmental abnormalities should clearly include them.
At the same time, we shouldn't morally lambast them for it. Nor should we force help upon them if they don't want it. If someone is fine being one-handed, just let them be. It also makes sense to accommodate them to some degree.
The same obviously applies to mental disorders. Homosexuality is clearly some kind of attraction misfiring. Yes, that means homosexuals will probably hold certain other disorders disproportionally (and there is substantial evidence for this as well). Yes, that means homosexuals need special help and accommodation (the most obvious being that can only have children through adoption or other nonstandard approaches). No, it does not mean we should discriminate them.
As long as we conflate biological and moral/political, we will fail to understand humans fully. That does not mean we should ignore the moral, merely that we should be able to consider them separately. I wouldn't mind separate compendiums for the biological and the moral side, nor if a single compendium would include both but with appropriate labelling. But the current positions where we pretend something isn't a biological disorder because we do not consider it a moral failing is nonsensical.
[Apologies for my bad English] "Scott Alexander did it again. This time he put homosexuality on an equal footing with pedophilia but he has improved his technique: now he asks not to take it out of context by using unintelligible signs between words"
My conclusion: we cannot negotiate with the Cathedral.
Congrat's on getting back to posts you'll regret writing. They've been sorely missed.
>So N, should N your N purely N biological N, apolitical N, taxonomy N of N mental N disorders N classify N homosexuality N as N a mental N illness, N or N should N it N refuse N to N classify N pedophilia N as N a N mental N illness?
You just answered your own question: if my taxonomy don't classify H as a mental illness, it's not doing it's job, is being political, and is catering to political needs. That the mental illness is relatively harmless is irrelevant. Palilalia, for instance, is even more harmless, it's still a mental illness.
Addiction is a mental illness as well, be it to crack or to twitter. Even an addiction with beneficial side-effects (Have there been artists who produced masterpieces against their will, unable to stop? Maybe, but we can just fall back on the more grounded workaholic who -in some cases- create a lot more wealth than my lazy ass, and should receive both our gratitude and our help) would be a mental illness.
Refusing to cateforize mental illness as such in order to prevent social stigma seems a great way to end up with mentally ill people uncared for, and still socially shunned precisely because they're uncared-for. In fact I don't really buy that the DSM is driving the loss of social stigma, rather than simply people collectively changing their mind.
And then there's the idea that "it with insurances" line of thought, that's a recipe for disaster, from one side (insurances lobbying to declassify what they don't want to pay for) as from the other (lobbying to classify non-illness in order to get it reimbursed by insurances). You may argue "Psychiatrists & insurers are responsible enough to not have it happen", but this entire post stems from how self-serving & vulnerable you (as in, psychiatrists in general) are to social pressure & will classify or declassify illness according to "well i really want these guys to get reimbursed".
Is the job of the concept “mental illness” to get people cared for or to do something apolitical? You seem to move back and forth between these two conflicting ideas.
Both? The "accurate cataloguing" aspect allow the "care for" aspect.
As a parabole, consider an entreprise of cataloguing chemical elements. A potential benefit of doing so could be of getting an accurate picture of the nutritional needs of healthy humans. Now if, in the middle of your cataloguing, you decide that, for some DEI reason, magnesium "isn't actually a chemical element", and claiming it is would be discriminatory against some minority or another. So you remove it. And thus your entreprise becomes less accurate, and less useful for whatever purposes it could be used.
Scott, if you're that worried about being taken out of context, either don't say it or rephrase it to be more innocuous. You're a smart guy, you could just describe homosexuality as a sexual targeting error that doesn't harm anyone, and then in a separate paragraph discuss sexual targeting errors that we object to for moral reasons. At the very least, the amount of ellipses required to stitch together an Out-Of-Context quote would be suspicious.
I think the issue is that you want to write provocative things for impact (which is not a bad thing, it's part of engaging writing), but also don't want them to be taken out of context and used against you, and those are clearly in a trade-off - interspacing letters into the sentence means it loses whatever impact on the reader you were hoping it would have, and I can still paraphrase this article as "While discussing the flaws of a purely biological, apolitical taxonomy of mental disorders, Scott compares homosexuality to paedophilia", because nobody clicks links anyway.
If people want to attack you for political/personal reasons, you've already given them more than enough ammunition, and I don't think it's a great idea to spend however long you continue blogging in fear of your own words being thrown back at you, because they will be anyway.
To steelman the position that transgender is not stigmatised by the DSM: gender dysphoria is caused by the assignment of the gender being wrong, not by the experienced/expressed gender being wrong, and could be prevented by developing a technique for assigning the correct gender (ie the one this person will experience/express as an adult) at birth.
So the fault is not in the person, but they are being driven mentally ill by society and their body not being in alignment with their experienced/expressed gender.
That is... very hypothetical. There is no such thing as "gender assigned at birth". There is "biological sex observed at birth". Seeing how there's no clear distinction between the brain of a transgender person and a cis person even in adulthood, it's extremely doubtful that making this distinction is possible at birth, in principle. Also note that this would have to be extremely reliable, since the result of a false-positive would be to raise a cis child in the gender that's not even congruent with its body.
I can't really get the last sentence to make sense. "The person" is presumably the subject that is expressing/ experiencing gender. If that gender does not match their body, how is that not the fault (as in, misfunction, not necessarily moral failure) of the person? Like, if a paranoid person is wrongly perceiving a worldwide plot to hurt and humiliate them when there is none, that's the person's fault, not the world's, right? If a transgender person perceives themself to be of one gender while their body is of the other, it's the person's fault, not the body's, right? And if that mismatch didn't exist, society wouldn't have any reason to put pressure on the person.
"There is no such thing as "gender assigned at birth". There is "biological sex observed at birth""
Of course there is: if we take sex as being purely biological (the premise of this entire article), then all social characteristics are gendered rather than sexed. The first social characteristic most people are assigned is a gender ("it's a boy/girl") and the second is a name based on that gender. There is no biological requirement to do that, therefore it is gender (social) not sex (biological). Obviously the assignment of gender is based on the biological sex, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.
As for "this is not possible" - agreed, we do not have any idea of what a technique could be that would lead to a successful determination of gender at birth. The only one I can imagine is if you could develop time travel - go and see what gender they develop, if they turn out to be trans, time travel back and assign them the right gender in the first place. This is clearly science fiction rather than reality, but there are plenty of people with untreatable medical conditions, and we don't tell them that their distress at those conditions is their fault or that they are mentally disordered for not accepting their untreatable condition - so why should we not accept that the assignment of gender at birth was wrong in an individual case even as we acknowledge that we can't always get it right?
"If a transgender person perceives themself to be of one gender while their body is of the other, it's the person's fault, not the body's, right?"
Why? The gender cannot be changed (AIUI, that is the basis of the diagnosis of gender dysphoria; if it could be changed then the person should not be so diagnosed). The body can. This is clearly a physical problem in that the body does not align with the self-perception and the body can be aligned with the self-perception. The psychological problem is distress caused by the lack of such alignment.
"gender dysphoria is caused by the assignment of the gender being wrong"
"their body not being in alignment with their experienced/expressed gender"
These claims seem contradictory. Even if society is somehow able to divine and assign the "correct" gender, the body would still not be in alignment, and so dysphoria unavoidable.
I read the title very literally, and my immediate thought was that the obvious issue with purely biological, apolitical classification is that mental disorders are about how people function within a society, whereas a biological taxonomy would talk in terms of the underlying causes: genes and metabolic pathways and cell damage and head trauma.
I'm sure that, many decades (centuries?) in the future we'll understand enough about how the mind works to construct such a taxonomy, in the same way that we know that "deafness" can be caused by a variety of different genetic mutations, or by aging, or by bacterial infection, or by damage to the inner ear caused by loud sounds. This will be great to know, but the practical implications of this level of understanding for the deaf community seem to be pretty limited - obviously the distinction between being born deaf and progressive hearing loss is significant, but we know that already! I expect that understanding the exact causes of schizophrenia will also be restricted in its impact.
I work in gov't employment agency myself and 20% of my job is assessing if sick people are capable of work. We use the diagnostic system for this too, and things outside it don't practically exist to us, even though the symptoms are really real and hell for people. And that sucks, but we live in a society and if we didn't have it we'd have to make a lot of really complicated decisions and we'd fail hard at that.
Diagnoses inform multiple governmental needs, from care and treatment to identifying beneficiaries of welfare to insurance and actuarial decisions, and they're laden with serious moral/political weight, because they impact people's lives in so many ways.
I do understand the general motivation behind this thinking, but semi-equating "political" with "pragmatic and ethical" less so, and the example with punching bags and kittens completely lost me.
The biology of muscle movements is the same, but the effects are not: one inflicts suffering, the other one doesn't. Now, I understand the argument: "'suffering is bad' is a moral/ethical judgment, and we want to do without those". But is that really true? Why then not go on to claim that pain is, in principle, no different from any other sensory perception? And why the label of "disease" and "disorder"? Heck, what's with all that fuss about "pure biology"? Isn't biology just a man-made and thus political label applied to some physical and chemical processes and phenomena which obey the very same laws as everything else in the universe, "dead" or "alive"? So how could it possibly be pure?
Obviously, this would be a ~wrong~ useless basis for any such taxonomy, or even any conversation about disorders, mental or otherwise. "Disorder" always implies some judgment. I get that this post is fundamentally about how hard it is to decide whether some concrete phenomenon is a disorder or not, but this is not the same as saying "disorder as a concept is meaningless independently of how it is defined", which would be the more consequential position. "Pain and suffering are bad" to me seems like a reasonably minimal assumption to overcome this meaninglessness, and I think it would be fair to grant at least that to the authors without accusing them of politicizing.
If we accept that:
1. biology as a concept makes sense
2. some or all biological organisms have subjective experiences
3. some of those experiences, that we label "pain" and "suffering", are "bad", i.e., we seek to reduce or avoid them
then it becomes fairly easy to distinguish between punching a punching bag and a kitten, or between consensual homosexuality and pedophilia. It's easy to see that one of those actions statistically increases the overall experienced suffering much more than the other.
It's probably net-negative for your Substack income to put the Ns in. You've already lost anyone who cares about what the outrage machine thinks; all the Ns do is annoy the people who remain - and either avoid or discourage the people who come here precisely *because* they're defying the outrage machine. Remember, you got a whole pile of new subscribers from that NYT article.
You're on the Blue Tribe's shitlist. Sunk cost. Relish in the freedom to ignore that sunk cost.
On one hand I get it - today's media is Baphomet, with a unique ability *and motivation* to seemingly destroy people's lives and livelihoods out of sheer glee.
On the other hand, I'm a "purple" triber (I have one foot firmly in each of the two "tribes" so to speak, in terms of lifestyle and deep culture), I have firmly conservative Republican views on most issues, and yet I am an unapologetic gay man who thinks those who see homosexuality as immoral or bad are full of themselves and need to get a grip.
Despite this hodgepodge of views I am turned off by the seeming instinct to attempt to appease the Blue Tribe media in any way. At this point I simply see the mainstream media as malevolent, and think there is no point in even attempting to reason with them. I am instinctively turned off by those who do not realize this and still see them as an authority to try and reason with.
My interpretation of this is that Scott still has tons of bridges in his social and professional life that cross into Blue territory, and he is not yet ready/willing to burn them. Hence the obligatory salute to the Pope.
The other interpretation is that Scott spent a lot of time on 4chan lately, and this whole story is just a 5D troll to find an excuse to insert 'N' between every 2 words in a way that everyone who spends time on 4chan knows what it means.
I don't understand, are you doubting my sincerity ? or Scott's ?
In case you're doubting my own sincerity, I *do* believe that my first explanation is a big part of why Scott usually avoids being too offensive even after the Blue tribe has already shown its disdain for him and his community multiple times. I don't claim it's true, but it's what I believe. The second explanation is of course an obvious joke.
You have all my respect, but the entire concept of "Offensiveness" as understood by the Blue tribe is bullshit. A tool of control.
There is far more to decency and being a virtuous person than a simple list of words that you're allowed or not allowed to use. I can see why those words are hated and how some subset of people who use them are not decent, but to extrapolate beyond that and just ban the words entirely is such bullshit and simple-minded thinking.
I believe you, Scott, and every other "Heretic Blue Triber" guy or gal has a lot to learn from 4chan. Specifically, you have to learn the concept of cry bullying, that when someone makes a big deal about "ohhhh my god that's so fucking offensive" they are not really hurt and they are not really offended, they are using your easily convinced social instincts to exert power and control over you.
To be entirely honest with you, I enjoy saying the N syllable to people who make a big show of being so offended by it. Nothing about black skinned people irritates me, I just love to see the faces of those who use them as a tool of control when it fails.
The thing is, you know very little about me and are making some terribly inaccurate assumptions.
II got my first Union card at 16 working after schools and Saturdays in a factory. At 18 I started a decade long stint as a laborer in an iron mine.
I don’t whine and I don’t cry.
I worked my way through university as a student doing heavy labor moving lab equipment and working in the university bone yard and it’s heating plant.
My wife worked 5 ten hour shifts and 8 hours on Saturday on a Ford plant plant assembly line in San Jose before becoming a mine millwright.
She doesn’t whine or cry either.
She is offended by cruelty and ignorance but does not tattle or try to cancel. She gets in the face of the cruel and ignorant and tells them to fuck of.
I am offended by cruelty and ignorance too. But I don’t tattle or try to cancel either. I get in their face and tell them to fuck off too.
Quit stereotyping me. No one at MSNBC tells me what is right and what is wrong. I’ve learned those things first hand. Yes I am an old school, blue collar liberal. I’ve had coworkers killed by accidents on my shift. I am not some thin skinned, whiny little bitch.
I think that the main issue is that Scott just gets very distressed when people publicly disparage him, the more public and seemingly unfair the worse. He's more or less made his peace with the shitlist status, but prefers them to hate him quietly.
Perhaps this is an artefact of Scott having much stronger Blue Tribe affinities than I do. Despite a very Blue Tribe upbringing myself, and a mess of contradictory and contrarian views in all directions, my political loyalties have always tended Right (as have many of my lifestyle preferences, in this world where basically everything has a political valence) and thus I've never really cared what the Blue Tribe organs of Correct Thought think about anything. Perhaps Scott, having views much more toward the Left than me, still feels at some subconscious level that these are "his people" and ought to understand him better. He's clearly not enslaved to such illusions but there may still be some yearning deep down.
How about a less sensitive example: left-handedness. Nobody considers that a disorder, mental or otherwise, today. But when my father was a child, his teachers would slap his hand with a ruler any time they saw him write left-handed. (It worked, sort of: he still prefers to use his left hand when nobody is threatening to slap him with a ruler, but he ended up being ambidextrous.)
So would it be correct to say that left-handedness is not a disorder today, but it was back then, because of the problems of living in a society which did not accept it? Or should we say that no, those teachers were just stupid, left-handedness is not a disorder and it never was.
How about if you lived in a stone-age tribe where it is super important that everybody is able to hunt with a bow and arrow, and all their bows are made to be used right-handed and for some good practical reason it would be super inconvenient if the tribe had to make and maintain a separate left-handed bow just for you? Would left-handedness be legitimately classified as a disorder then?
I don't actually know what point I am trying to make with this analogy -- I just figured it can't hurt to have an example to discuss which doesn't map to a topic that's already a political hot potato..
>because of the problems of living in a society which did not accept it
You can see a technological reason, sort of. A fountain pen and left-to-right writing make a mess of handwriting, because your hand is prone to smear wet ink on paper.
Lefty here: This still happens with pencil and ballpoint pen, just less so. Back when I had to handwrite a lot I'd end up with graphite smeared across my hand, and I'll smudge ink if I'm writing too fast. (rarely a problem nowadays, but annoying in college)
I guess the other option, if pencils haven't been invented yet, is brushes like in East Asia. Then your hand isn't supposed to touch the paper at all.
> It’s just the claims to be able to avoid political bias in what is vs. isn’t a disorder that I find compelling.
There's a "don't" missing from that sentence, isn't there?
Also, I've seen you use "transgender" as a noun on a lot of occasions and that feels weird to me. I don't think I've ever seen it used like that by transgender people themselves; they use it exclusively as an adjective. I'd use "transgenderness", maybe "transgenderism" at a push.
There is a fair amount of sophistry at work here. You are effectively asking to subordinate biological taxonomy to the rules governing insurance policies. I would like to think it would be easier to change insurance rules than biology. If something is harming an individual or others around them ,it needs to be addressed by the society, whether or not it is a biological disorder. Conversely, some biological disorders are harmless and require no treatment.
Is it necessary that these 3 things are all the same?
- being a mental disorder
- getting insurance coverage
- be viewed as a problem to be solved
In an alternative world could we have a DSM that talks about things that are unusual to help with destigmatizing (not just "disorders") and then have some subset get insurance help because they're serious enough? It would be a bigger tent, so people wouldn't feel bad about homosexuality or being trans being included, and whether treatment was covered would be an independent axis.
One of the core problems with the taxonomy of mental disorders is that our conception of a mental disorder involves causing dysfunction for the person within the major areas of what we consider to be living a fulfilling, independent life, and whether a behavioral or thought pattern causes that is intrinsically dependent on the surrounding culture. It can be what causes the dysfunction is societal treatment.
This isn't a novel observation and psychiatry and abnormal psychology try very hard to separate out what appear to be arbitrary cultural factors, but this is a difficult task.
A substance use disorder - a drug addiction if you prefer - is at its root a compulsion to engage in a behavior despite the negative consequences it invites. Addictive chemicals work because their biochemistry has a quirk that allows them to trigger the mammalian reward-motivation pathways in the brain and produces reinforced behavior. The negative consequences part; however, cannot be completely disentangled from societal response to this. Certain substance use disorders are much worse because people will risk severely harmful consequences that the state actively dispenses in response to use.
But suppose a state banned women reading books under threat of long prison sentences. Would women persist in trying to read books despite this penalty? I bet they would. Would this prove that women reading books is a mental disorder because they are compelled to do it despite the negative consequences it invites leading to a loss of global functioning? I think the answer is plainly no, but why that might be is interesting. I think the answers to this question outside of, "Well, we just don't find that legitimate" to be not compelling. You can't escape making moral judgments about what society ought to do and how that interacts with human behavior.
> But the whole point of wanting a purely biological apolitical taxonomy of mental illness was to make sure we would never again repeat the DSM’s error of calling homosexuality a mental disorder!
By such a definition, it seems like we would have to conclude that most people living outside Africa are suffering from the immensely debilitating disease of birth-control usage. I think that would be at odds with how most people use the term "disease".
Isn't the problem here that our current culture derives its morality/ethics in part from the psychological classification system? That seems the fundamental error at play here. People should stop doing that. To develop true ethics you need to actually know how the world is. Classification systems are about learning how the world actually is. Morality/ethical systems are a different thing. I am a short male. This could be considered stigmatizing to me. The culture accepts that as an accurate description despite the danger of stigma. Morally/Ethically everyone pretty much agrees not to be a jerk to me because of my height but we don't feel the need to reclassify me as "normal height-ed" or to avoid using rulers.
It's moreso the inverse. The classification of mental health disorder necessarily depends on what society deems to be a problem. The various theories of mental illness never quite escape importing cultural judgments about what sorts of behaviors and cognition people shouldn't have.
The difference between homosexuality and paraphilic disorders is that the former is morally permissible unto itself and any psychological distress it causes the person is because of errant societal disapproval. But we'll deem pedophilia a disorder because it is *not* morally permissible and the social consequences it invites on some level are warranted. It's a disorder because it makes a person want to do something morally wrong or, more accurately, is the condition of wanting to do something morally wrong.
This is in large part because, outside of clear-cut physical brain trauma, most mental illness is in a spectrum of normal behavior, where “illness” is on the extreme edge of the distribution. Everyone experiences some anxiety. How much is dehabilitating is circumstantial inherently. Ephebophilia is probably a common thing, but social conditions and alternatives act as a strong check. Similarly I suspect that is true of the broader set of chronophilia and other “targets” per Scott. There are probably more people out there with wider preferences, that can easily focus their interests in practice. The impact of self-control is a big factor. Similarly there seems to be a muncher wider spread of psychopathic behaviors, some of it conditioned on habitation. But plenty of people of are fully functioning in society without other factors contributing to drive the worst in behavior.
So you have spectrums and plenty of cofactors that might influence the expression of both behavior and inner-states. No wonder the definitions aren’t clear cut. We are talking about extremes that require multiple things to be true, that might even be fine in other circumstances. Simple definitions are going to be hard to come by on the margin.
My understanding of the HITOP model is that it would ideally be able to identify a series of dimensions upon which we all sit. It attempts to determine the dimensions atheoretically, (sort of like the Big 5 personality traits). This would be useful information for each person to have and may help them gain insight into the distress they feel. It is the distress that would be the focus of treatment. The idea is that this side-steps the morally wrong=disordered or disordered=morally wrong problems outlined above and provides a more individualized experience. It is of course true that 2 people with identical profiles may have differing levels of distress entirely based on the culture they are in at the time.
My rephrasing of Scott's observation is that tying specific complex instincts/behaviors down to genes is impractical for nature, that nature can either hardcode simple rules which leads to e.g. birds misidentifying their parents, or rely on higher-level cognition filling in the details of a fuzzier idea, which leads to e.g. mistargeting. A few thoughts that lead me to find the idea unsatisfying, despite having a pretty compelling premise.
Caveat emptor: I'm not certain I've entirely pinned down Scott's idea. To avoid accidentally equivocating, let me try to define biological here as a characteristic, or a change in a characteristic, with enough impact on effective reproduction and a solid enough grounding in genetic material that it can ends up naturally selected for or against in a meaningful sense, in a reasonable time-frame. By contrast let define a moral as something that is mostly left up to society by default of nature not biasing it very much one way or the other.
>If this is accurate, the N relevant N difference N between N homosexuality N and N pedophilia N is N moral N, not N biological. Both are sexual targeting errors, but one re-targets sexuality onto other people who can consent and won’t be harmed, so it’s fine. The other targets people who can’t consent and will be harmed, so it’s bad.
Under the sexual targeting error hypothesis, it would seem that homosexuality is not determined biologically, rather something that develops from a different interpretation of our fuzzy instincts and drives.
That there must be environmental causes, before sexual drives are fully developed, that pushes them to unfold in a different way.
1/ Wikipedia estimates a quarter of black swan — Cygnus atratus — couples are homosexual. It describes males as larger, with a straighter and longer bill. Presumably it is not exceptionally hard for natural selection to unearth genes that visibly differentiate male and females, so that I wouldn't expect hacks of the same kind that some species of birds use to recognize their parents to be exceptionally harder when it comes to recognizing potential sexual partners. Pedophilia in nature, or at least in black swans, seems much less notable than homosexuality.
We should expect making females birds instinctively recognizable as sexual partners in DNA to be in the same category of difficulty as than making younglings and parents instinctively recognizable, so instincts being hard is not a compelling explanation for why the sexual-partner-identification instinct would have been pushed to cognition in birds.
2/ But let's assume sexual targeting has a good reason to be pushed to cognition, perhaps because parent recognition is needed from a very early age and needs a hardcoded rule more than sexual targeting does, and I can try to make a different point.
It seems to me that given nontrivial reward, we should still expect natural selection in birds to not have had a great difficulty in unearthing some sort of hardcoded anti-homosexuality distaste in birds, or that the difficulty of conjuring this hardcoded rule should not be much greater in the case of homosexuality than for pedophilia.
If homosexuality and pedophilia are equal and purely moral differences, with no biological basis, all else equal we would not expect the rate of homosexuality in birds to be very much higher than the other. And it seems vaguely reasonable to assume all else is roughly equal, or close enough to not matter too much.
So, it may not be inconsistent to hypothesize that the rate of pedophilia being lower than the rate of homosexuality — at least in birds — could have a biological basis. Possibly, and I may be going out on a limb here, pedophilia bad. To an extent where it would be selected against with categorically more urgency than homosexuality, way upstream of the effect of any moral constructions or culture war topics.
3/ I'd like to hand-wave something about how you may be a little quick to dismiss harm as a biological issue, because trust and social cohesion is good, as we know. If you have to isolate some subgroup of birds from the other birds to avoid scary bad outcomes, maybe this is meaningful to point to in a less subjective sense than purely calling it a moral issue.
4/ Back to talking about people directly, there it makes more sense to me that we would generally have fuzzy instincts over hardcoded rules for picking sexual partners. We have complex societies, what makes a good partner in a human is more complex than in a bird. We've likely greater-or-equal cognitive capacity available for evaluating fuzzy instincts than birds do.
But, it's not clear to me that it should be exceptionally hard to add a hardcoded rule on top of the fuzzy instinct, if that were beneficial. Our fear instinct is fuzzy rather than hardcoded — we can fear complex abstract things at our core, and with intensity — but we also have hardcoded fears on top of that (say the sight of blood, insects, mice), and those vary with considerable individuality!
Here's how I would try to refine the idea of instincts being hard: It is impractical to try to encode firm rules for the selection of sexual partners in DNA, so we have fuzzy rules that are more open to interpretation. In the same way that not everyone has the same instinctive fears, despite fears having a fairly uncontroversial tie back to reproductive fitness, there may exist a set of more specific fuzzy rules to refine sexual targeting. This may be without those rules having to be either entirely hardcoded or entirely open to interpretation.
It is presumably hard to find a genetic correlate for specific instinctive fears, and presumably the same would be true for pedophilia, or homosexuality. Still, there is a real sense in which explaining instincts as untethered from biology doesn't make for a very compelling explanation, regardless of how hard a time we have looking for those ties.
It is possible that pedophilia or homesexuality are natural variations on either the *specificity* of an instinct (in a sort of "openness to experience" sense, perhaps how much an instinct is open to interpretation is itself a variable trait), or more directly variations in strength of components that compose the instincts for sexual preferences.
This variation would still reflect the reality of instincts being hard.
The key factor that puts me in a rage over this subject is the bit about imprinting. Many schools are encouraging experimentation with homosexual acts at an early age -- when the hormones are raging and imprinting is possible.
I used to be a Libertarian, and worked on the campaigns of gay candidates.
The current effort by the alphabet community to imprint children in a gay direction has changed my mind dramatically on the subject. I now miss the Moral Majority and was to bring back sodomy laws. Take this a data point. Helnlein's prediction of Crazy Years followed by a Cromwellian revolution could well happen.
1) I work in the deaf community. Its not just these people do not hear as you would think. Especially if you do not hear from when you were born, you will have hard time to read thw "written language" and visual languge (sign language) will be natural for you. You will very probably be part of "Deaf community" which involves a specific culture and you will have your way of cognitive processing. To feel better, the "Deaf community" uses "D" and not "d" and is holding the idea that "deafness" is not a disease but just a human variety and the reason is prevent others to stigmatize them. At the same time in many countries these people have state half-rent, social help and insurance coverage for various conected problems happily using this (because they are not disabled (they can do everything but do not hear) but they are disabled (they are foreigners in their country - can not communicate with people around them and often also psychiatroc problems are involved...well....not from deafness but from depression that follows it?) You see, it is a perfect parallel to this post.
2) I know there are probably many evolutionists here but actually many astronomers and other field scientists **secretly** believe there is an engineer behind life (or maybe a group of engineers). If so, we are biological machines and it seems we consist of a hardware and software. What is making this more complicated, we can produce (involving a small factory in women to produce other machines) and there is adaptation and other weird mechanisms. Let us say, our friend Elon Musk would miniaturize his factory and place it in a car booth, so the car itself can produce another car. The car would also adapt, evolve to some extent etc. Building would be based on a design plan called MNA (Musk DNA). No one can deny, after some thousands of years, Elon would be capable of constructing such a car (there is just no motivation, where would come the profit from??). Now, these cars start to reproduce, adapt etc and small mistakes show here and there. A car is born without wheels. A car is born with a software for a cattle. Etc. How would you call these? How do we know it was Elon's plan or it is too deviated from his plan? Etc. Let us say, we can not meet with Elon. We just have understand from how the cars look and what they do etc.
> "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."
It's not incoherent if their politics is the one good, true politics derived scientifically from nature. In that case, the taxonomy will follow nature, just as the politics follows nature, and each will be aligned perfect with the other without any effort beyond what's required for true knowledge of nature. The one true natural scientific taxonomy will be 100% politically correct, without thinking about politics at all, because the politics is also the one true natural scientific politics.
Reading over that, it sounds to me like I'm being ironic, but I'm genuinely not trying for irony. Lots of people really think that their politics is derived scientifically from nature. And to them, an apolitical taxonomy such as Scott describes here isn't incoherent at all. It's only incoherent under the assumption that their politics isn't the one true natural scientific politics.
How do those people never run into the "is/ought" divide? You can have a million true observations about nature, but you will never observe a naturally formed stone plate with ten commandments written on it. Politics is not about what the world looks like, it's about what people should do, and there was never a scientific experiment establishing that.
Some people look too much to manuals like the DSM to inform their opinion of whether or not something is bad or not. Pedophilia's badness has nothing to do with whether it is in the DSM. Making it a diagnosis makes it something that it is considered appropriate for health care professionals to treat. It's not really even a statement about what kind of thing pedophilia is.
Similarly, in my opinion, some people misinterpret what it means when it is said, e.g. "alcoholism is a disease". They think this is a scientific discovery that we have made about alcoholism that takes it from one category and puts it in another (like discovering that coral is an animal and not a plant). This isn't really true. Saying alcoholism is a disease doesn't mean we have discovered it is just the same kind of thing as influenza or thyroid cancer. "Alcoholism is a disease" means that we consider it is something that is a distinct entity that is appropriately treated by (among other people) health care professionals, who need to make it into a diagnosis because that is how medicine works. Sure, thinking this way is informed by scientific discoveries, but it doesn't depend on them. We could consider alcoholism a disease even if we knew nothing about its etiology or pathophysiology.
Also, sometimes people think that mental disorders aren't as real as somatic ones because they aren't as well defined. However, it is easy to forget that the distress caused by somatic disorders is also subjective, and the distress is actually why people get treatment, not something objective about the disease. Acne is just as clearly a disease, objectively, as cancer (by this I mean it is possible to identify parts of the body that are abnormal), but for a supermodel to have acne is a much greater problem (for the patient) than for some random guy who doesn't care at all.
(Of course, whether or not the DSM actually categorizes mental disorders correctly is another question.)
> 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 - you’re the wrong gender, but you’re crazy for being unhappy about it? Also, I can’t find support for this distinction in a literal reading of the DSM criteria themselves
The DSM says that there must be evidence of distress about the incongruence between a person's assigned and experienced gender for a gender dysphoria diagnosis. If someone is transgender but does not experience distress, they are not suffering from a mental disorder according to the DSM. I would probably put myself in this category, as a non-binary/agender person who doesn't experience any gender.
I think the same principal should be applied to everything. If a condition doesn't cause distress or impairment to the person who has it, it should not be seen as a mental disorder. This means that I think the definition of mental disorders should be individual rather than political or societal.
A test for whether someone is suffering from a mental disorder could be whether they are experiencing significant distress or impairment, and whether they would still be experiencing significant distress or impairment if they were transported to an alternate universe where everyone was like them. I believe only people where the answer is 'yes' to both questions are suffering from a mental disorder. Perhaps the definition could be made more precise if expanded to take account of whether one condition impairs the ability to feel distressed about something associated with another condition (e.g. a paedophile with ASPD who doesn't feel distress about their paedophilia because of ASPD), but I think even the simplified version makes more sense than any definition that pathologizes dissent to societal norms.
So, a serial killer that feels no distress or impairment due to his psychopathy would have no mental disorder? I guess that such definition is coherent, but I'm not sure that it makes more sense.
Fascinating post! I was just these days thinking about exactly this topic.
So, to sum up: if homosexuality and paedophilia are congenital, biological and immutable (as it seems we are supposed to believe these days), yet paedophilia is clearly morally illegitimate, then the fact that a trait is congenital, biological and immutable does not automatically make it morally legitimate (as is the case being made for homosexuality).
On the other hand, if these traits are not congenital nor immutable, that means they are at least partly (mostly?) sociocultural, in which case, whether they are to be encouraged/discouraged become a matter of individual ideology, no?
Except "homosexuality is natural" has never been an argument *for* homosexuality. Indeed, assuming something is good simply because it's natural is a fallacy. Murder is natural, rape is natural, and yes, pedophilia is most likely natural, and it's perfectly reasonable to oppose those behaviors in spite of their natural origins.
"Homosexuality is natural" is merely a counter-argument *against* the idea, frequently espoused by social conservatives, that homosexuality is specifically wrong because it's unnatural. That argument is doubly wrong, because not only is it an appeal to nature fallacy (in other words, saying "homosexuality is wrong because it's not natural" is just as fallacious as saying "murder is right because it is natural"), but it's also based in an assertion that's just outright false, since homosexual isn't actually unnatural at all.
The reason that most people in modern Western countries accept homosexuality while rejecting murder, rape, and pedophilia has nothing to do with how natural or unnatural any of them are. It has everything to do with the fact that the first one doesn't cause harm to anyone (and furthermore, that trying to suppress it does cause harm), whereas the latter three are all extremely harmful. Sure, social conservatives can try to make the argument that it's "harmful to society," but that's such an incredibly vague argument that it can be and has been made about virtually anything and everything (e.g. porn, alcohol, cannabis, caffeine, Adderall, fatty/salty/sugary foods, vegetarianism, meat-eating, low tax rates, high tax rates, car culture, violent movies, edgy adult cartoons, rap music, pop music, rock music, heavy metal, video games, Dungeons & Dragons), so people tend not to take it seriously.
People did take it plenty seriously for many centuries. But these days the reasons to do so no longer have the same cultural force, so we'll just have to establish the harmfulness of that stuff in practice.
People took it seriously in large part because of religious prohibitions on homosexuality, but religion no longer has the cultural cachet that it used to. Even among devout Christians, there's a LOT of people who don't really care about adherence to traditional sexual morality, viewing it as more of a cultural artifact than a central pillar of the faith. And in a society where the vast majority of the populace doesn't have any problem with sex outside of marriage, and even considers it a totally normal part of life, then saying "okay but when it's gay sex then it's *really* bad" isn't going to be persuasive. (Some of the more devout Christians might assume that the solution is to take a harder stance against premarital sex among hetero couples, in order to push it into being considered socially unacceptable again, but every attempt to do this outside of isolated hyper-religious enclaves has backfired and driven people away from the faith altogether.)
Leaving aside the issue of religiosity, a lot of people are also just burned out by the sheer abundance of moral panics over the past few decades, especially when most of them have turned out to be misleading exaggerations or just total bullshit. From "rock & roll is the devil's music," to "Satanists are kidnapping and brainwashing children," to "D&D is a pathway to real occultism and human sacrifice," to "gangsta rap is causing a rise in youth crime rates," to "The Matrix and Grand Theft Auto cause school shootings," to "teenagers are throwing Rainbow Parties where girls all take turns having oral sex with random boys," to "college students are getting dangerously drunk off alcohol suppositories," a lot of people have wisely grown skeptical of any claims that some new trend is hurting society.
Attempts to "establish the harmfulness of that stuff in practice" will usually be perceived as bad-faith arguments because, quite frankly, they almost always *are* bad faith arguments.
Oh, I didn't mean to say that I a priori assume that all of that stuff is indeed harmful, even if some of it was when Christianity and co. were codifying their dogmas. I simply made an observation that its harmfulness will be established, one way or another, by people practicing it, since there's nobody there to forbid it any longer.
Indeed it's possible there could be some reason, based on long centuries of human experience and social practice, that homosexuality was considered morally illegitimate by practically all (all?) major religions since the dawn of humanity, no? And even those cultures that really went in for it, such as the Ancient Greeks, I'm pretty sure would have been shocked by the idea that two men in a sexual relationship should be considered a marriage, and that they, therefore, could and should raise children. But it is just so passé these days to try to learn anything from thousands of years of human experience and traditional wisdom... I agree with you that at this point, we are immersed in one gigantic social experiment and only time will tell if we are on the right track...
I am not talking about natural or non-natural, obviously nature is not a guideline for any kind of morality (in most religions, including atheism, morality is based around striving to limit certain instinctive, natural tendencies). I am talking about whether a trait is congenital and immutable, for a trait which is congenital and immutable, it would be very hard to argue that it could be immoral (would indeed be like saying that being ginger is immoral). But certainly the attempt is being made to put homosexuality (and transsexuality) on an even footing with purely genetic traits, such as race, in order to bullet-proof them against any possibility of considering them less biologically or morally valid than cis/heterosexuality. Once that has been achieved, then anyone who does not wish to encourage homosexuality/transsexuality as perfectly valid and interchangeable options vis a vis heterosexuality/cis, is tantamount to a racist.
If something as basic as taxonomy is based on practicality and ethics, rather than science, then is anything about clinical psychology scientific? Are some disorders more scientific than others, schizophrenia perhaps?
What in principle distinguishes therapy from the kind of ethical and practical counseling you might get from a priest or a fortune teller? What justifies the professional licensure of therapists, when we wouldn't dream of licensing priests and fortune tellers? I get that psychiatry is different, you're prescribing drugs, you have to know what's safe, and what might be effective. That's got to be based on evidence. Is therapy really medical or scientific at all? Or is it just talking to someone about your problems?
Hey Scott - I've been thinking this for years and I'm so glad that you've written it out. To discuss this is very taboo.
"Born this way" as a criteria of whether a behavior or identity is moral is an extremely conservative idea. In regard to LBGT identities, for conservatives this criteria was fulfilled by reproductive ability between a pair. Progressive people decided to not question the criteria, but instead cultivated evidence that the brains or early-age behavior of LBGT individuals are different from others, which indicated biological determinism of their identities. So, weirdly, conservatives and many progressives agree on the criteria, and simply disagree on what evidence should used for determining that the criteria are fulfilled.
The truly progressive thing to do would be to question whether this is the right criteria to use. And, its definitely a terrible criteria, because too many undesirable behaviors have biological components, like mental illness and addiction. Honestly, most human behavior is a combination of biological and social inputs, so it feels pretty meaningless to create a dichotomy based on those qualities.
Plus the biological determinism approach to describing LBGT identities has always struck me as sad, because it implies you would be different if you could actually chose, and it undersells the tremendous creative work humans put into developing their identities.
Morality should just be how your actions effect other people and yourself. There shouldn't be a component of fatalism or biological determinism. But a lot of people believe in God, so fatalism and determinism are important to their worldview.
What if we just strictly defined "mental disease" as something that impairs the functioning of the mind or causes distress in the individual with the disease (defined by the individual in question), just as we do for bodily diseases.
Paedophilia N wouldn't N necessarily N be N a N disease by that metric, but that doesn't matter as coercing and punishing people is the job of the justice system, not the health industry.
This would also make clear that psychosis etc on it's own is not a thoughtcrime and does not deserve punishment or a forced cure.
I am here, FULLY agreed with your idea... but you must bear the responsibility of your idea.. What if, for instance, someone comes to you and he says "I am gay, I am a man who loves men", etc. but ALSO he says "but I wish I was not, and the practicing of my homosexuality feels like something beyond me which I cannot control, which harms me"... I think this is very marginal and (hopefully?) a small number of people, but what with today's ethic do we say? "No, sorry, you are deluded, homosexuality is etc. you must reconcile yourself to this and rid yourself of your homophobia". I don't say that this is wrong, but what is to delineate the 'lived experience' of someone like this from the pedophile who says his desires terrify him, or the pornography addict who wants to be rid of desires which he feels his addiction created within him..? Do you agree that already your notion of 'causes distress' is very personal, and that to decide the question of whether or not to attend to 'distress' we sometimes ARE in fact willing to tell the patient that he is deluded (he is homophobic and hates himself), and other times are not (you are correct that you have an addiction)? Maybe in the case I gave we choose this secret third option, "yes you are right, your sexuality is harming you, but ONLY in some specific of its presentation (e.g. you choose to go with strangers rather than a close, loving partner who you trust blah blah), and so we will cure you of that part of your disorder rather than the other part which is not a disorder.."
if there was a broader understanding of disorder or "impairing the functioning of the mind" as you put it, then we should PRECISELY be prepared to cure things which we do not even know we are curing...
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.
The two choices you present for "purely biological, apolitical taxonomy..." seem clearly delineated, and I think we ought to just choose the 2nd one without any problem. Your language is also very clear: "things which don't deserve stigma", "make everyone mad at you", "have everyone end up thinking you're even more political" (not concerned with the 'truth'; if you had said these things about the conclusions of a physicist, he might say 'why should I care?'). Consistent with this, you are very mindful and careful of the fact that e.g. in (certain) biological terms, homosexuality and pedophilia share a taxonomy, AND you are clear that this is NOT in itself a moral/ethical fact (in particular because each treat the matter of consent differently). The fact alone that you write about this distinction means that there is (at least in your mind) a 'matter of fact' about the taxonomical approach, AND that there is a corresponding social/political/etc. pressure exerting itself regarding this approach. So in the sense that you are arguing against pursuing apolitical taxonomies, you nonetheless appeal to some external biological approach & show that it does not give a complete moral account --i.e. it does not tell us what we ought to do.
You say also "That is, we want our definition of “mental disorder” to be ethical (eg not stigmatize people who don’t deserve stigma). And we want it to be practical (eg identify a group of people who need and deserve care)."... In the first sense, what I am asking is 'why can't we have a non-ethical taxonomy?' Obviously, there is no need to ask this question in spheres of thought which don't concern the (practical) affairs of human lives. And obviously the possibility of "stigmatiz[ing] people who don't deserve stigma" is the reason we want to be "ethical". However, let's be good analysts and forget all the nice and pleasant work "being ethical" is doing for us here: ""[t]hat is, we want our definition of “mental disorder” to ... not stigmatize people who don’t deserve stigma". So now we can see the operation of this sentence properly. But in the sense of answering the question about a taxonomy and its definitions, it still is difficult to see how the former part relates to the latter. Turn to your fellow mathematician and tell him you want his definitions not to stigmatize people who don't deserve it.
(1) -- Our definitions are erroneous, people who do not need to be 'cured' are labelled as in-need-of a cure. (But don't we think this problem can be solved within the scientific framework?)
(2) -- Our definitions are _correct_, in that the delineate without much error treatment-wise, but outsiders make use of our terms in a moral sense and cause harm to those our definitions concern.
If we were talking about (1) the actual meaning of the quoted sentence (avoiding creating stigma) is that we ought to censor scientific work -- which then represents the meaning of "being ethical".
So since we are probably talking about (2), what if we replaced "mental disorder" with some distant and cold terminology bereft of meaning? After all, its purpose is only to delineate "in need of cure" from "does not need medical treatment". (And perhaps now we see that the symbol isn't so relevant as the fact that we have the "sick" and the "healthy".)
No: stimga, stigmatizing... These are not what is at stake, here. What is at stake is treating those who do not need treatment. In the case of homosexuality and its perception, what has changed is that it was once indistinguishable from 'unhealthy', 'sick'. The fact that this was overcome is their main victory.
There is a good debate (https://sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literature-and-performance/ICA-talks/024M-C0095X0856XX-0100V0) involving Paglia here, and Watney here attacks her (around 45:30 mins, if you can bear it) & the British government etc. for a lack of education and spending in healthcare for gay men. The point is that it doesn't matter how massive a disaster the HIV/AIDS pandemic was/is, the government(s) are totally responsible for it because they are assumed to have the power to effectively prevent it. Without the condition of responsibility, one cannot be held morally responsible; hence the pandemic has to be within the government's power. Similarly, here, the one addressed by my moral speech designates the responsible one. The diagnostic methods, and all the structures by which the doctors abide, are precisely what allow us to make the doctors and the medical world accountable for all the sufferings we can throw at them.
What I want to say is that already we live in a culture which designates the medical approach to mental issues, or issues of the behaviour rather than the physical; when a suffering is easy to see (heroin addiction) we can trust the medical response, but in nearby cases (Twitter addiction, infamous deaths playing video games, where we cannot literally see the needle going into the arm or whatever) we cannot, because the ethical system decides first. Likewise the issue at hand for mental health is not "you are stigmatizing me," and so on, but "you are not offering me the cure to my condition which I demand".
We are now more than ever in need of explicit, cold, taxonomy, but already by the title of this article we can feel how the medical establishment is somewhat defeated by this goal .. "can we really practice today the science of mental disorder, when already we inherit so many mistakes and biases, my god...". If there is this entity, taxonomy, which speaks to us from some scientific perspective, which places demands and limitation upon us morally, OK then we ask the question: to what extent ought we to obey it, blah blah.. but THAT question is moral, and relies on taxonomy practicing freely (which is to say non-ethically). To say again what I am saying: either we have (as this article seems) given up on being able to practice taxonomy for fear of saying something dangerous (note the special care this article pays to being misquoted), OR we believe that taxonomy is possible, is clear, but is nonetheless itself dangerous... in which case I am pessimistic about my next doctors appointment, when he already will tell me exactly what I want to hear..!
Ah - the weight of proper classification in a social-political lodestone. Reminds me of the uncertainly principal in that the more closely we attempt to define one aspect, tge more slippery the rest becomes. I N did N chuckle N at N your N solution.
So, the question boils down to: How can we get groups that we like everything that they want and nothing that they don't? How can we consider these surgeries and treatments medically necessary, non-elective when there is nothing medically wrong with these people and we don't want to say that there is something wrong with them mentally?
I feel very uncomfortable in this middle aged out of shape body. I identify as young and athletic. Why won't you pay for my surgeries?
No matter how afraid you all are of the dudes in skirts you eventually have to tell them that if they eat their cake it ain't still on the counter.
Isn't the obvious solution simply to consider whether the condition causes harm to oneself or others? If it does, then it's a disorder. If it doesn't, then it isn't.
This would exclude homosexuality but include gender dysphoria due to it's high incidence of suicide, and pedophilia due to the mental distress and possibility of child molestation.
Homosexuality on its own doesn't cause distress, but homophobia does. And similarly, being a woman on its own doesn't cause distress, but misogyny does. Meanwhile, gender dysphoria is distressing on its own (from personal experience, gender dysphoria is not the *only* part of being trans as you wouldn't stop being trans/become cis by quashing dysphoria, but the disorder of gender dysphoria is still an aspect of being trans; hence why people may call gender dysphoria a disorder but not being trans a disorder, dysphoria is just one aspect).
I think by "harm", Sandro might mean the thoughts & emotions *directly* caused by the condition. Is the harm INHERENT to the condition of the mind, or is the harm being caused by the condition of being in an environment that considers people with condition to be "lesser"?
Taking trans people as an example again: Gender dysphoria is inherently distressing. Transitioning in order to alleviate dysphoria may or may not be distressing depending on societal attitudes (like transphobia). This makes one aspect of the transgender experience disordered & harmful to the individual, and the other neutral (harmful only because of external influences like transphobia).
I happen to agree with all of your specific points personally, but the point I'm trying to (poorly) make is that we can't really trust specific societies to have a good idea of where the harm comes from.
There's other commentators here that are making the point that homosexuality decreases fitness for the individual in some Darwinian way and qualifying that as "harm to self", and while some of them are making this point only in some kind of detached evolutionary sense, some are sincere in the thought that someone not being attracted to the opposite sex for the purpose of procreation is some kind of harm to self or others.
I personally think those definitions aren't only wrong but actively harmful and the thought process that produced them is harmful, but do I qualify those people who sincerely believe that as having a disorder of some kind?
> we can't really trust specific societies to have a good idea of where the harm comes from.
Sure, but rooting out causal factors is exactly what science is for.
> do I qualify those people who sincerely believe that as having a disorder of some kind?
Being wrong is not a disorder, even if it can be distressing. "Harm" is not merely distress, it's a high level of distress that causes physical or mental damage from which the individual may not recover for a long time, if ever.
> Sure, but rooting out causal factors is exactly what science is for.
I think we're waiting on neuroscientists and others to nail down a lot of these things, but in the meantime, we have to, as a society, practice medicine and justice and other things without this knowledge. This doesn't necessarily counteract your point here.
> Being wrong is not a disorder, even if it can be distressing.
While I would generally agree - when I say the thought process is actively harmful, I mean that this particular though process has been followed to extreme ends - chemical sterilization, anti-gay conversion camps, and, uh, similar. These thought processes and similar have led to this harm - should this kind of thinking be classified as a disorder?
> While I would generally agree - when I say the thought process is actively harmful, I mean that this particular though process has been followed to extreme ends - chemical sterilization, anti-gay conversion camps, and, uh, similar. These thought processes and similar have led to this harm - should this kind of thinking be classified as a disorder?
That same process would lead you to healing therapies given different assumptions, so I don't see how the process itself is the problem so much as the assumptions and beliefs that fed it. If anything is a disorder in the scenario you outlined, it's the lack of empathy while enacting those "corrections", not the thought process that drove you to it.
Correlation is not causation. Since not all gay people have monkeypox, and since not being gay doesn't prevent you from getting or transmitting monkeypox, then being gay is not what's causing the harm.
Behaviours that conduce to higher risk of contracting disease are what is causing the harm, and "it is my human right to go to a piss orgy" is one such behaviour.
I really, really wish I didn't stumble across stuff like that, I don't go looking for it but somehow it turns up on my radar, and I'd be perfectly happy not to learn about gay men with piss kinks who go to orgies where they have unprotected sex with multiple men and then worry about "gosh guys, does this sore I developed look like monkeypox to you? because it looks like the descriptions" as they post photos online of said chancres for others to help them identify.
If there are straight people going to piss orgies and contracting diseases, this is also equally harmful behaviour. But it's hard not to see how the figures stack up, which of course then gets you in trouble for seeing the emperor is not, in fact, clothed in Armani from head to toe.
> Behaviours that conduce to higher risk of contracting disease are what is causing the harm
Yes, but those aren't exclusively gay behaviours. Condemn the behaviour that's causing harm, not some group of people only some of whom are doing it.
> But it's hard not to see how the figures stack up
I'm fairly certain that piss orgies were not causing most of the harm from monkeypox. Furthermore, people could be more diligent about checking for symptoms before engaging in risky behaviours, so you don't even have to condemn the behaviour so much as being reckless about it.
Argue all you like but the facts are that both monkeypox and HIV only became epidemic infections in populations of gay men who practice promiscuous anal sex.
Gay men suffer higher rates of std infections. That's not a moral judgement, just an irrefutable fact.
"I really, really wish I didn't stumble across stuff like that, I don't go looking for it but somehow it turns up on my radar, and I'd be perfectly happy not to learn about gay men with piss kinks who go to orgies where they have unprotected sex with multiple men"
Where are you seeing this stuff? I'm a bisexual, polyamorous, fairly sex-positive transgender woman who's at least peripherally involved in the kink community, and I've never seen anything like this. Maybe it's selection bias, but most of the queer kinksters I know are incredibly cautious about monkeypox and sexually-transmitted diseases in general, probably considerably more so than the average person. Many of the kink events I've attended have explicitly prohibited any sort of penetrative sex, and they've all had very strict rules to prevent any sort of bodily fluids from being exchanged or spilled anywhere, and to ensure that the venue is kept as clean and disease-free as possible.
I know that's all anecdotal evidence, and I'm not saying it should be taken as representative of the norm for kinky queer people. But I don't think your examples are representative either, particularly if they come from some of the nastier corners of the internet.
By speaking to gay men in the real world and observing what actually goes on. Many societies didn't give gays the death penalty for no reason, but due to basic concern for the well being of the innocent. Monkeypox and HIV and who knows what else didn't come from nowhere.
What does "in the real world" even mean? I'm queer myself and I know plenty of queer people in the real world, including gay men. I've spent a lot of time in queer spaces, not just on the internet, but also in person. I'm certain I have a better idea of what real queer people are like than you do.
All rants against "politicizing" are hypocritical. The speaker wants to make his own political assertions, then preemptively prohibit counterargumentation.
Not even just transphobes, who are par for the course, but also some straight-up homophobes in this one.
It's especially frustrating because Scott really went out of his way to clarify "no, I do NOT think that homosexuality should still be considered a mental illness," but there are a ton of people reading it that way regardless.
I think fewer of them would have come if the controversial example was simply swapped out for something else, and I'm not sure why it wasn't. The point would have remained the same
>It's especially frustrating because Scott really went out of his way to clarify "no, I do NOT think that homosexuality should still be considered a mental illness," but there are a ton of people reading it that way regardless.
We're not reading it that way regardless, we're arguing that
1-By some of his criteria, it is (or pedophilia isn't, pick your poison)
2- His other criteria, with which he explains why it isn't, are bad.
You know, you could just rename it "Taxonomy of Human Psychologies," without any implication that some genera are bad and some good, and all the PR problems would go away. Can't see how the insurance industry would care either, they just need a number to write down on a form somewhere.
This seems to me like a psychiatrist/psychologist guild own goal, and that you can solve the problem any time you like. One assumes it suits the field somehow to keep the contraversy alive and periodically visibly fret about it.
We believe that some mental conditions need to be ameliorated and others do not, and you need some way of classifying and understanding the ones that do in order to do that.
Even if diagnostic codes for insurance weren't involved at all, you'd still have a need to understand what mental conditions require treatment separate from merely classifying them.
Ordinary medicine doesn't have this problem. Each diagnosing physician, in consultation with his patient, decides whether a condition needs to be treated or not, for a wide variety of reasons, and nobody needs to have all the decisions written down in some official manual. Insurance companies don't require it, either. Oncologists don't need to have a big public breast-beating and hand-wringing session every five years in which they classify certain prostate growths as "Cancer! Evil! Must be Treated!" and others as "Meh Just Old Age Something Else WIll Kill You First So Don't Bother." I don't know why the mental health field needs to be drama queens about this, but my working hypothesis would be that it brings in income, or influence, or both.
I don't think this is an accurate description of what goes on in medicine at all and there are, in fact, constant debates over what sorts of things ought to be treated (and how) or just left alone with professional organizations sometimes getting awfully heated with disagreements about formal standards of practice. Physicians as islands of independent judgment in consultation with patient wishes seems like it is from an alternate universe.
Well if I meant that particular straw man, you'd be right to object to it. But fierce and ongoing debate within the community of surgeons, oncologists, cardiologists, et cetera, with many varying philosophies. making many varying decisions, with many options for patients, and a focus on the provider-patient nexus as the primary decision locus != "we have to write everything down in this one sacred Dictionary of Things That Need Treatment every five years and then robotically apply it."
And at that I don't even think the actual treating community *does* robotically follow it, or even feels strongly compelled to do so -- cynicism seems rampant -- so once again I don't even see the reason the giant Sturm and Drang exists at all.
The community could solve this easily. Make a big taxonomy of Human Psychology, so you all speak the same language. Great stuff, very helpful, no longer useful in idiotic culture wars. Then go have a second argument with CMS about what Medicare will and won't pay for, just like the drug companies do. Since that is manifestly a political/social/economic fight, no one will be surprised if culture plays a big role, and indeed there's no reason it shouldn't.
If your complaint is with having a single manual and not, you know, professional standards of what constitutes illness and best practice for responding to it with intradisciplinary disagreement, then your initial objection to my response loses all its force.
"Why not just have a descriptive manual that tries to categorize the varieties of human behavior and cognition," besides being an impractical task, still seems to zip right past that we still have to have some way of identifying which kinds of mental states represent problems to be fixed. Whether the best practice collection of human knowledge on that is summarized in a single large manual or is spread out over a larger collection of sources is irrelevant to this point.
Given that I am part of the "treating community" I'll note that no one thinks of the DSM as the sum total of guidance on mental illness, which is why we're able to have fights over what should go in and what should go out. Those ideas have to come from somewhere separate from the previous iteration of the manual.
If you just rename it Taxonomy of Human Psychologies without any implication that some are bad and some are good, then you become a big fat target for the other side in the culture wars. Social conservatism, most often expressed as religious fundamentalism, _centers_ on identifying which behaviors are good and which are bad so that the bad can be punished until eradicated. For social conservatives, if we're letting the "others" just walk around and be free and happy members of our society then we're doing it wrong.
Psychiatry/psychology as a profession has lots of collective experience and history of being in those crosshairs literally since the invention of the concepts of psychiatry/psychology. And Father Coughlin et al were not just playing, back in the day....the profession seems very unclear right now about how to navigate our contemporary cultural/political reality. But it is collectively quite clear about the consequences of being a big target when/where the pendulum swings back to the overall framing which used to be culturally dominant.
Your description doesn't match any real life social conservative I know, and seems more like a caricature of the bogeymen that haunt the nightmares of social liberals who don't take the time to understand their fellow man.
Any anyway, if that were true, it would be a cowadly and dishonest course of action, and I would not respect it.
I know several social conservatives right now who fit exactly that description; in fact I am related to a couple. For that matter there are plenty currently holding high elective office.
But anyway you have entirely missed the actual point of my comment which was about the collective shared experience of the psychiatry/psychology profession. Even if we pretended that a lot of social conservatives today didn't want what I described, that wouldn't erase the recent-historical facts of it, and the collective memory of it within that professional field.
Sure, but since I don't believe you understand the wide population of social conservatives -- and your credulity is at issue because you heedlessly extrapolate from the few you do know -- I equally don't believe you about the broad experience of the psychiatrist/psychologist community[1]. You can certainly speak for yourself, and your own experience, and I respect that, but I don't think you speak for an entire community, and so any argument you make based on that assertion will not be credible to me.
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[1] And if it comes to that I also know a few psychiatrists and psychologists personally, and they don't seem to share your view of victimization, which lends additional weight to my skepticism, although I don't claim to understand the entire community.
So what is your opinion of the attempts to stigmatise by medicalising conditions like "homophobia" and "transphobia", then? Sure sounds like "identifying which behaviours are good and which are bad so that the bad can be punished until eradicated".
There hasn't been any serious attempt to medicalize homophobia and transphobia as mental illnesses. Now, I don't doubt that you can find a tweet from some wannabe-clever activist saying "homosexuality isn't a mental illness but homophobia is," or maybe even an entire article on some clickbait-ridden thinkpiece site about how homophobia is a pathological condition, but that's just because you can find people saying *anything* somewhere on the internet. It's not an idea with any real support among any notable group of people. Even among the most radical progressives, the vast majority of people would say "no, of course homophobes aren't mentally ill, they're just assholes."
Doubt it. Even putting the usual arguments aside for the moment, isn't the DSM also heavily used in other countries that are far less afflicted by this particular American madness?
Racism is not so listed in the DSM, nor is misogyny, nor xenophobia or homophobia.
There are of course calls from various quarters including some psychiatrists for some of those things to be categorized in the DSM. That's nothing new, you can easily find essays and book chapters and earnest announcements of committees formed to lobby for that going back years. (Decades, regarding racism or "extreme racism"). There's no particular sign of the APA being about to agree to any of it though.
So yea, I'll take that bet -- I'll offer $1,000 that transphobia is not listed as a disorder in the next edition of the DSM. It doesn't appear that a DSM-6 will be produced for some years yet though....how about we ask Scott to hold the funds from each of us until then?
Whereas social liberals expend an awful lot of time and energy on trying to categorise thoughts and individual people, rather than behaviour, into good or evil.
Oh I wish. In an ideal world, maybe, but this is not that world. I am perfectly comfortable with the idea that my own twist of the genes, asexuality/aromanticism, is a mental disorder and a genetic dead-end because no babies, and also because no personal emotional connection with spouse and family or other person. If that is deemed "bad" or "wrong" or "immoral", then that's something I have to live wit (and for some cultures/beliefs, it is immoral because it is your duty to marry and have children so that family lines continue and the ancestors are properly cared for with descendants to perform rituals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitru_Paksha on their behalf). But you can bet your socks that if there was a "Taxonomy of Human Psychologies" that classed aroace people under a pathology, there would be a roaring rage of activists demanding that this awful slur on perfectly normal people be removed (and all the usual stuff about stigmatising and encouraging violence and discrimination and the whole bingo card).
We have to bear in mind that the bulk of a Taxonomy of Human Psychology would quite naturally consist of what is generally considered "normal" behavior. Necessarily, since far more people are "normal" than are not, pretty much by definition. So the appearance or not of Psychology A.II.1.c in the Taxonomy doesn't seem likely to provoke controversy all by itself, because *everything* is listed there. Whether it's weird or not is not addressed, although to be sure people can (and no doubt would) go through the book afterward with a red pencil and circle this or that.
Consider the equivalent of a giant book on biology. Most of what it lists is how normal cells function, but it also includes how cells function in ways that are unusual, and in some cases pathological. We don't have giant fights over what gets included in human anatomy or biochemisty textbooks because we don't want to stigmatize people who happen to be 7 feet or 2 feet tall, or who have liver cells that are/are not degrading cholesterol at a high/low rate, or digestive tracts that do/do not metabolize lactose correctly, with/without embarassing side effects. We just describe everything, and we have separate fights about whether this or that process is "disease" or "a variation on health" or something which insurance pays for something that doesn't. I don't see it as a logical or even social requirement that a taxonomy be subject to pre-publication ideological vetting, lest The Wrong Ideas get into print.
It happens rarely in other fields. Economists can describe Marxist thought in books without having Austrian school fanatics go apeshit over them even putting the forbidden ideas into print. Even the most rabid evangelicals don't insist that archaeoligists be prohibited from publishing their findings from Olduvai Gorge. I don't see any good reason why the study of psychology has to be a unique victim of some hypothetical social intolerance of mere description, and I rather suspect it's because it chooses to be, like the victim of abuse who returns again and again to the control of the abuser -- there is something to be gained, the victim is not just a victim.
Parenthetically, on the personal subject, it sounds to me like you are much too hard on yourself. You seem clearly to form emotional connections, indeed quite deep ones, and to people. It may not be to people who are in your physical life today, and it may not even be to people who are now alive, but connection is connection, and human is human. What would we be if, like animals, we could only form connections to those whose butt we can immediately sniff? Surely there is much more to the human spirit.
So (although I know little of you of course) you do not seem to me to differ importantly in spirit from the whole human, except perhaps in fairly unimportant and transient ways. It may just be reflection of our crassly materialist age that definitions of what it means to be a complex and engaged soul has become stuffed into the cramped little cardboard box of animal functions[1]. It would be regrettable if someone as independent-minded as yourself were to overinterpret these shibboleths -- they're just current habits of thought, fleeting, and do not represent the considered wisdom of Man, let alone the mind of God.
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[1] Like what is to me the flabbergasting assertion by some that chastity is some unbearable situation that might as well be torture or death. Are we all just the basest hedonists these days? There's no recognition of the spiritual qualities of the voluntary fast? Amazing.
You've convinced me that I do want a purely biological, apolitical taxonomy of mental disorders. Sorry for all the people in the world who feel stigmatized, but it sounds really useful.
Regarding the "pedophilia as a sexual targeting error" debate: I recently read an article about a man dating an adult woman who looks like a small child, and it's caused an enormous amount of controversy and heated debate. (https://nypost.com/2023/01/23/im-dating-a-23-year-old-woman-who-looks-like-an-8-year-old-girl/) On one side, there are people saying that he's not doing anything wrong, since she's a consenting adult. This is obviously true in the legal sense (he hasn't committed any crime) and in a consequentialist moral sense (she's a consenting adult of sound mind, so there's no harm being done to her). On the other side, there are people arguing that having a romantic and sexual attraction to someone who looks like a child is a sign of innate pedophilic desires. So even if he's not breaking the law or hurting anyone directly, they still consider him a pedophile at heart, which is effectively synonymous with "bad person" in their eyes. Maybe they think he's more likely to pursue actual children in the future, maybe they just think it's gross. Then there are counter-arguments from disability activists, who say that expecting this woman to be totally celibate because of her appearance is extremely unfair to her; if you condemn anyone who has sex with her, that's functionally the same as saying she shouldn't be allowed to have sex at all, which amounts to severe discrimination against someone with a medical abnormality.
Now, I strongly disagree with the idea that this guy must secretly be a pedophile. He's had prior romantic relationships with physiologically-normal adult women, and there's zero evidence that he's ever shown any sort of sexual interest in children. I think there's a very good chance that he isn't actually attracted to childlike bodies at all, he just happened to develop a relationship with this particular woman and was willing to look past her physiological abnormalities. But even if he was specifically attracted to her body type in particular, I still don't think he'd be a pedophile, because pedophilia is "attraction to children," not "attraction to adults with childlike bodies." Classifying him as a pedophile would be a category error or, at most, an example of the non-central fallacy (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world). He'd be more comparable to disability fetishists, like the sorts of people attracted to amputees. And while disability fetishists are considered very weird, and sometimes seen as off-putting or socially problematic, they still aren't viewed as inherently sick or evil the way that pedophiles are.
I don't think that "sexual targeting errors" should ever be considered a mental illness in themselves, especially because it's not entirely clear what even counts as an "error." While we don't know for sure yet, there's some evidence that homosexuality is evolutionarily advantageous to the homosexual's family and tribe, in which case it's not an error at all. And even if that theory turns out to be false, there are major problems with the idea that any preference for non-reproductive sex constitutes a mental illness. If homosexuality is a mental illness, then what about a straight person with a fetish for oral or anal sex? What about a man exclusively attracted to older woman who are no longer fertile? Should the DSM include a category for men who browse the GILF category on PornHub? The reasons why pedophilia should be considered a mental illness go well beyond any issues with "sexual targeting," and for some (possibly many) pedophiles, it seems to be a largely or purely pathological issue that might have nothing to do with sexual targeting at all.
I think our paedophilia taboo is entwined with the incest taboo, and if anyone chirps about "but is incest really that bad, really?" with that dumb thought-experiment about "two adult siblings using contraception decide to have consensual incestuous sex once; since there won't be any offspring to be horrible twisted mutants, is this really so bad?", I am virtually dunking their fat heads in a virtual barrel of virtual water until the ooze is washed off.
Youthfulness. Paedophilia is classically "older/adult male with younger boy/girl" and incest is often "older family member/younger family member" (think of the Hapsburgs and all the uncle-niece, cousin-cousin marriages).
If we have a taboo about incest and one about paedophilia, they might be linked on the basis of "older sexually mature person with younger immature person ends up in not good result".
I agree that incest almost certainly has a very strong correlation with pedophilia. Not to the point where there's a complete overlap, since there are cases where incest occurs between siblings and cousins of similar age, but I'd imagine a lot of incest cases (quite possibly the majority) involve large age gaps.
In contrast, I think the correlation between homosexuality and pedophilia is low, despite the constant attempts by social conservatives to equate the two in the public eye. My guess is that male homosexuality is correlated with pedophilia to exactly the same degree that male heterosexuality is (and that has far more to do with the fact that men in general seem to be attracted to younger partners than with sexual orientation), while female homosexuality seems to be correlated with pedophilia *less* than female heterosexuality. Both "older male/young female" and "older male/young male" cases are sadly commonplace, and while "older female/young male" cases are less frequent, they still happen often enough that they're hardly unheard of. But "older female/young female" cases appear to be extremely rare, to the point where it's hard to find instances of it happening at all. (I only know of one situation where a woman was arrested for having sex with an underage girl, and the woman in question was an 18 year old high school student who was only a few years older than the girl she slept with. I don't really count that: From what I could tell, the only reason the older girl was arrested at all was because the younger girl's parents were homophobes who really had it out for her, and they lived in one of the few states that didn't have Romeo and Juliet laws.)
In the past, Alexander wrote a controversial piece on homosexuality and mental illness. In this article, he obscures his meaning with a strange code to protect himself from public scrutiny. According to a leading Alexander scholar, Emile Torres, the decrypted version is the following:
This is probably something that others have thought of and that has been articulated and more fully fleshed out elsewhere, but while reading this, something clicked for me about why efforts to change language in order to avoid stigmatizing a group have always seemed misguided to me.
The core issue is that a group gets stigmatized primarily because some people want to stigmatize the group, and only secondarily because of the language used to refer to or describe the group. Changing the language used to refer to a group will only help destigmatize the group among people who already don't want the group stigmatized, but as long as there are enough people who continue to want to stigmatize a group, even the new language will (eventually) start to seem like it stigmatizes the group, and the language will need to be changed again.
I'm sure it's more complicated than just this (e.g., there's probably a role for preference falsification, it's easy to imagine the ways in which the act of proposing destigmatizing language would be mocked), but it seems pretty reasonable to me to put the responsibility for stigma on the people doing the stigmatizing rather than the words used to do it.
There are already too many comments on here for anyone to ever read this, but what the hey. What I can determine from use of ctrl-f is that folx have been discussing evolution without plucking the obvious, low-hanging fruit. This will sound sarcastic, but I am serious when I say that:
1) a la Henrich, the real watershed period was when culture-gene co-evolution took off, creating a feedback loop different in kind than with other previous changes due to evolutionary pressure
2) we can solve both the insurance problem and the stigma problem by categorizing everything that our common ancestor with the chimpanzee would not have recognized immediately as ordinary.
3) "but leo, insurance can't pay for the treatment of every single human trait" well no obviously not. But insurance only pays for clinicians to treat people who are in enough distress to seek treatment. If someone is in enough distress because of an excessive tendency towards imitative learning or copious sweating or needing to buy clothes to cover his hairless body, I say treat him -- him and every other person with distress from any human-specific condition.
4) "But leo! Bonobos constantly exhibit homosexual and pedophiliac behaviors! Are you saying pedophilia isn't a mental disorder?" Yeah thos are bonobos. Our common ancestor with chimps would have classified that whole species as a bunch of slutty little weirdos.
Have you read "The Goodness Paradox"? (He compares us to the slutty weirdos... oh if only the women had domesticated humanity (rather than the men.) and I could hump all the women as a means of saying hello each morning.
All the women? You have an exaggerated view of your prowess there, and if compulsory sex in order to keep the social hierarchy in place and you not to be kicked out or on the bottom rung of the pecking order is necessary, you might not enjoy having to hump all around you simply as a survival tactic.
I'm going to think about conditions where you become at risk of damage by factors in one's environment which have no significant effect on most people.
" If I understand journalistic ethics correctly, they can’t edit the sentence to remove the Ns"
Journalists have ethics?
Yeah, I can see why this is something Scott needs to be VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY careful about because oh me, oh my.
I'm glad to be sufficiently obscure that I could express an honest opinion and nobody would care because nobody knows me. But starting a fire in the comment thread here is not a good thing to do, so I'll just shut up now.
Well then, call me Carrie, because I'm all about firestarting. I think that we need to stop taking journalists seriously, because it's pretty obvious by now that they have no ethics and are bound by no rules. They no longer need N some N kind N of N a N fig N leaf N to smear Scott (or anyone else); they can just do it de novo. Fortunately, they are also getting closer to bankruptcy every day (the financial kind, not the moral or intellectual kind, they're way past that). The way to beat them is to make them irrelevant, by amassing a large audience who simply doesn't care whom the journalists have designated as the enemy du jour; and I think Scott is quite far along this path already.
Yes. The media is an enemy of the people. Donald Trump was bang-on right about this.
As a skeptical contrarian, it's been a trip seeing how the right-wing media has increasingly been more accurate about most things since ~2015 than the mainstream media.
To be fair to the HiTOP authors, the problem (if it is a problem) of stigma/bias in the DSM isn't one of the big issues they're trying to address. They're more interested in technical problems like the DSM's arbitrary diagnostic cut points etc. I included this because it's a common criticism of the DSM that I believe is partly addressed by HiTOP.
What the HiTOP offers that the DSM doesn't is continuity with ordinary human experience. Anxiety isn't some weird catchable virus, it's something that everyone feels sometimes - it only becomes a problem when it begins to significantly impact a person's life. This perspective is built into the HiTOP, and is why I think it reduces (but doesn't eliminate) the potential for stigma.
That said, I do agree with what you've said here. As long as there's power and/or funding tied to the diagnosis of mental disorders, it can never be a passionless academic exercise. I wasn't around at the time, but my understanding is that the removal of homosexuality from the DSM was largely a social/political decision with a thin layer of scientific backing, not the other way around. The debate about transgender/gender dysphoria seems to be something similar, except that there are actually medical treatments and funding available for people with GD, so no diagnosis might mean no treatment.
Many of these issues are high-level consequences of deeply flawed systems. It's just what happens when post-agricultural primates industrialize the entire goddamn planet. A postmodern society built on false meritocracies and the illusion of scarcity.
This is the sort of comment that sounds "deep" but doesn't actually say anything meaningful. It's a deepity, to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett. (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity)
How are "these issues" the result of "deeply flawed systems," precisely? What are these systems and what are their flaws? How do they connect to whether homosexuality, gender dysphoria, hitting punching bags, social media addiction, or meditative bliss states should be considered mental disorders or not? What does the "illusion of scarcity," a theory of economics, have to do with any of this? If you want to make a serious argument that there's a connection between all of these things, you have to actually explain that connection, or at least outline it. Just cryptically alluding to some unknown connection with vague gestures and implications isn't enough.
No shit, but that's a novel and not a comment that I can leave after my morning coffee. Nobody required you to write a paragraph explaining this either, hence the /grumble. I appreciate the - presumably - real entreaty to adumbrate my thoughts, but this comment just comes across as hostile intellectual posturing.
> This doesn’t seem especially destigmatizing to me - you’re the wrong gender, but you’re crazy for being unhappy about it?
This is coming from someone who has never read a diagnostic manual, but: one would assume that it's possible to be in so much distress that it constitutes a mental illness, even though you're not crazy and the degree of distress is justified by the circumstances.
Or are mental illnesses usually defined so as to exclude “normal” / “expected” reactions to difficult life experiences?
Yet a black in 1950s Mississippi, or a woman in Afghanistan, could be under a tremendous amount of distress for the same reasons (although of course the distress takes a very different form in terms of views toward the self). Yet it would be insane to call being black or being a woman a mental disorder.
It's weird how when you read a new book, with new ideas (new to you.) it tends to color all your thoughts for a while. Such is the case with "The Goodness Paradox" which I've almost finished (chapter 12 of 13) One of the main ideas in the book is that humans self-domesticated themselves, and in this case domestication means specifically, being selected for less aggressive behavior. The classic example is silver foxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox Now being domesticated (less aggression) has all these other traits, which get dragged along with it. These are mostly just details of our development process... floppy ears, white spots, smaller heads... And one of the traits is increased sexuality and homosexuality. Huh. I'm not sure this makes any difference to the above discussion, but less aggression and increased sexuality, is just part of who we are.
(This blogger sometimes, for idiosyncratic reasons, inserts a capital 'N' between every word in a sentence. To preserve readability, these 'N's have been omitted from quotations.)
> That means that a purely biological apolitical taxonomy of mental disorders which classifies all things with similar biological causes in the same way would also probably classify homosexuality as a mental disorder. But the whole point of wanting a purely biological apolitical taxonomy of mental illness was to make sure we would never again repeat the DSM’s error of calling homosexuality a mental disorder!
That is certainly not the whole point of wanting a purely biological taxonomy of mental illness. One point might be (indeed, should be) to try to stop using the same treatment on unlike problems that show similar symptoms (when that treatment is differentially effective). One point might be to inform our views of what we should properly consider a mental illness -- why are we sure that, when the old DSM and the new DSM disagree, the new DSM is necessarily right?
"But the whole point of wanting a purely biological apolitical taxonomy of mental illness was to make sure we would never again repeat the DSM’s error of calling homosexuality a mental disorder!"
I mean, it wasn't an error, so the apolitical taxonomy would, by definition, not correct this.
My thoughts immediately went to issues like depression and ADHD, which are multicausal, and defined by their symptoms. It's hard to look at something as a proper cause when it is defined as "a collection of symptoms that impede normal function without a single or even any specific known cause".
Agree with the general point, but I don’t think the idea of a purely evolutionary or biological view of human sexuality is that coherent either.
Most of the sex that people actually have is an error if you mean anything that doesn’t directly result in reproduction. A lot of those sex acts could have some indirect evolutionary benefit in the right context, that we'll never be able to prove. Why draw the line at homosexuality and not eg. oral sex? I've read plausible evolutionary benefits for both.
Sex is partly a social thing for humans. (So too for some other social animals, or have I been very mislead on what hyenas and bonobos get up to?) Sex acts are gestures, they have meaning. Those meanings vary widely between cultures, and within cultures there are smaller disagreements.
It seems significant here that autistic people are more likely to be asexual!
When I say that the meaning of sexual acts is social and subjective I'm not saying that it should be anything goes - if someone waves a swastika flag around in public in a western country and their defence is that it meant something positive in India then they’re an edgelord at best. In their own home though, why not? When you’re little if an older kid tells you that showing your middle finger to people means hello and you decide to do it to everyone you meet then you’ll be mortified when you find out what the consensus is on that meaning.
>Why draw the line at homosexuality and not eg. oral sex? I've read plausible evolutionary benefits for both.
It's not the act of having gay sex that is dysfunctional. It's being exclusively attracted to a person of the same sex. From an evolutionary perspective, this is fatal.
And importantly, having non-reproductive heterosexual sex isn't some genetic or hormal thing. We didn't start having so much non-reproductive heterosexual sex because we were "born this way". It's a choice, and a choice in a way that a gay man forcing himself to have sex with a woman isn't.
I'm grateful Scott brought this up. Like nearly all the jargon associated with gender ideology, changing the public ideation of homosexuality by changing the DSM was a blatantly political act. Queer Civil Union doesn't have the cache of Gay Marriage. But Pregnant Persons is a bit much.
The question of "purely biological " vs politicized (culturally inflected) concepts of mental disorder was nicely tackled by philosopher/psychologist Jerome Wakefield in his 1992 article "The concept of mental disorder: On the boundary between biological facts and social values" (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1992-23607-001). Wakefield proposed that in order for a condition to count as a mental disorders it must meet TWO criteria: It must be the result of a biological dysfunction, AND it must be deemed as harmful - and what we deem harmful is inevitably is a matter of social values..
Some conditions may be the result of a dysfunction but, if we agree they are not harmful, under Wakefield's analysis, they are not a disorders.. For instance, homosexuality. Conversely, some conditions may not be the result of a dysfunction, but we agree they are harmful!. These are also not disorders. Surprisingly, an example might be antisocial personality - a very adaptive social strategy that parasitizes social cooperation. We would not find it in a manual of "disorders", but that would not mean we wound not be justified in "treating it" - say, in persuading the sociopath to change.
So, we need three "diagnostic" manuals! :1) A manual of mental conditions that are indeed mental disorders -they are harmful dysfunctions 2) A manual of mental conditions that are mere biological dysfunctions that are not harmful (it may be of scientific interest to classify them somewhere) and 3) A manual of mental conditions that are not dysfunctions, but are harmful - these conditions are of great social interest, and merit "treatment". That is, we are justified in trying to change them.
"First, I think everyone is a little bit gay - or put better, humans are on a continuum of sexual attraction between homo and hetero."
No, we are not. This is a common error from both bisexuals and a certain type of heterosexual feel-good liberal.
If this were true, I wouldn't have spent years self-flagellating by trying to force myself into expressing some sort of sexual attraction to women for years on end.
I get that it's trendy to claim there are no distinct categories and everything is a continuum (sometimes followed by the idea that categories themselves are a patriarchal oppression or something - bang on job, queer theory!) But it's better to accept that while there will often be some deviations, the categories usually have a point and there is a lot of accuracy to them. For instance, the existence of a small number of intersex people does not make it false that sex is binary. The existence of people without arms does not make it false that humans have two arms.
The fact that you personally are at one end of the continuum does not disprove is existence.
Sure, some people are more or less all one way or the other, but if human (male) sexuality is as binary as you say then how come bisexuality was the norm in pre-christian Rome & Greece?
Sex is binary for certain. I don't agree that sexuality is, so sorry I don't fit into your pigeonhole.
Also I think that male sexuality is very different to female, and that camp/effeminate males are their own distinct category that I don't much understand.
Maybe I'm completely wrong and I'm just projecting my own experience.
>The fact that you personally are at one end of the continuum does not disprove is existence.
The fact you say you 'think' it exists isn't proof it exists.
>Sure, some people are more or less all one way or the other, but if human (male) sexuality is as binary as you say then how come bisexuality was the norm in pre-christian Rome & Greece?
It wasn't the norm. And even if it were, I have no idea on earth why one particular society in one point in history should be considered the natural state of man.
It is considered normal in every society that wasn't subject to the moral code of one of the Abrahamic faiths which teach that gay sex is a mortal sin.
The fact I'm completely outside of your continuum disproves your continuum. If I was 99% gay and 1% straight it wouldn't disprove it. I'd just be at the far end. But if you posit that everyone is some level of bisexual, then yes, me being 100% gay and 0% straight does disprove that.
>Sex is binary for certain. I don't agree that sexuality is, so sorry I don't fit into your pigeonhole.
More that I don't fit into your pigeonhole.
>Sure, some people are more or less all one way or the other, but if human (male) sexuality is as binary as you say then how come bisexuality was the norm in pre-christian Rome & Greece?
Bisexuality was not the norm in classical Rome and Greece. It was very much an upper-class affectation. Aristophanes pokes fun at it in his play "The Clouds".
>Maybe I'm completely wrong and I'm just projecting my own experience.
You say you are 0% straight, but how do I know that this is true? You say yourself you have had difficulty coming to terms with your sexuality, so it is not certain that you have it completely right now.
The whole of Spartan society was structured around male same-sex relationships. In Rome it was considered entirely normal and proper for men to sodomise other men. It is only the Abrahamic faiths that imposed the morality that gay sex was sinful. No other society ever thought so.
How do you quantify being gay ? or being straight for that matter ?
I find myself "Trapped" by people like Finnster (https://twitter.com/F1NN5TER?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor), i.e. attracted to (very convincing) cross-dressing femboys. But - if anything - this only proves I'm straight, the only men that attract me are those who look so much like women that even women wouldn't know better.
I'm glad you found 4 words in my comment that you can reply a snarky twitter reply to and feel good about yourself.
But the entire point of the "cross-dressing" part of "cross-dressing femboys" (of the kind in the link) is that they look so much like women that every *woman*, let alone man, is like "I wouldn't know you're a man if you didn't tell me". So it's indeed to be expected that a straight men would be attracted to them, it would be a bit suspicous if I wasn't attracted to something that looks better than 60% or so of women.
>First, I think everyone is a little bit gay - or put better, humans are on a continuum of sexual attraction between homo and hetero.
I think they aren't.
>I don't think that everyone is a little bit paedophile.
More adult men have had sex throughout history with non-adult women than with adult men. And since we're all about sexual spectra, where does pedophillia end? The moment a girl is sexually fertile? What if she looks more like a child than a sexually fertile girl? Men were having sex with them based on their appearance, not whether they were strictly sexually mature or not.
>Also, while homosexual attraction is biologically sub-optimal at the individual level, some have theorised that it had benefits at the group level.
If you mean under 18 then sure. If you mean obviously well under the age of sexual maturity, then I would like to know how you ascertained that claim.
Men have a powerful biological imperative to have sex with a girl as soon as she becomes sexually fertile. Or do you not agree with that?
It is therefore expected for men to play close to that point, as it were.
That is not the same thing as being attracted to children who are obviously well under the age of sexual maturity - that is what we call paedophilia.
>There's literally no possible selective benefit to it
What if it is like sickle-cell anaemia, or other conditions? You have a bunch of genes that individually increase a persons selective fitness, but if you get them all together then you are gay.
A population that has these genes in it is fitter overall, even at the cost of some percentage being made less fit.
"That is, we want our definition of “mental disorder” to be ethical (eg not stigmatize people who don’t deserve stigma). And we want it to be practical (eg identify a group of people who need and deserve care). But things that are biologically similar can be ethically and practically different”
After you’ve clearly demonstrated that “mental disorder” is NOT a moral matter, I don’t understand why you aren’t insisting that it is NOT a moral matter, and lobbying your professional organizations to insist the same. That way, people who have “mental disorders” would not be stigmatized.
Moral issues are clearly involved in a subset of “mental disorders” (again, as you have clearly shown), so why can’t they be classified distinctly, as, say, ”harm-inducing mental disorders” or some such? Then only that group will be stigmatized, as wished for.
I think if ya’ll would hold that line long enough, the public would come around.
"Causes harm to oneself or others" encompasses all mental disorders in the model of mental disorder most people are working with. If you look at the DSM diagnostic criteria, you'll notice that it is always looking for marked impairment of a person's daily functioning or severe personal distress. A condition that doesn't do this isn't considered a disorder. When people use pop awareness of mental illnesses to self-diagnose, a common area where they go wrong is in brushing this aside. They end up describing subclinical or even perfectly fine issues as qualifying in a way that is almost insulting to people who are severely impaired.
The harder part is deciding when something *is* causing harm, but shouldn't be thought of as a disorder. Some of this is when we decide the problem is with societal norms, not the individual.
To me, this seems to be the *easy* part of the demarcation - if it's not a problem for the subject or a problem for society, how can it even be called a disorder? To me, at least, this seems straightforward.
The tricky part is surely the *other* side of this - what issues that *are* a problem for the subject or for society are still not mental disorders?
Example: A pyromaniac who is obsessively unable to keep from starting fires would certainly seem to suffer from a mental disorder. But what about someone who simply loves to see things burn enough that he keeps doing it out of choice even though he could probably refrain from it at a loss of personal satisfaction? Or someone taking revenge on society for imagined slights through repeated arson?
I agree completely, especially with the broader principle that it is important to maintain the distinction between the biological and the moral, but I think a potentially solution to the issue presented of insurance coverage is specifically designating those (fairly few, I would assume) things that experience discrepancies between fitting the biological, practical, and moral definitions of mental illnesses as special cases that get insurance care but without being technically considered a mental illness. I do recognize the massive political and bureaucratic hurdles to such a systems, and the complications of infinitely designating exceptions, so maybe this solution is more ideal than practical. Oh well.
I saw a lecture where the author talked about how "crazy" is culturally defined. But in some cultures we will say people are crazy, in others they will say oh this person is possessed by a demon. Pedal to the metal, both cultures have to deal with someone who isn't fitting in.
We could also just admit, as Thomas Szasz said, that all mental health diagnoses are ethical/moral/political.
Psychiatry is all about labeling "problems in living." They sought to medicalize social problems, to transform political problems into purely technical ones. E.g., children don't like school because it's boring? Call it ADHD. A housewife won't submit to her husband's demands? Call her schizophrenic and give her ECT until she is docile.
The changing treatment of homosexuals by the DSM is just one more example of how psychiatry is defined by ethics, not medical science.
The function of psychiatry has always been to dominate and control those who do not meet society's expectations.
So let's just admit that all mental health disorders are social, political, and ethical, not medical. Just admit that psychiatry is a social science that works in tandem with the police state, not a medical science. Let's call a spade a spade.
Then, we can say that pedophilia is treated differently because of homosexuality because of its ethics.
Are people who hear voices telling them to harm others simply people failing to fall in line? Are people who are paralyzingly convinced that everyone is out to get them just 'failing to meet societies expectations'? Are people who experience profound, debilitating depression despite the material conditions of their life being great actually fine, and it's merely a judgemental and controlling social apparatus convincing them there something wrong with them?
I've had severe OCD. It was a living hell. Medication and cognitive behavioral therapy may have saved my life.
Not "social, political and ethical" at all. Very objectively real.
Psychiatry sometimes does bad things (forcing kids onto literal amphetamines en masse because teachers don't want to deal with normal adolescent behavior). Psychiatry also sometimes does very good things.
Hopefully Scott responds to it. Definitely above my paygrade and expertise, but I love stuff that is intriguing and goes against the (public) consensus, even if it's wrong in the end
Humans evolved in small hunter-gatherer groups in competition with other groups of humans for limited resources (food, water and land).
In "good times" -- and by "times" I mean time periods spanning a generation or more -- when resources were plentiful and competition not intense, it was advantageous to have heterosexual offspring who would mate, produce more offspring, found new groups, or join other nearby groups. Surplus resources make the raising and feeding of children practical and sustainable by the group, and expectant mothers would be under conditions of little stress.
But in bad times, when resources were scarce or when competing groups threatened the group, having many babies, children and expectant mothers would be a disadvantageous burden upon a group fighting for survival. Pregnant mothers would be under stress, and that stress would select for homosexual offspring who would be less likely to reproduce and have families of their own, and more likely to become adults free to help care for their siblings, neices, and nephews, or participate in food-gathering or war-making activities on behalf of the group.
Hence, homosexuality is an advantage in groups facing hard times. The group is more likely to survive to see good times in the future thanit would be if burdened by the urges and outcomes of rampant heterosexuality.
First of all, please don't state this as if it's an ironclad fact. At best, it's an extremely speculative hypothesis. You are very certain of your claims and offer no probabilistic qualifications for any of them - this certainty is not warranted in any way. Even the extent of the role that prenatal maternal stress has on orientation is not that firmly established.
Secondly, this is based on the long obsolete theory of group selection that is almost certainly incorrect. Such a theory is literally incoherent.
Something cannot be an evolutionary adaptation if it STOPS your genes from propagating. What natural selection /means/ is some genes are selected for and passed on and other aren't. If you have the functional equivalent of an infertile offspring (i.e. gay kids who don't reproduce), any genes that code for the production of this 'infertility' will be lost.
That which exists is that which persists, and you're claiming that something exists that has no way persisting. A trait can only be passed on if you produce fertile offspring. The people having all the gay babies would have their genes not passed on, and the subsequent generations would be dominated by those having no/fewer gay babies.
The fact that having gay babies could (potentially) be beneficial to the group is irrelevant. It cannot possibly be good for the individual's fitness, and genes are passed on at the individual level. There is not mechanism for gayness to pass on. The group might benefit if such a thing came to be, but the benefit necessarily accrues to those having fertile offspring, passing along their non-gay-offspring genes. Even if you want to say everyone can have this gene and pass it on whenever they're having non-gay babies, no individual has a selection benefit from these genes, and those without the genes will have superior fitness.
I think homosexuality is probably a simple byproduct of a biological process, in this sense it makes the most sense – rather than strategy. E.g. there is a hypothesis that the same mechanism that causes cryptorchidism in some 3% of males is the same one causing homosexuality in males. Also the same for facial hair in women. It seems like regions of the brain and body in some small fraction of foetuses have reversed receptivity to masculinising or feminizing hormones, producing sex atypical traits in both men and women at a rate that is evolutionary costly.
Natural selection in social species differs from non-social species (like foxes, in the article you reference).
People are not octopoi who cast thousands of tiny offspring into the current, hoping on large numbers and chance to continue our line. Nor are we lone predators like the foxes in the article you cite. Every human depends on other humans to survive and thrive.
Social species like us cooperate to ensure the continuation of our genes.
Natural selection isn't about the "individual's fitness" or the individual's propagation. It is about the survival and propagation of the genes. And the gene doesn't care about the individual.
Siblings, cousins, neices and nephews carry almost exactly the same genes as any individual one of them does. Genes are "selfish" and do not care whether they are propagated by the individual or by a close family member.
Whatever strategy helps the progeny of the family survive well into their reproductive years helps the gene propagate.
Humans do not begin to reproduce until well into their second decade of life, and continue to reproduce well into their 30's (typically, for women). That is a long time for any given fertile offspring to survive, (nay, thrive, given the energy and caloric needs of a pregnant human female) before they can pass on their genes.
It has been said, "it takes a village to raise a child." If a doting, helpful and productive gay aunt or uncle makes the survival of his gene-similar family members more likely to grow and live to produce more children, then that gay relative has passed on his or her genes as well. A similar explanation has been posited to explain why we live so long after our child-bearing years into grandparenthood: because grandparents help younger family members during pregnancy and afterwards to raise children who then go on to repeat the process.
As for your critique that I state certainties rather than probability, well, that goes without saying, as natural selection is all about probably rather than certainty. FThe author's labeling of homosexuality (we may as well throw in asexuality while we're at it) as a "targeting error" is a presumption, and ignores the fact that these phenomenon exist in social species from honeybees through penguins to humans.
Social adults will care for offspring that are not their own, and natural selection selects for this behavior, because in closely related individuals, it passes on essentially the same genes.
Finally, there is likely no "gay gene" to either pass on or not. The trait/behavior is not genetic, it is epigenetic. Meaning, it isn't about whether a gene is passed on or not, but whether it is switched on or not. That is how prenatal hormones influence sexuality, through epigenetic switching. (Google it, it's fascinating.). The same prenatal epigenetic switching also is how mothers can pass on to their offspring whether to grow to be small or large, depending on the food supply available to the mother during her lifespan. This science is well established. In particular, a study of Dutch populations before, during and after the Second World War showed how malnutrition or good nutrition of a parent affected the adult height of the offspring, even into the second generation.
>Natural selection in social species differs from non-social species (like foxes, in the article you reference).
No, it doesn't. There is no mechanism for passing on infertility genes. That's the whole point.
Read the article again. The point isn't some "takes a village" social aspect to child rearing. It's that you cannot pass on a gene for not having grandkids if you *don't have any grandkids*, which is precisely what such a gene would have to code for to have the effect you say it would.
>Natural selection isn't about the "individual's fitness" or the individual's propagation. It is about the survival and propagation of the genes. And the gene doesn't care about the individual.
The individual is the sole vehicle for gene replication and propagation. If you don't have fertile offspring and other individuals do, your genes for infertile offspring do not propagate.
>Whatever strategy helps the progeny of the family survive well into their reproductive years helps the gene propagate.
A gene for infertile offspring cannot be selected for!
The fact that you're using a gene-centered view of evolution to defend group selectionism is absolutely bizarre.
Genes are the unit of information that get selected for in evolution.
A gene cannot be replicated past one generation if it codes for something that prevents replication!
Evolution doesn't care about "family". Either other individuals have certain genes or they don't. If your sister has genes for fertile offspring and you have genes for infertile offspring, your sisters non-infertile-offspring genes are the ONLY thing that gets passed on. It doesn't matter if you share most of your genes with your sister. If she doesn't pass on your 'infertility' gene, the infertility gene *does not get passed on*.
It doesn't matter how well a gay aunt or uncle helps his family. An individual with 'infertility' genes cannot pass those genes into more than one generation. Individuals without those genes will pass on their non-infertility genes, even if their sister's infertility genes helped them.
>It has been said, "it takes a village to raise a child." If a doting, helpful and productive gay aunt or uncle makes the survival of his gene-similar family members more likely to grow and live to produce more children,
First of all, putting aside the absurdity of group selectionism, your explanation for this advantage itself makes no sense.
It makes no sense for gays to be produced during times of stress e.g. famine to help the group. A gay baby, child and adult will use an exactly equal amount of resources as a non-gay one up until the non-gay kids has babies of its own. That means the mother is helping the group TWO GENERATIONS LATER. The gay baby is using up the same amount of resources when the famine exists, and it only once they get to child bearing age any 'benefit' can exist, by which time the famine is unlikely to still even exist. And even if the famine still exists, there's no reason evolution would choose to have more kids now rather than later.
If your gay offspring consuming resources is fine because it helps raise its cousins, then why isn't having non-gay kids who have kids of their own fine? They'll consume more resources, but they'll also help raise their cousin's kids too! You're saying one thing is fine in one generation, but it suddenly stops being fine the next generation. And not only that, it's fine in the generation closest to the e.g. famine, but stops being fine only after an entire generation after this original famine has occurred.
Even if there were some mechanism for passing on these genes, it's plain dumb to think that evolution would reward infertility 2 generations out from a source of stress that may no longer be relevant any more than simply having as many fertile offspring as possible. Evolution doesn't work like this.
If we were talking about becoming infertile yourself as a defence against resource overconsumption, that would make sense, because there's a min. But saving resources only when after a bare minimum 13 years have passed from the time that there was a resource shortage is incoherent. Either babies are a resource drain and need to be avoided, or babies grow up to help their family more than the resources they consume. It can't work both ways.
>As for your critique that I state certainties rather than probability, well, that goes without saying, as natural selection is all about probably rather than certainty.
No. That's not it. It's not that natural selection is a probabilitic process. It's that you're stating that an evolutionary mechanism exists, but we don't know if it exists. It's extremely speculative to say it exists. You didn't say "one possible explanation is...", you just said it as if it's an established fact. It's not. Not even close.
>FThe author's labeling of homosexuality (we may as well throw in asexuality while we're at it) as a "targeting error" is a presumption, and ignores the fact that these phenomenon exist in social species from honeybees through penguins to humans.
All kinds of useless or actively harmful traits exist in social animals. It doesn't make them any less useless or harmless.
>Social adults will care for offspring that are not their own, and natural selection selects for this behavior, because in closely related individuals, it passes on essentially the same genes.
Natural selcetion is concerned with individual genes and their replication. "Essentially the same genes" isn't good enough when we're talking about a specific gene existing or not.
If my genes make me infertile, it doesn't matter whether I help my 'essentially the same' family members. If they lack this infertility gene, then the gene will not be passed on and cannot evolve as a group fitness strategy.
Let me be clear: I'm not saying that infertility can't be helpful for the group as a whole. I'm saying that infertility BY DEFINITION cannot be selected for, so no matter how beneficial to the group your infertility genes are, they will not be passed on and so cannot be selected for.
>Finally, there is likely no "gay gene" to either pass on or not. The trait/behavior is not genetic, it is epigenetic. Meaning, it isn't about whether a gene is passed on or not, but whether it is switched on or not.
Even if this is true, and even IF this epigentic trait is passed on, it STILL can't repilcate because people without this epigentic switching will still be selected for and those with it will be selected against. This is true even if it helps the reproduction of those related to you. Infertility *cannot be selected for*, genetically or epigenetically. The more fertile individuals will pass on their more fertile genetics/epigenetics, and the infertile genetics/epigenetics will not be passed on.
>he same prenatal epigenetic switching also is how mothers can pass on to their offspring whether to grow to be small or large, depending on the food supply available to the mother during her lifespan. This science is well established. In particular, a study of Dutch populations before, during and after the Second World War showed how malnutrition or good nutrition of a parent affected the adult height of the offspring, even into the second generation.
This is irrelevant because any analogy between this and gay babies completely breaks down for two important reasons.
1. This switching helps the propagation of this individuals height-switching genetics/epigenetics directly. The switching confers a direct selective advantage to the individual and so the genetics/epigenetics is *selected for*. It doesn't render the individual infertile and therefore by definition incapable of passing on this infertility.
In this case, having short kids *increased the likelihood genetics and epigenetics for short height would be passed on*. Having infertile kids for genetic or epigenetic reasons *eliminates the possibility of it being passed on*. You may help your siblings, but any siblings without these genes/epigenes will be selected for.
Having short kids in this environment increases the chances of your kids being fertile. Having gay kids in this environment greatly reduces the chance of them being fertile. There is no way to select for infertility because by definition you're *preventing the information for this trait being replicated*.
2. This has an effect, and therefore a benefit, from the very first generation. You're proposing some bizarre arrangement where this 'switching' has no benefit in resource savings until the second generation, because it only after one generation when the group population is affected at all. There's no reason evolution would select for something that helps later rather than sooner in response to acute stress experienced during pregnancy.
If resource consuming gay aunts and uncles are beneficial one generation, there's no reason they would stop being beneficial in the following generation. Such infertility can only ever be punished by evolution.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I think we might be talking past each other here, both making valid points, and I'm sorry if I haven't explained mine well enough, because your reply didn't really address or acknowledge what I'm trying to convey. Let me try again briefly, and then we'll call it a day, okay?
1) The latest research is indicating it's likely that there isn't a gay gener, per se, but that we all have within our genes the capability to be tall or short, energetic and slim or prone to store fat, as well as the ability to prefer the company of men or women. The genes for these traits exist in (most/) all of us and all of these genes are passed down together. Which genes are expressed (turned on) is a response to prenatal conditons and in some cases (e.g.the Dutch study) by the life experiences of the parents even before the conception of the offspring in which the genes are expressed.
Prenatal environmental factors are responsible for selecting whether certain genes are expressed. Did you know that in crocodilians, for example, the sex of the offspring isn't determined when the eggs are laid, but by the temperature of the nest? A few degrees difference in temperature changes the ratio of male and female offspring by a large amount (reference you can google). The genes of the offspring don't change in the egg -- they have the potential to be male and female at the same time -- what they become is due to the environment. And even then, not all of them become one or the other, there is still a mix. On an individual basis it's just the probability that changes. But crocs and gators lay eggs, and the environment is outside. The analog in mammals is where the egges develop and grow into individuals -- in utero, and the "environment" is transmitted through the mother's bloodstream, in terms of nutrition levels and hormones.
These epigenetic switches -- where the potential for several options or outcomes are preserved simultaneously in the genes while only one of them is selected based on environmental condidions -- are a very useful evolutionary advantage. They allow an organism to change it's adaptation from one generation to the next, much more quick adaptation than would be possible by selecting for genetic mutations alone. Natural selection for genetic mutations is very slow and can only happen over the course of many generations, and during that time the new trait, being a mutation (which is rare), is only expressed in a small minority -- sometimes just one -- of the offspring. Epigenetic switching, in contrast, is already there in the genes, in every offspring, ready to take effect when the environment calls for it.
Takeaway is that if homosexuality is an epigenetic, rather than a genetic, trait, as the evidence seems to indicate, then there's no "gay gene" to naturally select away due to not reproducing. Instead, the genes for preferring a particular gender, one or the other, already exist in us. It's only which one gets switched on in utero that determines our sexuality.
2) Epigenetic switches don't get "passed on," (as you assert above). They are set by environmental factors, each generation, early in development of the offspring (in the egg or the womb, or sometimes in the gamete (the ovary or the testes, before conception). Being gay, for example, doesn't make one infertile. Many gay men and lesbians have been married and have kids (usually due to societal pressure to conform) before they figure out they're barking up the wrong tree (for them). But these kids are just as likely to be straight as kids of straight parents. And conversely, most parents of gay kids are straight. And even gay individuals who don't have kids aren't infertile in evolutionary terms if there close relatives (99.999% same genes) have kids. And if these gay persons (otherwise nonreproducing adults) help their relatives who do breed to have more kids, and kids who are more fit to find mates of their own and reproduce, then their genes are replicated in greater number than the genes of competing families whose kids are less fit because they and their mother doesn't have that kind of help around.
Takeaway is: it isn't a gay thing, it's a "what kind of assistance the reproducing individual ahs, and how that helps them have more offspring and how it helps those offpreing be more fit to have offspring themselves" thing. It doesn't matter if the helper is a husband who sticks around and supports hie wife and kids, or a grandparent, or an aunt or uncle (gay or not) -- more help means 9on average) more kids and kids who are more fit.
3) Gay folks (and let's throw in grandparents and other nonreproducing adults here, because the same fact applies) don't just "consume resources" that otherwise might go to reproducing adults, causing a detriment to the society in which they live. On average, folks without kids create resources -- (people in a society create resources through the goods and services they produce through their labor, right?) -- and in functional families and societies, these resources are shared with the reproducing adults enabling them to have more and fitter offspring. And that makes these kinds of societies -- let me call them "sharing societies" for short -- ones where nonreproducing members produce surplus resources -- far more surplus than a reproducing family can produce, due to the demands of raising children -- and share these surplus resources with the child-raising families -- produce more fit offspring than societies where the child-raising families must struggle on their own.
That effect -- the benfits of sharing -- are especially magnified when resources are scarce or hard to get. More folks unburdened by children produce more surplus which can then be shared with the reproducing members, making the orffspring more likely to survive, thrive and reproduce. And these reproducing adults are passing on the same genes as their nonreproducing sisters and brothers, Except in the very rare instance where a beneficial genetic mutation arises and is passed on uniquely through the new gene, it's epigenetic switching that does all the adaptive heavy lifting.
At this point I can't explain it any better. I've reached my limit. If you get it, great. If you don't that's fine, too. It's easy to guess from your user name and image what your beliefs are, and that this idea that nonreproducing adults might be evoutionalrily advantageous might be a stretch, requiring you to question some basic assumptions you hold about what it means to be human. I obviously have a different opinion. But it's good to see that we can still discuss the matter respectfully.
Maybe just reconteztualize 'mental illness' as 'sufficient mental and/or emotional suffering to warrant treatment' so we can just move on without stigma.
A fun side effect of your disclaimer: I was curious how bad the sentences were out of context, so I skimmed the post, only read the sentences with Ns and then got distracted and forgot I had this tab open.
Going to read the rest of the article now, though. Definitely won't get distracted this time. Definitely.
"Acting on your desires on someone who doesn't share or can't consent" is a crime. pedophilia is a failure of understanding when your desires shouldn't be acted upon.
It's the same regardless if we're talking about children, animals or grownups that do not consent. We just call it different names.
No. Pedphillia involves attraction to a demographic of people who categorically cannot consent. If you're exclusively attracted to children, then by definition you cannot have consensual sex with anyone you're attracted to. That's what separates it from other modes of sexual orientation in this context. You have a sexual orientation that necessarily cannot be acted upon in a way that doesn't cause social harm, whereas the clear majority of homosexual and heterosexual sex is consensual.
Pedophiles by definition are sexually aroused by sex that is rape. Most homosexual and heterosexual people not only don't commit rape, but importantly in this context, they're not even interested in sex that is rape.
Not really sure where "homosexual and heterosexual sex" comparison came from, those weren't even part of my argument at all. As for everything else - my personal opinion is that difference between "cannot consent" and "doesn't consent" is artificial and unnecessary. Both cases are (arguable the same) crime and should be prosecuted as such.
You can be attracted to whoever and whatever. Ability to NOT act on your desires is one of things that distinguish humans. We should really be better at using it.
If it's not helpful to combine Biological and Apolitical, then let's separate into 2 concepts:
- Homosexuality is a Biological disorder that does not Require Treatment
- Pedophilia is a Biological disorder that does Require Treatment
in which, "Require Treatment" come from our society's concensus (aka politic), which come from various considerations such as technical feasilibity to treat the symptom, the cost-vs-benefit to society, the personal freedom of choice etc...
The question is: Whether marking someone as "Require Treatment" stigmatize them?
The big assumption this article is making is that the DSM or HiTOP or whatever we collectively use to understand mental health disorders decides what is a "mental illness" and therefore what is covered by insurance. This is true in the current system — but the article then goes on to say that a biological and apolitical taxonomy of mental health would not be a good thing because of this. Well maybe it is the current system rather than the biological understanding of mental health that is the problem.
You should probably write "NO" all over these parts of text instead of "N". N's just look like a weird gimmick. NO's , taken out of context, hint that you dissaprove of sentences' meaning, which is true for cases when they are quoted poorly.
I doubt I'm the first person on this ball, but no, the premise of this is incorrect. I'm fine with classing homosexuality as a mental disorder. Just note in the description of it that although technically a disorder of targeting, it almost never causes actual distress and that treatment is therefore contraindicated.
EDIT: Also, preventing stigma is a silly and nonsensical ambition to have in general, and particularly in a dry medical text. Anybody can call anything stigmatizing, heeding that is just a way of yielding power to society's whiniest, which I oppose. And if people really are stigmatizing mental disorders, confront that at the social level, not in the diagnostic manual. (If inclusion in the manual is stigmatizing, surely schizophrenia shouldn't be in there either, or bipolar disorder, or...?)
The point is not that it is a mental disorder. The point is that you cannot call pedophillia a disorder but not homosexuality on the basis of *biology* alone. It is a response to people who think a purely biological approach to classification will prevent things like homosexiality a disorder. You need precisely non-biological aspects to be considered if homosexuality isn't going to be recognised as a disorder.
I feel like you're not picking up what I'm putting down, here. Possibly just because you already had this conversation a few times in the comments and are skipping ahead steps? But my point is, I'm fine with calling both pedophilia and homosexuality disorders on the basis of biology alone, so the problem evaporates. Preventing things like homosexuality from being recognized as disorders is a fool's errand, partially precisely *because* it prevents sensible and rational solutions such as going by biology alone. A correct response to such people is just "you are stupid, we're doing it this way, deal with it".
SO many people here are convinced that homosexuality is a evolutionary strategy.
Putting aside the fact that even if it made sense it would still be simply a speculative hypothesis, it in fact makes no sense for two main reasons.
1. A gene that codes for infertile offspring *cannot possibly be selected for*. Genes are selected for when they get replicated successfully. Infertility by definition prevents replication. There is no mechanism for replicating something that prevents replication.
It doesn't matter if gay aunts and uncles help the group overall. It doesn't matter if you share most of your genes with your non-gay family members. Gay kids as a survival strategy *cannot be passed down*. Even if your group benefits, the ones without the gay-kid genes/epigenes will be selected for, meaning that subseuqent generations will be dominated by genes/epigenes which don't code for infertility. Even if the trait helps the group in one generation, it by definition cannot be passed to subsequent generations and therefore cannot be selected for. Even if the whole group benefits from individuals being infertile, the individuals who are most fertile will necessarily be selected for and the strategy dies out after one generation.
2. It doesn't even make sense as an evolutionary strategy!
If gay babies are made due to stress during pregnancy e.g. a famine, it makes sense to have less kids, not less fertile kids. Infertile kids still consume resources, and so this "strategy" is based on a benefit existing 2 generations after the acute stress was experienced by a pregnant mother.
Gay offspring will consume as much resources as non-gay offspring, so there can only possibly be a resource saving benefit in the second generation when the gay offspring aren't having kids.
Not only is this contradictory in that it says resource-consuming gay aunts and uncles are beneficial in one generation but not the next, it also means that it's better to save resource two generations after a mother experiences famine, rather than the first generation which is closest to the famine.
Evolution is not going to reward this weird delayed infertility that does nothing to save resources for an entire generation after an acute stress is experienced.
Why are resource-consuming uncles beneficial in one generation because they help raise other kids, but the next generation suddenly such people would be a resource drain? Why wouldn't kids of their own have the same benefit even though they're consuming the same amount of resources as their parents (except this time, further away from the famine).
Having shorter kids due to malnutrition makes sense, because there's an immediate resource saving that directly INCREASES the likelihood that this short height gene/epigene gets passed on. But a gene for infertility cannot possibly be propagated regardless of how much it helps your group because it is by definition a gene that prevents its own replication.
All of this positively reeks of ideologically driven people desperately looking for a way for homosexuality not to be a disorder or 'mistake'. I have nothing against gays, but I am completely opposed to people proposing incoherent scientific hypotheses because it suits their ideology better than the alternative. I'm not even saying its a deliberate act of dishonesty. I'm just saying that no smart person would engage in such sloppy thinking if their ideology wasn't getting in the way of them seeing things clearly.
What about classifying pretty much everything as a disorder, and leaving the political and insurance problems outside the classification? Would such classification be useless?
By "everything" I mean not just "pedophilia" or "homosexuality", but also any fetishes, and even "having sex not for procreation", or any "being dysphoric in own body".
This post continues Scotts tradition of having jarringly different Ideas about what relationship categories have to truth than me. Scott is of the opinion that categories are just word games and that technocrats should be able to shift their borders are any time to maximize public utility. Being rhetorically gifted as he is he describes this position well. There is no natural force that decides whether whales are fish or some other category so we ought to define fish however this best serves us. It's a difficult position to assail. And yet...
I think firstly that there is such a thing as a natural category. These are things people can intuit about the territory, like canyons etched by the simple combined implications of gravity causing water to flow down hill and precipitation taking that water back uphill. This forms natural borders between things. Creatures capable of flight are an intuitively useful category, people use it for things like determining if a wall is going to keep that creature out. This kind of category cannot and will not bend to our word games. We may call it something different or create new categories that mostly but don't exactly match this category(maybe you'd like to include or exclude insects based on some further need) but the natural category remains.
What people want out of things like the DSM is for it to have as its first goal to reflect a natural category. And there are a few options here, I think whether we pick a natural category that includes or excludes homosexuality is an important debate that could go either way. But it should be about which category to pick, not whether we should shift between different categorical systems from line to line. Because if you're switching up the justifying for inclusion from one definition to the next the actually underlying category is just "Whatever I find expedient" which is a maximally bad fit for a document meant to describe reality. It makes a farse of the whole project and in the end it turns the DSM into just another locus of power in the culture war with no more legitimacy than a piece of paper that says "I do what I want".
"Creatures capable of flight are an intuitively useful category, people use it for things like determining if a wall is going to keep that creature out. This kind of category cannot and will not bend to our word games. We may call it something different or create new categories that mostly but don't exactly match this category(maybe you'd like to include or exclude insects based on some further need) but the natural category remains."
But we don't actually have a term for creatures capable of flight! We have the term "bird," which refers to warm-blooded vertebrates with wings, feathers, and a beak. The vast majority of them can fly, but there are some bird species that can't. And there are also some creatures that can fly but aren't birds, such as bats. If you lived in an area that had no birds but still had a large bat population, it would be very foolish to say "don't worry, there aren't any birds in this region, so nothing will be able to fly over this wall." And if you lived in an area where the only birds were ostriches, it would be equally foolish to say "we shouldn't even bother trying to build a wall, those birds will just fly over it anyway."
Yet at the same time, we shouldn't just change the meaning of "bird" to include bats and exclude ostriches. "Bird" is a useful biological category. If there was a deadly virus that was killing off birds, then it would be an enormous mistake to say "these ostriches can't fly so they'll be fine, no need to take any precautions with them," or to say "we need to devote a ton of resources to protecting the bats around here, otherwise this disease might completely wipe them out." Scott was never arguing that categories were entirely arbitrary with no basis in the real world whatsoever; he was arguing that how we choose to categorize things is highly dependent on our practical reasons for wanting to categorize them in the first place.
But all of these categories you're talking about are also natural categories so I'm not sure you've addressed my point. I agree we utilize several different categories to refer to subgroups of volants. But we don't, with some Californian bee exceptions which I also oppose, just throw things into the bird category for political expedience. We don't allow and would be highly suspicious of a proposal to add tigers to the bird category on the grounds it would have huge tax benefits to that tiger king fellow. Scott's post argues that no, in fact we don't want a consistent biological category or avian because then all of our weird tax lookpholes won't work anymore, and I'm over here hoping we kill the tax loop holes and very much being in favor of a strict avian category being able to exist.
I don't remember Scott saying anything about how we should categorize Tigers as Birds for their tax benefits. I think he might have been talking about something entirely different.
> What people want out of things like the DSM is for it to have as its first goal to reflect a natural category.
The problem is that people want different things from the DSM, which are in conflict. From my perspective, the question whether something is an mental illness/disability is separate from the question whether we want to treat it, which is separate from the question whether we want to make special acommodations, etc. Asperger's and homosexuality are limiting in some ways and in some contexts it can be useful to regard them as mental aberrations that require a form of consideration/help/whatever, but they also unrestrict people in certain ways and can be seen as valid ways of existing.
Of course, the exact same has been argued by some when it comes to pedophilia. Ultimately, it is hard to deny that the perception of harm done to others plays a major role in what is seen as acceptable and thus what people want to get rid of, by treatment.
Ultimately, what is unfortunate is that there is great power in pretending to be objective. In general, I think that a lot of power plays are justified by appealing to an objective good, which is used to cloak personal preferences and specific interests as things that cannot legitimately be opposed.
There us no rule that we have to have only one list. If you know anything about relational databases this problem us like thinking we can't have one to many relationships because we have made the poor decision to store everything in one flat table.
My argument is that this is in no way an impossibility, it is a choice. And it is a choice which gives more power to certain people than if you make a different choice, so there are reasons why people don't actually want to change it to expose what political choices are actually made.
There is a lot of power in presenting subjective choices as objective truth, because then dissent can be dismissed as anti-science, anti-establishment or such, rather than having to defend the actual choices.
I'm very confused. I thought biological and psychological were used as counterpart- and sometimes opposite- terms, where psychological areas are classified primarily by personal accounts and functionality in society even if the underlying biological causes have been partially identified. Given that, what does a purely biological psychological disorder mean?? Doesn't Scott, as a psychiatrist, look at a little checklist ten times a week about how much mental states are effecting the ability to function in day-to-day life to determine level of order or disorder?
Given that, it feels incredibly disingenuous to say "don't quote me out of context for saying these two topics are not functionally different, but also they're not functionally different only politically different." Is there a reason the resulting actions from expressing mental states with or against other people isn't being measured as a type of functionality here? I would think a consensual action that doesn't harm another person could be called more functional than a nonconsensual action that does harm another person & thus results in said person needing mental and/or physical treatment to be well/successful. That's simply a measurement: that's as apolitical as it gets.
(And given this straightforward way of measuring, it makes perfect sense to me to say "severe distress causing depression, discomfort, self-harm, etc. from untreated dysphoria results in low functionality and therefor is a disorder" and "a person that doesn't currently experience severe distress and happens to be wearing a dress doesn't result in low functionality therefor it is not a disorder". That's very simple logic, not some type of mess of caveats.)
This feels like a weirdly unconstructive article for such a charged topic.
The entire idea that any illness should be treated if a treatment exists and no treatment may be done absent an illness, consists of bureaucrats/technocrats trying to force a multi-faceted and complex question into an objective measurement. But no one likes the outcome of any objective measurement, which cannot capture the actual nuances and factors that exist, so then they covertly introduce politics into the objective measurement or slyly use the measurement differently in some cases.
If you look at the legal system, then they are much more sane (than healthcare) by not simply jailing everyone with aberrant behavior, but actually judging the impact on others and the acceptability to society, not based on a 'objective' standard, but based on a standard that is recognized as being political.
Could we not do some magic and label body dysphoria as a bodily disorder rather than a mental one? (If it really is a disconnect btwn mind and body, but -maybe politically- we choose the mind part to be truer?)
I'd still prefer to imagine an ideal body of law with which we can base a taxonomy off of. In that case, the society- gov and moral conscious included- is like the environment for which a trait is best adapted for. I'm really only stuck on this because I'm sad to have to say that concepts can't be organized logically, and let non rationalists win :(.
also, from a collectivist perspective, pedophilia is still much more of a disbenefit if it causes harm to others, unlike queerness. One might respond that evolutionarily it only matters to have an individualist perspective; not so if the gene is spread among the population.
, it clusters with most other mental disorders . So if we are interested in the scientific project of identifying natural kinds, there is an obvious candidate for the meaning of “mental disorder” , that includes homosexuality. Obviously this a verbal dispute and nothing FORCES us to give “mental disorder” this meaning, but it seems like a fairly natural category we’d probably want a name for anyway.
Now, for me, it’s not that classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder is necessarily “stigmatizing”, more that it may come with the presumption that it is somehow irrational not to mind being homosexual, or that if it were possible I would be mistaken in not becoming heterosexual. This is simply mistaken. There is a very wide range of rationally permissible preferences. As long as I don’t have to deal with annoying paternalists who think they know better than me how I should want my mind to be, I don’t really care if people call homosexuality a disorder.
Yes there are certain respects in which being homosexual makes someone worse off. So it is better for people not to be gay in the first place. But people tend to intrinsically value certain kinds of psychological integrity, and a change in sexual orientation violates that for many people.
An AGI future seems more plausible than an embryo selection future. So biology and culture war considerations are less interesting to me than more abstract questions about people’s value systems. In a posthuman world, if all goes well, being homosexual likely won’t come with any negatives at all. I suspect the future trajectory of conditions like anxiety and depression to look very different from that of homosexuality.
I largely like and agree with this post. I think the post’s comparison of pedophilia and homosexuality is debatable, but plausible, and certainly not unreasonable, and I won’t comment further on it. But I am bothered by the comments—not because many of them advocate ideas that are false, unreasonable, and harmful (though many of them *do*), but rather because they are mostly repeating debates that have already happened at a MUCH higher quality elsewhere, and it sure looks like nobody has mentioned this fact in over 1,000 comments.
VERY well-developed versions of these same debates have already been taking place for DECADES—in fields such as philosophy of medicine, philosophy of psychiatry, and sociology. I’ve skimmed hundreds of comments in this thread, and only a few people have mentioned any of the relevant literature. A few people have mentioned Szasz (though not so much his critics, who are possibly even more important!), and a grand total of one (1) person (singular!) has mentioned Jerome Wakefield, and not much else has been brought up.
I hate people who dismiss everyone else’s ideas by saying “Read the literature!” because this sort of comment is generally condescending and unhelpful. But I’m going to do it. Please read the literature. At least a little bit of it. Or at least become aware that it exists. For starters, I recommend glancing over the following SEP articles—
These articles provide decent overviews of, and extensive sources for, many of the debates being brought up again and again in the comments here. For one thing, look at the section 8 “Values and Mental Disorder” in the “Mental Disorder (Illness)” article. And for more generic discussion that I think can help reduce diseased thinking about disease, there’s also the following—
I don’t mean to endorse all the literature cited in these articles, or the articles themselves, in their entirety. They’re summary overviews with their own biases in what they cover and how they cover it. My point is more that they illustrate how these topics have been discussed extensively and for a long time, and at a high level of complexity—covering a great many topics discussed here, and doing so in a thoughtful and well-developed way. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel alone here. There is a cumulative tradition and set of communities and epistemic practices—resources of arguments, paradigms, theories, and criticisms, for copious object-level and meta-level issues here! There are specialist discourses on these topics that are worth engaging with, replete with useful conceptual distinctions and theoretical arguments which can be examined, adopted, rejected, criticized, and modified, for purposes of enriching the inquiry.
There is also, of course, a lot of meta-level debate over whether physical disorders are basically the same kind of thing as mental disorders, and/or whether we should engage in classification similarly or differently in these two areas.
The most notorious philosopher of mental illness might be Thomas Szasz, who advocates an extreme skepticism about mental disorders altogether. I’m pretty sure Scott is very much an anti-Szaszian. Szasz’s arguments probably don’t successfully apply to some more recent theories of mental disorders, so a lot of his ideas have been superseded. Hanna Pickard (a philosopher and psychotherapist) has defended a neo-Szaszian view in her book-chapter “Mental Illness is Indeed a Myth,” but she still shows that Szasz’s particular arguments and version of his theory were incorrect.
In the rest of this comment, I’ll discuss two anti-Szaszian theories of mental disorder (or disease more broadly, which is related) which I’ll discuss because I’m familiar with them and consider them fruitful to explore to improve the discourse. The first is a unified theory (Jerome Wakefield) which is realist and attempts to track the commonsense concept of disease or disorder. The second is a pluralist and pragmatist theory (Quill Kukla)—which I actually think closely resembles Scott’s revisionary pragmatist account given in “Diseased Thinking: Dissolving Questions about Disease.”
One major theorist is Jerome Wakefield (no relation to the anti-vax guy), known for his “Harmful Dysfunction” Analysis of mental disorder (HDA). (I’m pretty sure Wakefield also thinks the HDA is true of physical disorder, but he focuses mainly on mental disorder.) The HDA attempts to combine the need for a “biological” component (“dysfunction,” here a neutral term for, roughly, a failure of some bodily or mental element to perform its adapted evolutionary function) and a “normative” component (“harm”).
The HDA is supposed to apply to both physical and mental disorders. Wakefield has also compellingly argued that not all mental disorders are identical to, nor caused by, physical disorders. There can be mental disorder without (say) brain disorder. Nevertheless, this does not commit him to any kind of mind-body dualism. It is rather similar to how there can be software malfunctions even in the absence of hardware malfunctions, yet without any metaphysically dubious dualism that would say the software is a soul or anything like that. On this, see Wakefield’s article “Addiction and the Concept of Disorder, Part 2: Is every Mental Disorder a Brain Disorder?”
Not all harmful conditions are medical disorders at all, so something like a “dysfunction” component seems needed. But not all failures to perform evolutionary functions are bad, and (arguably!) it is misleading to call something a mental disorder if it is not at all bad—so something like a “harm” component seems needed. These statements are, of course, controversial.
Still, the HDA, or some variant of it, clearly has the ability to clarify a lot of the confusions that are messing up people’s thinking in some of the comments below Scott’s post—at the very least, by providing a body of empirically informed & logically rigorous argumentation and theory that can provide the basis for further discourse and debate! I think it should also disillusion some people of some beliefs they are highly confident in.
For example, some people in the thread have claimed it is “obvious” that homosexuality is a mental disorder, and that sheer political correctness is the only thing that prevents experts from admitting this fact. But really it is far from obvious that homosexuality is (or isn’t) a mental disorder—insofar as [1] it is far from obvious whether Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction account is correct or incorrect, and [2] it is unclear whether the HDA would imply that homosexuality is a disorder, because [2A] it is unclear whether homosexuality is a “dysfunction” in the right kind of evolutionary way; and [2B] the harm associated with homosexuality is caused by homophobia rather than homosexuality itself, and it is not entirely clear whether Wakefield’s analysis allows or disallows such extrinsically-caused harm to count as the right kind of harm to make a “dysfunction” qualify as a “disorder”.
Of course, the HDA has problems, and there is a lot of debate over it, and many theorists disagree with it. For an extensive recent anthology of chapters by Wakefield and fellow scholars who disagree with various aspects of his theory, see “Defining Mental Disorder: Wakefield and His Critics.” I haven't read much of it yet, beyond the intro chapter, but it looks fantastic and seems to be entirely open-access.
Whether correct or incorrect (or some combination of both), the HDA is the kind of nuanced way of thinking about mental disorder that stands a chance of pushing the conversation forward. The discourse around the HDA is, to some extent, a better version of the discourse people in this comment thread are attempting to engage in. For a 20-page overview of the sorts of issues discussed in the anthology, see its introductory chapter here: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5015/chapter/2812043/Introduction
The DSM itself, and organizations such as the APA, also have various discussions on these topics, and there’s overlap and cross-pollination between these discussions and the literatures I’ve mentioned. Some of this is also discussed in the Wakefield anthology.
More broadly, in the related academic literatures, there have already been myriad debates on topics such as (1) what is even the point of having a category of “mental disorder,” and (2) what criteria (if any) for “mental disorder” classification would avoid both over-inclusiveness and under-inclusiveness? Many (and perhaps all) proposed criteria seem to either [A] include things that shouldn’t be included, or [B] fail to include things that should be included, as instances of mental disorder.
Also relatedly, there’s a debate over whether [A] we should define “disorder” such that a disorder is always bad (in at least some way) by definition, or if instead [B] we should define “disorder” neutrally such that there can be disorders that are not bad at all. Perhaps a mental disorder is usually bad but not necessarily. There are pros and cons to each one. If a “disorder” must be bad by definition, then this may make it a less scientifically objective classification than people believe it is—and admitting it isn't scientifically objective may be problematically revisionary. On the other hand, if a “disorder” can be neutral or good, then this may clash with the commonsense concept of “disorder,” so it may also be problematically revisionary. I personally think commonsense thinking about “disorder” is fundamentally confused on many levels—so, as a result, I suspect *any* plausible account of “disorder” (if we should even keep the concept, which is also debatable) will be revisionary and counterintuitive to at least some degree.
As I interpret him, the view Scott defends in “Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease” is, roughly, X is a mental disorder *because* it responds well to “medical” treatment (which, in mental disorder, I assume means something like “medication and/or counseling”). Or rather, we should call it a “disease” on the grounds that by doing so, we will assist the appropriate response of medical treatment. The appropriateness of treatment is in turn determined at least partly by the presence or absence of the various contributory qualities given in the post’s node diagram, which are connected to the ‘hidden inferences’ encouraged by the use of the “disease” concept. Pardon me if this isn't quite a faithful summary.
I think something like this is a plausible analysis, and one which is an interesting rival to the Wakefield view. (Scott also connects his analysis of disease to something like hard determinism and an instrumentalist or consequentialist account of warranted blame, but I don’t think these further notions are necessary for the core of his analysis.) Notably, Scott’s view is revisionary, I think, because it looks like the reverse of the commonsense view. I think the commonsense view is basically that X responds well to medical treatment because it is a disorder. By contrast, Scott seems to think X is (something we should define as) a mental disorder because it responds well to medical treatment. This isn't necessarily a problem though, since again I think *any* plausible account will be revisionary, since commonsense is kind of busted on this topic.
Finally, I will also note there are some analyses similar to Scott’s analysis in the literature as well, such as Quill Kukla’s account of “disease” (which is at least similar to “disorder”).
Kukla’s account, and Scott’s account, are both broadly pragmatist—they both say we (morally) should define “disease” in a manner that is sensitive to the humanitarian consequences of making such a classification. Kukla’s version helpfully addresses the diverse and contradictory rationales for why people are interested in “disease” concepts. As a result, Kukla’s analysis is explicitly pluralistic, claiming (I think correctly) that some conditions will be properly categorized as diseases only in some contexts and not in other contexts. But I think this position accords well with the spirit of Scott’s other work in conceptual analysis, such as in his post “The Categories were Made for Man, not Man for the Categories.”
As a final note, I’ll also mention that there’s debate over the constellation of similar terms here, such as “disorder,” “disease,” “health condition,” “pathology,” and “illness,” among other similar or related terms such as “disability” (which is associated with yet more layers of controversy). And there is a variety of practices on whether some these are identical or distinct categories (some of which I think is arbitrary semantics, and some of which I think is substantive). Kukla alludes to this in a footnote.
Anyway, that’s about all I have to day on this for now. I highly recommend people interested in these topics check out some of these sources, and the broader tradition of scholarship surrounding them.
I understand how most of the N'd sentences would sound bad without context, but one stood out to me.
"... it’s N important N for N your N sexual N partners N to N be N able N to N consent." At the very least, this particular clause seems quite safe to quote without context, and overall the whole N'd section prior also seems far more safe than all the other N'd sentences.
Good point on the general principle, but wrong on the specifics. Just as with homosexuality back in the day (pre-Hooker), most research on pedophilia uses hopelessly biased clinical and forensic samples, while statistical analysis of what good data exist shows that in the absence of coercion, negative outcomes are associated with social stigma and condemnation rather than with the contacts/relationships themselves.
What's significant in this article, but not mentioned, is the preponderance of homosexual males who are sexually attracted to boys or to teenagers. Pederasts. The youngster may be able to 'give consent' (especially if the youth believes that he *is* a homosexual) but the law says that an adult can't engage in sexual behaviour with underage boys without suffering some punishment if caught and convicted of so doing. The link between homosexuality and pederasty and paedophilia is not only linked in a diagnostic sense but is also subject to the same kind of consideration of 'politics'. For me, I'd say, 'to hell' with worrying unduly about 'stigmatising' homosexuality and homosexuals; get it on a list of mental illnesses so that parents and public bodies can lawfully keep kids away from being corrupted.
"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.
"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.
>There are distinct claims I make: homosexuality has an evolutionary fitness advantage. Pedophillia has no evolutionary fitness advantage.
How does that translate to "They aren't the same thing from a purely biological standpoint" ? Whether something is advantageous or not has nothing to do with whether it's nature or nurture (or politics).
>I am not taking a stance on morality.
You expressing concern about "Far right" people reading Scott's blog and agreeing with those things make me somewhat skeptical that you're completely value-neutral.
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.
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.
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.
>"Homosexuals are pedophilles grooming your children" is right now, at this moment, spreading among the far-right.
There is a thousand thousand "Drag Show for Kids" and similar trends on twitter and tiktok already to fuel this, so I don't think the people who want to paint homosexuals as pedophilles are really in a deseprate want.
>He is of course opposed to negative coverage in large media outlets, and feels slighted by the NYT in particular. I do not care about that, and nobody really should.
Why ? I actually *do* really care about doxxing and the unfair treatment of ordinary people by those who wield a public pen. Scott is fortunately not exactly without power, but even he got his life intensely disrupted by the NYT. It sounds really tactless to say """Meh, so he quit his job and spent a year or so recalculating his entire lifestyle **Yawn** so what ?""". To say nothing of the countless people who got their life disrupted an order of magnitude worse and had nothing to do about it.
In contrast, I actually don't give the slightest shit about the latest panic about people equating homosexuality with paedophilia, 99% of it self-inflicted.
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.
The thing is, the word "harmful" here is doing an aweful amount of (undeserved) work. Comparing gays to paedophiles is not any more harmful than, say, (1) comparing right-wing advocates to facists, (2) comparing anti-abortion advocates to Al-Qaeda terrorists ("y'all Qaeda"), or (3) comparing parents concerned about their children's education (whether rightly or wrongly) to domestic terrorists.
Every single one of those groups rejects the comparison, every comparison is derogatory as well as violence-suggesting (what do you do to fascists or terrorists except spraying them with bullets ?), and yet I have never seen any objection to them from the same people who see comparing gays to paedophiles as beyond the pale.
Love it or hate it, you can say anything on the Internet. The entire success mythos of progressive ideology is that it started as a radical sect that initially parasitized the University institution then spread on to the Internet, becoming super-charged by the new medium's global interconnectivity. Feminists spent entire decades and several server farms to rage on men and their various behaviours and traits, comparing them to various repulsive and dehumanizing things in the process.
So it rings a bit hollow if, after all of this, after 40+ years of wokes\progressives freely dehumanizing their opponents and 20+ years of doing it on the internet, it's suddenly a crime to compare gays to paedophiles. Where was this decency when "Facist" was and is used to denote anyone who thinks "Woman" should only mean "Adult Human Female" ? Nowhere to be seen, as far as I can tell.
TL,DR; Meh, comparing gays to paedophiles is no big deal, and is no worse than what most movements on the side of gays themselves do.
>(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!
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.
--------------------
[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/
You're literally suggesting being a cuck and supporting the bloodline of competing males was an advantageous strategy and that's why homosexuality exists?
The math doesn't even close to work out, how do you propose this altruistic behavior actually evolved?
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.
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!
>or screaming for the family to be abolished
What's wrong with that? Are you against free speech?
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.
Where did you get your statistic that torture often works?
Bruce Schneier, whose job I suspect requires him to know, makes the opposite claim. I doubt torture works like regular people think it works.
The only reason it persists is to satisfy the sadistic nature of humans who have an out-group in their custody.
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.
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.
> 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.
That said, I do feel a ***tiny*** bit suspicious when the exact same people who say this then go ahead and appear Extremly Keen on teaching materials and storytelling that advertises and describes homosexuality in vivid details in schools.
Most of the time, the stated purpose is "So the gay kids don't feel like they don't belong", and this sounds like something very noble..... that a school shouldn't touch with 1000-kilometer pole unless in a sex ed class. (the material in which is approved through the various channels by lawmakers and parents, or their proxies) If *parents* themselves want their gay kids to feel like they don't belong, then you have a far bigger problem not fit to be solved with moral grandstanding and "My Way Or The Highway" thinking that those people often display.
Sometimes, those people slip and say their explicit purpose is "Normalizing" gay relationships, and at this point, I have to very politely ask "What is 'Normalization' exactly ? and how - when done to kids or early teenagers who can't think critically enough - is it that different from an accusation of 'grooming' ?"
(And 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.)
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.
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".
There is no straight agenda because people don't set out to include straight relationships in things deliberately. No one actually unironically says "I want to 'de-stigmatize' \'normalize' man-woman love, so I will include those 2 characters in my show for no other reason but to tell people how progressive I am and how much woman-man love is so much better". Do tell me if someone actually says that.
It's difficult to access one's inner judgements, but I suspect that I actually have no problem with gay relationships per se in kid's material or schools, or perhaps I have a small problem that is not enough to make me really oppose it.
But what's extremly creepy and unsettling about the modern LGBT++ movement is the cheery attitude of "We're Going To Plan Things From The Very Start To Include Gay Things, And Your Kids Are Going To Love It". What's extremly creepy is dressing like a drag queen and performing in a kids' event. I would be very curious to see what's your straight equivalent of that, or of a book that depicts oral sex between 2 character that is included in a public school's library. It looks like the strawman version of the gay advocate that resides in (e.g.) Muslims' heads, except it's actually true. And it makes hollow every promise of "Guys, we're definitely not going to glorify or teach homosexuality" that gay advocates have made since the 1990s or so.
If you don't like being accused of having an agenda, maybe... you know, just don't have an 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.
> 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?"
Both.
An example of the first category that I know of is a book like Gender Queer.
But the second category is also something I don't like. 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". With gay relationships, you're cornered by the fact that 2 gay people *don't* get together to make a child, so you're forced to either be incredibly vague about what's really happening or just lie, neither seems to be a good solution to me.
>Every book with a romantic subplot describes heterosexual relationships in vivid detail
Like I said, I don't think the 2 kinds of relationships are symmetric.
I will also modify my original reference to "Teaching materials and storytelling" to include the spoken words of teachers themselves, not just written printed materials.
>If you had a rule of not letting anyone talk about who they had a crush on
I mean, this rule already exists, it's just a vanilla part of being a decent teacher. I was talking about teachers and what they are allowed and not allowed to say or teach. I would **definitely** be suspicious as hell if a teacher is telling the kids about his or her crushes. One or two jokes are okay, but making it a consistent topic seems a bit off.
>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!
>Why do you have to talk about babies, rather than romance?
I can, but will pre-adolescents understand it ? I don't think they would. Babies (through the implicit reference of marriage) serve as a convenient euphemism for sex, one that you can trick a child into accepting as an answer.
Will a pre-adolescent understand romance as a distinct type of love ? How would they distinguish between it and vanilla friendships ?
>Two men who love each other like your mommy and daddy do
But this is the entire point, 2 men are not like mommy and daddy, mommy and daddy are a woman and a man. Am I getting hung up on a difference that pre-adolescent will not care about ? It seems to me like it's a pretty big deal.
>since "normalizing talking about these things" applies as much or more to kids talking to each other.
And in this case I have 0 problems with it.
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.
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 think it actually fails miserably in this goal, and that furthermore it naively misunderstands the Abrahamic religions' point of view.
From the POV of Abrahamic religions, everything God creates is a test, He is the sort of asshole prankster who creates you with a desire to bed men then tells you you're going to a raging hell if you ever so much as think of doing so. A follower of those religions already believes that and has absolutely no problems with it, since God already did multiple things of that sort to them. A Muslim is already born to desire food and drink very much, yet Allah says that they're supposed to abstain 10-15 hours each day for a month, no reason, just to demonstrate their allegiance to Him.
So if a homosexual says "I was born this way", the Abrahamic religion follower would just reply "So what ? I was born with tons of desires and tendencies that God also tells me are a sin, and I try to comply as much as I can. I sometimes fail, but I never go as far as arguing that my failings be tolerated or even celebrated as equals to their opposites."
Theologians have differed on what exactly makes the Abrahamic God such an asshole, whether the various tests He makes up are really intrinsically "ethical" in a way that benefits us, or whether He literally just does it beacuse He feels like it. But the vast majority of rank and file believers model God as a sort of stern father : He doesn't give a shit about what you think is or is not fair, He doesn't give a shit about what you think is the correct course of action, He is to command and you're to obey His command.
It seems hopelessly naive to try to reason about such a model with "Well, is God so cruel so as to create me with lust for men and tells me I'm going to hell for indulging it ?", the unironic and straightforward answer is "Yes", He *is* in fact exactly that cruel (or appears to be), and you should shut up and follow His rules regardless of anything you empirically see in the world or believe in your head.
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.
>brute-forcing the names of God
and my bookshelf grows ever longer
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.
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.
Competing for mates isn't easy, especially as a man. People saying exclusively gay men would be just as reproductively successful have to give some serious proof.
I like Robin Hanson's explanation for falling fertility as being the product of evolution encoding absolute wealth as the sign that you should have fewer kids and invest more per kid with the hopes that one kid becomes king and thereby you have lots of grand kids, when in reality it should have encoded relative wealth as that is what determines your child's chances of being king, but since most humans throughout history were dirt poor absolute wealth was a good enough proxy for chances of having a child be king. It seems to me a better explanation for the relationship between income and fertility than the classic Gary Becker - Jacob Mincer explanation of increasing opportunity cost and quality and quantity trade-off of children.
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.
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.
> but unethical to act on it.
Ethics is purely subjective, you should stick to talking about facts.
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.
Weird. I swear it was on SSC a few years ago I read that the latest theory on homosexuality was that there is a "really really REALLY likes men" heritable trait, and that sisters of gay men tend to have lots of partners with the obvious follow-on of lots of children.
So the gay men are just getting the same trait as their sisters: they really like sex with men.
Then whoever wrote this thing that I was reading was concerned, since it didn't seem like the same sort of mechanism could explain lesbianism.
All this just hazy memory, obviously at least partially incorrect, so take it with all those usual salt grains.
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.
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.
>Someone called me?
Or took the square root of -1.0, which invites you whether you want it or not.
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 would consider this an obvious mental illness (women getting higher education and not dedicating themselves to their biological imperative) and it's causing society to collapse with women not having enough children.
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.
> a soldier who manages to do a lot of raping of women in conquered territories... none of them are morally desirable.
what a load of nonsense, this is what most men proudly did throughout all of human history
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".
Sometimes things are spandrals, sometimes they aren't.
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.
Not exactly addressing the point, but some thoughts:
If I could use gene editing to modify embryos of my future offspring, I think I would select against every mental disorder if possible.
I think that transgender people and pedophiles have more difficulty lives.
If given the decision between homosexual and heterosexual, I would choose for my offspring to be heterosexual. I think even many homosexuals would do the same, although I’m not certain of that.
If conversion therapy from homosexual to heterosexual were painless and possible, I would think insurance should subsidize it.
I don’t think homosexuality is immoral but I don’t think being anxious and depressed is immoral. It’s just I wouldn’t want to be those things and most people wouldn’t either. It seems to reduce quality of life.
Although this is kind of “word games” of a sort and there aren’t good exact definitions of ordinary language.
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.
>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'd expect most parents to edit their offspring to be bisexual." What? MOST?
In a world where reproduction is done by selection from drop-down menus and homophobia is a cultural memory like dying of gangrene?
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?
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 one uses the criterion of hurting others, it surely hurts others, genes be damned
You're so confident about this, but a lot of hysteria around the topic is actually a recent invention. If anything is a social construct, it's the modern hysteria around and redefinition of the concept of "rape", which has not been about "consent" historically.
It takes two to tango, forced copulation only works if the female also evolves to reward it, and they often do, since it's one way to make the male proves its fitness.
“ 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.
But I Do Want A Purely Biological, Apolitical Taxonomy Of Mental Disorders, now I'm pretty unusual in this respect but that's fine with me. I haven't actually read Thomas Szasz but this seems to get at a similar point (he made lots of points) he was making (and maybe Caplan), that is in the public conscious the term mental disorder has been too medicalized that is it carries the same sort of weight/sense as medical disorders as opposed to being explicitly there for pragmatic purposes such as social control. Not sure if this is a correct interpretation of Szasz but I recall him saying something similar in a interview. Personally I think a lot of people conceive of mental disorders in a way similar to evil spirits in the mind (sort of abstract maybe physical like entities, similar in some respects to many Platonist or realist positions in philosophy). I think a lot of people would object to this characterisation but it's the general sense I've gotten looking at people, a good example in my personal life would be when my school counsellor told me that the WHO just classified gaming disorder as a thing (something she and others thought I had), her reaction seemed not to be consistent with the view that the WHO thinks gaming disorder is a new social problem that needs to be tackled or something similar rather her reaction seemed more consistent with the view that the WHO after doing extensive research discovered some part of (or thing in) the brain that proved gaming disorder was a real thing. For her I was not just a child with unusual and perhaps counterproductive habits/preferences rather I had this thing in my mind that had been suspected to exist and had recently been discovered to exist, that needed to be removed/fixed. I should also add that I don't think pedophilia in the contemporary ordinary language meaning of the term is a "targeting error" that is it seems to be not only consistent with but a fairly obvious prediction of evolution by natural selection. Of course with respects to the technical meaning of the term that is, a strong persistent or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent individuals, the view that this is a targeting error seems very likely but of course basically no one uses the word pedophile like this and the broadening of the term is only increasing over time.
I should clarify that the first sentence is mostly separate from everything else, but to elaborate further, yes I actually want to "call a bunch of perfectly fine things that don’t deserve any stigma “mental disorders”, and make everyone mad at you, and have everyone end up thinking you’re even more political than the DSM." I personally care more about modelling the world for pragmatic purposes than what others would think of my model, also I need not share my model of the world and so most of the backlash can easily be avoided in everyday life.
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.
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.
at least going off of Michael Seto's given age ranges mesophilia (40s-50s) in men is a targeting error and perhaps even the later parts of teleiophilia (20s-30s) and obviously nepiophilia (toddlers), none are in the DSM but perhaps there are pragmatic reasons to consider them disorders, although I think broadly defining that which is a disorder as that which is evolutionarily harmful probably doesn't make much sense especially when you realize that which is evolutionarily beneficial changes across time and culture. Although it would be pretty funny to declare men who are NOT psychopathic hebephiliac polygynous rapists optimising for gene pool influence as mentally disordered. As for the political aspect of what gets put in the DSM, the controversy between Richard Green, Ray Blanchard, James Cantor and the authors of Rind et al. might be a interesting read.
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.
Ah - the evolutionary case for pedastry as origin of homosexuality, i.e. grooming young males to remove them from competition.
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.
It could be worth exploring exactly why can't they be treated just like any other stressed person.
We don't treat the depressed victims of racism by giving medications to change pigmentation or encourage them to change their name (or abandon culture) if the discrimination is based on ethnicity/ancestry/culture. We also don't tell someone who has some issues with having two arms to cut off their arms. Depressed short people should wear stilts? Depressed gingers should dye hair? On the other hand, depressed bald people - wigs, hair growth treatments?
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.
The explanation for homosexuality I’ve found most interesting is that the combination of genes and in utero hormone exposure that cause homosexuality at the extreme, lead to higher reproductive success at lower levels. For example, if your goal was to have as many surviving defendants as possible, would you trade a 3% chance of a child being gay if it came with a 6% increase in the rate of your children reaching adulthood - assuming the world that held for most of human history where child mortality was extremely high.
Do you have a pointer for more about this theory? It's not obvious to me how the survival advantage would work. Would the same mechanism also produce 3% of individuals who are aggressively anti-homosexuality and react with violence to try to suppress any evidence of its existence?
I’ll try and find a good summary. As a thought experiment (not an actual theory I don’t think) consider that testosterone is immunosuppressive. If a gene mutation occurred that reduced one’s susceptibility to the immunosuppressive effects of testosterone that could result in increased survival for you and your offspring. But, as is often the case, the gene that causes a benefit can, under the right circumstances have a negative impact. One could imagine that the gene that mitigates against the immunosuppressive nature of testosterone could also interfere with other aspects of hormonal influence under the right circumstances. Evolutionarily a gene that increased immune strength that resulted in 6% greater survival overall would propagate even if it resulted in homosexuality 3%.
And again, just a thought experiment.
You find it "interesting", but is it plausible something like that would evolve?
Sure it’s plausible. As we find out more about genetics we find more and more examples of genes that provide a benefit coming with an evolutionary cost. The most well know example of this is sickle cell disease. Having the sickle cell trait provides protection against malaria. But in 0.2% of those who have the sickle cell trait it progresses to sickle cell disease.
Malaria is an unusually impactful & recent disease. We can also clearly see the genes for protecting against it. There's no proposed pathogen whatever imaginary (GWAS hasn't found it, and we already knew concordance was low as one should have expected a priori) "gay gene" is supposed to protect against.
"You would wonder about heterozygote advantage, something like sickle-cell. But you would learn that you need a big advantage in order to generate a high frequency of a trait that reduced fitness so much – and big advantages are hard to find. The only known cases of such strong heterozygote advantage in humans are all defenses against falciparum malaria, which is a hell of a disease. And those defenses are limited to populations that spent a long time exposed to falciparum malaria – tropical and subtropical regions of the Old World. Moreover, any such gene would have an easily recognizable Mendelian family pattern , even if it had partial penetrance for some reason – and homosexuality does not."
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/not-final/
I didn’t claim it was offering protection against a specific pathogen. Maybe this is a better example:
<I> This raises the question of why such a potentially devastating, often lethal disease is still hanging around plaguing humanity. We know from an abundance of recent research that schizophrenia is heavily genetic in origin. One would think that natural selection would have eliminated the genes that predispose to psychosis. A study published earlier this year in Molecular Biology and Evolution provides clues as to how the potential for schizophrenia may have arisen in the human brain and, in doing so, suggests possible treatment targets. It turns out that psychosis may be an unfortunate cost of having a big brain that is capable of complex cognition.</I>
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/schizophrenia-may-be-the-price-we-pay-for-a-big-brain/
My understanding is that the rate of schizophrenia is around 1%, which is near the level of what can be explained by de novo mutations.
1% is way too high for de novo mutations. Achondroplasia is 1/20k. Also, you wouldn't see much (measured) heritability if it were de novo mutations. Cochran and Ewald put forward schizophrenia as highest candidate for cause by infection.
That's almost certainly at least 10x too high for spontaneous mutation. The general rate of non-heritable birth defects is usually around 0.1% at most and often closer to 0.01%:
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/data.html
To be more precise, heterozygous sickle cell trait protects against malaria. Homozygous sickle cell trait is what causes sickle cell disease. This is a pretty well known example of heterozygote advantage. Cystic fibrosis is another example, though I forget what the heterogyzous form protects against.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/08/10/cystic-fibrosis/
In the comments Typhoid is brought up as a candidate.
What's wrong with a variation on the Grandmother Effect (the argument that menopause exists because at some point it benefits the family gene line more for a woman to focus on the welfare of her grandchildren than to bear more children herself)?
We are very social species, clearly the survival of any particular gene line depends not only on the sheer number of children with that line, but also the efforts of parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, et cetera to defend and advance the welfare of the family. If it's advantageous for a woman to switch over from child-bearing to grandchildren-protecting at an age when she is still quite physically capable, why would it not be an even greater advantage for some of a child's uncles to be homosexual, and be inclined to defend and advance the interests of the family as a whole (instead of focus on personal procreation) while even younger, and even more physically capable? Fathering young children takes a huge amount of energy. If some of the uncles can devote their energy to discovering how to smelt iron instead of finding extra antelope legs for their own kids, that's potentially a big win for the tribe.
The rate at which uncles discover how to smelt iron is going to be too low to have a persistent genetic effect over generations. Plus, you need selection at the level of the gene rather than the tribe to explain a genetic effect (genetic group selection flounders amidst free-riders in the group).
Humans are a "very social" species, but nowhere near a eusocial species. It is always going to be to one's genetic advantage to have more children of your own rather than a sibling's children. This is why grandmothers are focused on their own descendants, not that of their siblings!
> she is still quite physically capable
No, her physical capability is declining with age, to the point where it will be her accumulated wisdom rather than physical capacity that can do the most for her descendants. The hard-off of menopause is distinct from that gradual decline, but the preceding decline makes the Darwinian math work.
> Fathering young children takes a huge amount of energy.
The fundamental difference between males & females across species is that sperm is cheap while eggs are expensive. Gestating and then caring for a helpless newborn is even more expensive. Polygamists have fathered lots of children in their old age.
Unpersuasive. But thanks for trying.
Which parts of what I said did you not find credible?
Thanks for asking:
1. You took a metaphor ("smelt iron") literally, either missing the point or constructing a strawman.
2. I don't find it credible that natural selection operates only at the individual gene line -- that would make the existence of social species that don't consist of clones hard to explain. Humans are not fruit flies.
3. I disagree it is always an advantage *to a particular gene line* for an individual to bear more children. I think you are conflating success for a individual person with success for his assorted genes. Competition does not occur entirely at the individual level -- if it did, sexual reproduction would be rare and most species would reproduce asexually, which preserves the individual (in the sense of that exact configuration of DNA).
4. Not sure with what you disagree about menopause, because I can't parse that sentence in a way that makes sense.
5. Humans are not fish, not even gorillas. Historically, human fathers invest a great deal of energy in their offspring, almost as much as mothers when they are young, and arguably more than mothers when they reach adolescence. The polygamy example (or the emperor with the harem) is an exception that proves the rule, not evidence against it. If this were not the case, monogamy would not be as much of a rule as it is, the social opprobrium attached to male infidelity would not be as common as it is,
And, finally, overall, you are mostly taking issue with various subpoints of the main point, which isn't really an argument that's worth having to me. I may well have adduced flawed evidence in support of the hypothesis, or I may not state it as well as I might, but editorial critique of its presentation isn't of interest to me. What would be, is an effort to fully grasp the nature of the hypothesis, and find major weaknesses in it -- what broad implications does it have that are contradicted by evidence and experience? What mechanisms does it presuppose which we know don't exist, or which might be too unreliable to function as necessary? In what way might it contradict other broad conclusions we can make about the way evolution shapes a species? Stuff like that.
As I said, thanks for being willing to engage.
1. If discovering new ways to smelt iron is a standin for all kinds of technological discovery, it's still vanishingly rare. Physical anthropologists looking at the tools of paleolithic humans see enormous amounts of time with minimal technological change. The Australian aborigines never invented the bow & arrow, much less any metalworking, during all their time there. The Tasmanians actually went backward technologically relative to the Australians.
2. What's so incoherent about a social (not eusocial) sexual species for whom selection operates on individual gene lines? Fruit flies aren't clones either!
3. The common explanation for aesexual reproduction evolving into sexual reproduction is "Red Queen theory": pathogens are constantly evolving, so their hosts have to run as fast as they can just to keep up. Sex shuffles up the genes to reduce vulnerability to pathogens. This is why we see it in non-social species as well, like both fruit flies & fish that lay unfertilized eggs and never even have to interact with their mates.
4. A woman's fertility declines over time. This means the payoff to attempting to have a marginal child also declines with age. The older she is, the more knowledge she also accumulates. Eventually she can ensure more descendants via devoting effort to her existing descendants rather than having a marginal child, menopause forces her into that strategy. Men do not have menopause, and are able to have children at much higher ages.
5. The amount that human fathers invest in their children varies, with some not really doing so much at all (including not actually having any such role as "father" or being recognized as one). I recommend reading Henrich on the cultural evolution of fatherhood. Polygamy is not an "exception", it is the norm across cultures. It's merely the case that the atypical monogamous Roman/Christian civilization was extraordinarily successful and suppressed others. The norm among Australian aborigines, for example, is gerontocracy where the older men hog the women. I've linked this elsewhere in the thread, but Misha Saul has recently been writing about the emergence of monogamy out of a norm against it: https://kvetch.substack.com/p/wife-economics-and-the-domestication
If you want a broad critique here it is: we know heterosexuality is adaptive, and it results in more offspring for obvious reasons. A priori we shouldn't expect homosexuality to be genetic, as natural selection would suppress it too much, and indeed both twin studies & GWAS find low heritability. People will sometimes bring up things like sickle cell anemia where genes are beneficial in some cases while obviously reducing fitness in others, but that's an unusual case where malaria (note: a pathogen) is a VERY LARGE driver of fitness and became common relatively recently when trees got cleared to create standing water for mosquitos to breed in. So you need something of that scale for the downside of a gene not to minimize its frequency, and there is no plausible way for "gay uncle" theory to work because these uncles don't act at all like ants or even wolves assisting in the raising of nieces/nephews, which makes sense when you think about it since homosexuality is not how those caregivers of other species wind up in such roles (effort devoted to mating would of course reduce what they can provide to their relatives). But do we know of situations where people devote lots of effort toward mating without producing children (and without birth control being the explanation)? Yes, in the "sterility belt", caused by STDs. Diseases will reduce your fitness, as it's no skin off their back, and per Red Queen theory that effect will persist even as we evolve to resist them. And that damage doesn't even have to be to the advantage of the disease, as polio doesn't spread after it reaches the brain to paralyze you (that's just a side effect to no gene's advantage).
"If you call something a mental disorder, insurance has to cover treatment for it, which is good."
Good for who? Why?
Good from the perspective of the people making the decision, who want everyone to love them and praise them for being pro-patient.
...reordering a fairly significant and universal human social guiderail so that a privileged set of rule makers don't get targeted by hedonist activists would seem a poor way of doing health care, but here we are.
Good for people who benefit from the presence of the treatment. Which in many cases includes everyone who interacts with this person in daily life.
I think this is a solid assumption in the narrow view that doesn't take into account the tradeoffs that have to happen for this individual to arrive at this "solution" to his problem. But if you zoom out from the individual, the assumption that "getting other people to pay for things that are good for this guy is good" starts to look less and less sound, and leads to bad outcomes.
>If this is accurate, the N relevant N difference N between N homosexuality N and N pedophilia N is N moral N, not N biological. Both are sexual targeting errors, but one re-targets sexuality onto other people who can consent and won’t be harmed, so it’s fine. The other targets people who can’t consent and will be harmed, so it’s bad.
The fact that you said this shows that either you didn't even have serious doubts about it or you're just lying. Maybe you lied in order to make people think their way to the truth more efficiently than if you had told the truth, but I don't see how they would, besides by your inviting a tiny number of implausibly courageous souls to object to it.
I don't want to spend too much text telling you how viscerally bad it made me feel that you said this; the sheer hopelessness that overcomes me when I think that you of all people cannot discover, through curiosity or by simply attending to the neurotypically-unspeakable strangeness of the world, the totality of clues on this matter.
How many characters short should my paragraphs be? How many paragraphs per post can I give you that you won't reject them for being too long? Will you just round me off as crazy if I have a mountain of anecdotal clues that humanity is collectively delusional about this topic? If our epistemic institutions and socialization are riddled with incentives to be carelessly misleading, it does not make reality and its clues any less real!
This is vague enough that I can't tell which of the various ideas in the quoted paragraph you think is clearly wrong. (Pedophilia being immoral? Homosexuality being moral? Either arising from a sexual targeting error? Gay sex being (usually) consensual & harmless? Pedophiliac sex being nonconsensual & harmful?)
I actually have no idea what you're talking about. Serious doubts about what? Inviting souls to object to what?
Explicitly given claims that are wrong:
1. Children can't consent
2. Children will (without qualification) be harmed by sex with pedophiles
3. Pedophilia is (without qualification) immoral
Surrounding claims in this topic that are wrong:
1. All children are conveniently stereotypical children
2. If children thought having sex with adults — with social consequences equivalent to those that an adult would face for having homosexual sex — was a real possibility, they would want it less frequently than adults want to have homosexual sex
3. The children who are not conveniently stereotypical children are not multitudinous and their interests are not important
4. Something remotely bad or immoral has happened if a child has confident, consensual sex with an adult and their social world doesn't punish them for it nor convince them it was a bad thing or they have some reason to be traumatized about it
5. People who have a fixated attraction to children are more dangerous or malicious than blacks who wanted interracial marriage with whites in states where it was illegal in 1960
I disagree that all those claims are wrong. In the 70s, there were some groups in Germany (affiliated to the green party) who honestly believed that sexual relations between children and adults would be good for the children. So they had sexual relationships with children, and they undertook great efforts to make sure that it was consensual, that everything was in a positive, caring atmosphere, and so on. It was not secret either, since it was accepted within their social groups. At least one person even published a book about it.
In retrospect, this didn't work out at all. A lot of these children got psychological problems. After growing up, many of them said that it was bad for them, and that they wished that these things had not happened. (Though they did acknowledge that the adults had acted in good faith.) Even some of the adults say in hindsight that the concept has failed, and that a lot of their believes during the adult-child-relationship (that sex is nice and beneficial for both sides and that the children actually wanted that) had just been wishful thinking.
My bottom line is that children don't have sexual drive before puberty. Adults can make children do and apparently even "want" lots of things, because children want to be liked by the parents. But if it is about sex, then the adult is not acting in the interest of the child. The idea that a pre-puberty child can have confident, consensual sex with an adult is an illusion. So my default assumption is that consensual sex between adults and children is potentially harmful. Not every single child will be harmed, but adults can't tell apart in which cases it is harmful, and the rate is high enough that it should stay generally forbidden.
Things do change a bit with puberty, but I still think that it makes sense to generally forbid this up to a certain age. Children are almost always in a much weaker position, and the risk that adults just impose their own desires onto the teens in a harmful way is way too large. Even if the adult have no bad intentions.
While this is going off-topic: not only the green party did discuss and ask for a removal of age restrictions for sex with minors, but also members of the liberals (FDP), social party (SPD) and conservatives (CDU) - so it was a broad discussion in the german society. Naturally, the more radical stances were found in the more radical parties, which were the green party back then. Source: https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/erste-ergebnisse-der-paedophilie-studie-forscher-enthuellen-so-kaempften-gruene-jahrelang-fuer-freien-kinder-sex_id_3077344.html
The green party did however ask an independent group of researchers to investigate on the extent of the pedophilic efforts in their party, which can be read here: https://www.ifdem.de/content/uploads/2013/12/Paedophiliedebatte-Gruene-Zwischenbericht.pdf
As for the later distress of the pedophilic relationship, and that one of the children did write a book about their history - do you remember the source for an evaluation, and post the author and title of the book? (I haven't read the whole investigation report yet, in case it's in there)
I completely agree on the missing sex drive before puberty and being unable to give consent to an adult - although I dislike the proxy of "age" as the legally determining factor of being able to give consent, it's the best we got.
I've heard anecdotes of people who claimed to have sexual desire before puberty, but I'll grant that it seems uncommon at best.
I would argue that those aren't sexual desires, but simply forms of imitation / model behaviour ("monkey see monkey do").
I think the question isn't so much that these desires don't exist at all, as that they are not mature. I wish there were a way to phrase this without sounding like a psychoanalyst because I disagree with that lot in most of the specifics, but my strong intuition is that the harm caused by """consensual""" pedophilia is, among other things, that it messes with the kids' still-developing mental structures around sex before they've actually matured.
I first ejaculated from masturbation when I was 6. I loved taking as many opportunities as possible to miss out on family outings so that if I was left at home I could walk around the house naked. It made me extremely happy every time I did it, and I felt sexually aroused.
I often had fantasies that I would meet someone else, maybe a princess, who had in common with me a secret love of nakedness and putting one's "private parts" in weird and satisfying places. No one knew this about me because, well, I was shamed for nudity and my parents often hit me over things that seemed even smaller and less deviant to me, so why would I reveal this as well?
What I did was obviously innocent, and because my siblings also reacted with shame to my nudity, I came to suspect that children everywhere lacked the cleverness to doubt adults and create secret, controlled moments of daring lawlessness.
If that makes me a sociopath, it is a tragedy of inconceivable loss that we are not all sociopaths.
I suspect your experience is significantly atypical. As such, while I am in principle sympathetic and would - all else being equal - be in favor of a counterfactual where you were able to meet someone with whom to express shared interests in a healthy and mutually-beneficial way, unfortunately all else is not equal. Childhood tragedies which are more common and no less severe have to be considered a higher priority. I mean, given the option, you'd probably also prefer that your parents didn't hit you at all, right? Institutions and norms involved in reliably preventing that would surely result in other effects on social contexts and developing minds, potentially rendering impossible, or unnecessary, any hypothetical methods for someone like you and a "princess" to safely find each other.
I agree that it was a general public discussion. But I think the Greens were more involved than other parties. The Greens had official party organizations that lobbied for that.
I tried to find some sources, and found a few in this article (might be paywalled):
https://www.spiegel.de/politik/kuck-mal-meine-vagina-a-2602651b-0002-0001-0000-000071029982
For the book, I probably blended several things into one. I have not read any of the original sources, but here are concrete links that I can extract form this and some other articles:
- There is the biographical novel "Das bleiche Herz der Revolution" by Sophie Dannenberg. The author was sent into "Kinderläden" in her childhood, and the book is based on her own memory and on interviews with her mother and other children and parents of that time. She does not describe direct sexual acts, but makes clear that even the "soft" forms of sexual infringements were traumatizing for her, e.g., having to present herself naked to other adults. In a later interview, she said "objectively it was abuse, subjectively (for the adults) not".
- There is the report "Kindererziehung in der Kommune" in "Kursbuch 17" from June 1969. As far as I can tell, this is basically a diary of the life in the so-called Kommune 2. In any case, it contains descriptions of very explicit sexual acts (though not intercourse) with the small children (3-6 years). The article cites a former members of the commune with the statement that at least one of the children looks back "mit Grausen" (with horror) to the time. This statement is not specific to the sexual acts, but in general to life in this commune.
- The "Konkret"-publisher Klaus Rainer Röhl wrote several articles in which he propagated consensual sex with children. Later, his two daughter accused him of child molestation, so obviously they were not agreeing in hindsight with what happened.
- There are quite a few books from that time which do not report a specific biographical story, but advertise sexual intercourse with children in general terms. E.g., the Handbuch in positiver Kinderindoktrination ("It's no less valuable if intercourse happens during cuddling."), or "Die Lust am Kind" by Dieter F. Ullmann (member of the green party). Helmut Kentler, a psychologist and professor for pedagogics, was an authority in this milieu, and has written lots of texts. He openly confessed that he placed difficult homeless children with pedophiles, because those would endure the difficulties of dealing with those children in exchange for sex. He was convinced that non-violent sex does not harm minors. In all these cases, I don't know about reports from the children. (Though Ullmann and Kentler were convicted of child abuse in several cases, so protocols might exist.) https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/sexueller-missbrauch-das-berliner-paedo-problem-a-1124210.html
- An interesting case, for which I also don't know the hindsight opinion of the children, is the Schülerladen "Rote Freiheit" at Kreuzberger Oranienplatz in Berlin, which provided daycare for ~15 children of age 8-14. The protocols of a few months 1969/1970 were leaked, and contained "sexual exercises" and "fuck lessons" on the schedule, as well as details on how these lessons looked.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to post this, that's a lot to go through, and not an easy topic to say the least... The articles are indeed paywalled, I'll see if I can get them from an alternative source.
There are many serious problems with your detailed just-so story, as is typically the case with age reductivists. Millions of age reductivists with internet access would have stories just as detailed and erroneous as this one. If the internet had been invented in the 1800s, American Southerner race reductivists would have just as detailed and erroneous stories about why slavery is necessary and for the good of the slave.
You have not yet demonstrated that you are exceptionally discriminatory or principled as an age reductivist, nor that you are exceptionally discriminatory or principled as a single-quality-reductivist of any sort. You failed to imagine and suggest a better way for the world to be that would involve fewer moral sacrifices taken at the expense of discounted groups.
"It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination."
— Christopher Hitchens
Convince me that I should care to explicitly scrutinize the details of what you, a single-quality-reductivist, have to say on this topic.
>In retrospect, this didn't work out at all. A lot of these children got psychological problems. After growing up, many of them said that it was bad for them, and that they wished that these things had not happened. (Though they did acknowledge that the adults had acted in good faith.)
Since Calvin won't, I will; there's a causality issue here. Are the psychological problems because of the sex, or are the psychological problems because society expects the sex to cause psychological problems? Being fine with something that society assumes traumatising is, ironically, frequently traumatising, which unavoidably taints any attempt to test whether X is traumatising within a society that already believes it is.
This is not restricted to child molestation, of course. It's a huge squirming can of worms in almost every case where trauma is socially expected - rape, corporal punishment, war, gender non-affirmation...
There are so many possible confounders. Maybe the adults involved, sympathetically, made a huge deal of everything and kept suspiciously discussing with the children if they were causing trauma, causing them to think about trauma in connection with the sex all the time.
I agree, this makes it very hard to discriminate those things. The book of Sophie Dannenberg (see comment above, and I haven't read it myself) seems to indicate that she already found it traumatizing at that time, when her parents and her most direct environment tried to make it a positive experience. But this is weak evidence, there are all kind of reasons why she might still have been influenced by the culture, or why she even got this wrong in hindsight. Or why "presenting yourself nude to others although you don't want to" is on the same level as "having to kiss your aunt although you don't want to".
The standard argument isn't always that children lack a proper understanding of sex to consent or that they lack sexual desire. The reason minors can't legally consent to sex with adults is the same reason that prisoners can't legally consent to sex with prison guards and soldiers can't legally consent to sex with commanding officers: the power difference is so great that they can't freely say "no", and if they can't freely say "no" then their "yes" has no meaning either.
This standard reasoning ignores the fact that semi-intelligent children know that an adult who consents to have sex with them is unstoppably fucked as soon as the child wants to make a public fuss about it, and the midwit children can be informed of this simple fact as well, and so actually the child is at an enormous power advantage over an adult where sex specifically is concerned.
This is a gross misconception of child knowledge.
Children get their world knowledge from the adults. If the adult who has sex with them tells them that something terrible is going to happen *to the child* if they say anything, the child will believe that, plain and simple. This is no speculation, it is literally how 90% of child abuse goes.
And not just children. Just looking at some recent cases of sexual abuse in sports, this still works way too often for 20+ year olds, e.g. diver Jan Hempel. The trainer convinces them that their career would be over if they told anyone.
This is a gross misconception of child knowledge and the typical family.
Parents tell their children to fear pedophiles and to scream if an adult is touching them. Parents also tell them not to say bad words, not to eat candy, not to watch Yu-Gi-Oh because it's Satanic, etc., and sometimes they punch or spank them if they're slightly too rude.
If the parents have a lot of rules that never lead to anything bad when they're violated in private, and they keep acting like villains from Disney movies to them, and the other kids in the neighborhood seem to know way way more about adult topics and seem happy and socially fine, a semi-intelligent kid is going to start asking themselves what's the point of all the fuss.
And then when that semi-intelligent kid starts asking for reasons, and the adults say "because I said so; I'm the parent and you're the child, so you do what I say, that's how this works," that kid is going to think "I see. So this is a mean relationship, not a nice one."
You must not have kids.
When my daughter was 5 I decided to give her a little psychological booster shot regarding getting in the car with strangers. We'd already had the talk about who counted as a stranger, the importance of not getting in the car with them, ways to say no to them, reasons not to get in the car with them, etc. She understood all that just fine, and could recite all the main points herself. So I decided to do a little role play. I explained to her that just to give her some practice we were going to pretend that I was a stranger inviting her into my car. Her job was to say no, then leave the area, just as we'd talked about. She understood all that just fine too. So I drive around the block, pull up next to her, roll down the window and say "Hi there. Listen, I've lost my puppy. Will you come with me and help me find him?" She stood there uneasily for a little while, twirling her hair and looking embarrassed and confused. Then she said, softly, "OK," and got in the car.
Later she explained that if a real stranger had asked her to get in the car with him and she had said no she was afraid he would get mad at her and say that she was rude. My daughter was not a hyper-obedient child, just average, but she had been raised to be respectful of adults, and of course I made sure that she was only around adults whom she should respect and obey --- my friends, my family, her teachers, etc. She had never been in a situation where the certified right thing to do was to just tell an adult "nope," and walk away while they were still talking to her. When asked to do that, even in a pretend game, she couldn't bring herself to carry through.
Kids up until age 10 or so are also easy to convince that they will get in big trouble if they spill the beans about sexual abuse. They all know that what is happening between them and the abuser is unusual, weird, and against the rules, and they have no real-world experience to guide them regarding who is going to get in trouble if people find out.
Kids have enormous power advantage over adults where beatings are concerned too, especially beatings that leave marks. Just 2 days ago heard about an 11 year old who went to the police and showed them the bruises from his aunt's latest beating. The aunt quickly lost custody of the kids and they were placed in foster care. But kids who bust their caretakers for beatings are as rare as hens' teeth -- and that's despite the fact that beaten kids, unlike sexually abused kids, cannot be silenced with threats that they are the ones who will get in trouble if the truth comes out.
Is all that enough reasons to change your mind?
Oh, and one more point. I find your multiple remarks categorizing children by intellectual level -- "midwits," etc -- repulsive and wrong-headed.
Your daughter is unspeakably adorable and I hope she's always safe and sound.
I disagree with the commenter you're replying to, but I dislike you taking their (wrong) view of the situation and turning it into a personal advice that they didn't ask for.
I think the issue of consent is perhaps the most interesting, where from a extremely naive autistic sense it seems obvious that a 3 year old girl can consent to providing a man a hand job and enjoy the entire process. Yet in the eyes of most people this is completely outrageous and more importantly, factually false with respects to giving consent.
Which raises the question what exactly is meant by consent, is it simply saying yes, is it saying yes and having a particular part of the brain reach a particular level of development, is it saying yes and having the earth orbit the sun some particular number of times, is it saying yes plus not having particular intoxicants in your blood stream etc. etc.
Whilst it is possible to imagine a sufficiently complicated nominal or reductionist account of consent such that it appears to perfectly match ordinary language uses of the term, this is clearly not the conception of consent people actually subscribe to, even if some more physicalist minded people defer to such an account when provoked they don't actually believe that's how consent works.
The way in which people actually conceive of consent is analogous to a non naturalist account of moral properties perhaps even explicitly reducible to some sort of complicated deontological statement. As such to people who are unable to perceive of such properties ( or in their eyes, don't suffer from moral hallucinations) the language and peoples beliefs about consent seem nonsensical and vice versa.
I should also add that much of the comments seem to address attraction to prepubescent children even though most people don't use the term pedophile like that and many of the inferences people make using the technical definition obviously can't be broadened out to encompass the normal usage of the term. Also many of the various forms of evidence offered to support or attack claims about harm from such sexual relationships are usually very weak and have obvious problems if you read further, nevertheless its interesting that people ignore perhaps the best data we have on the matter which is the widespread instances of child marriage in places such as India that are in living memory.
TBQH I thought of mentioning the "well, societies have done this before" point, but there are some annoying counterarguments like "maybe they were all traumatised and didn't notice"; Bret Devereaux, for instance, basically makes that argument regarding Sparta in ACOUP. I think that counterargument's kind of eye-roll-worthy, but nonetheless I'm not a psychologist or historian and didn't feel like I needed the point enough to wade into that swamp.
>If I understand journalistic ethics correctly, they can’t edit the sentence to remove the Ns - and if they kept them, people would probably at least wonder what was up.
You don't understand journalism ethics correctly. And again, you're behaving like a quokka. When they quoted you out of context before, they were *intentionally misrepresenting* you. Anything that a layman would call ethics has already been violated. When they say that they didn't change the words, that's an *excuse*; they say that because a ton of people who like to make excuses for journalists will say "sure, they didn't change any words, so they're not lying". (See also, previous Scott article denying that the media lies).
It's conflict theory all the way down. Whether they would remove extra N's is not based on "journalistic ethics"--it's based on "if we removed the N's, and got caught doing so, would there be backlash that inconveniently calls us liars". There won't be such backlash, so the journalists will have no problem removing the Ns.
So the header should be «I am willing to accept Peter Thiel funding a libel lawsuit for edited quotes if he ever picks a bone with a media outlet that has quoted me out of context» instead?
I think you are assuming that every ethical question here is binary, and either everyone will feel constrained or no one will. In fact there are at least some relevant journalists for who me the removal of the N’s is going to remind them of their scruples enough to stop them, which wouldn’t have been stopped by the presence of a disclaimer a few sentences before or after.
Should we consider transexuality a physical disorder rather than a mental one?
From my point of view, a transgender person's mind is fine. Their body just doesn't match. That sounds physical, not mental to me.
Perhaps the DSM is the wrong place to define it, and doing so elsewhere would avoid the need for the "this is bad and should be covered by insurance" and "this is not a mental disorder" inconsistency.
Well, the body "is fine" as well, so that's not a good reason to assign responsibility to the body rather the mind.
Generally (and I know this is philosophically nontrivial), I would say that it's the mind's job to deal with the world as it in constructive ways, with the body being part of the "world" in the broader sense. If the mind is not happy with what it sees, possible steps can include changing the body ("Looks like I'm getting fat - time to hit the gym and rethink my diet!"), but obviously there are maladaptive ways to change the body that are correctly identified as mental disorders ("Looks like I'm still fat despite only weighing 85 pounds - time to go throw up!"). Chopping off perfectly functional reproductive organs and signing up for a lifelong subscription of hormones falls firmly in that category IMO.
(Quick nitpick: A treated transgender person's mind is fine. An untreated person is in a whole lot of distress, similar to how a person losing a leg or two will likely be distressed and depressed-- and hence have a mental struggle that they need help with, even though the cause is clearly physical.)
But ignore that nitpick, I absolutely think people need to talk more about the physical side of gender dysphoria. I just learned this week that a minimum of 25% of trans men that have had hysterectomies were incidentally discovered to have Never Had Correctly Working, Functional Uteruses In The First Place. All this fuss over sex vs. gender, and there aren't even working sex parts! Frankly, the topic is worth a big "what the fuck"? (This minimum of 25% could be a small estimate as well, as these were incidental observations required to perform a hysterectomy, not full exams.) There is absolutely a physical problem going on here.
I don't think "gender dysphoria is a mental disorder but transgender isn't" is really a contradiction. The two are different conditions - if you successfully transition, you no longer have dysphoria but you're still trans.
Actually the gender dysphoria rarely abates. Hence the very high suicide rate and increasing amount of de-transitioning.
[citation needed]
In the studies I have read, the number of people still experiencing symptoms of distress post gender treatment is approximately the same as the suicide rate in the cis-population: 3%. An estimated .1% of those people were misdiagnosed with dysphoria and de-transition while the others are experiencing multiple highly distressing problems.
(This makes dysphoria treatment ten times more successful than wisdom tooth removals!)
Presuming a perfectly biological taxonomy is impossible, how much politics is ok and what are its limiting principles?
I mean, I get it, pure political neutrality is a myth, but on the spectrum between a purely biological taxonomy and a purely political taxonomy, where do we fall and what determines that as we change the taxonomy? Because the logically consistent thing seems to be a political knife fight to the bottom but that's not, yet at least, what I see and biological realities seem to be driving a lot of it. For example, while the exact dividing line on when someone goes from "weird" to "mentally ill" seems pretty socially constructed but people in the midst of a psychotic break are pretty unambiguously "wrong" or "off". At what point on that line, or similar lines, does the biological reality outweigh political considerations, if it does?
“Political knife fight” sounds like you imagine political discussions as inherently being zero sum. When you’re talking electoral politics in a two party system, it can be. But “political” is everything about how we live together. The ideas of free speech and of private property are both deeply political ideas, and while we may disagree about some of the details of each, there is very widespread agreement that some version of each is an important part of the social consensus of how we live together. Ideas of illness and health are like that.
I, uh, may be missing the point you're trying to make.
Like, yes, there is social consensus on some aspects of illness and health. I don't think anybody can look at a kid with severe autism and think that's a normal, healthy human being.
Having said that, those aren't really the areas under discussion. When that social consensus breaks down, as it very clearly did under both Covid and the current transgender debate, then politics begins to intrude, specifically because there is no social consensus to reference. What's most interesting to me, and what I'm trying to get at, is the area between things that politics/CW have absolutely eaten, like transgenderism, and things where there's a firm social consensus, like severe autism, and you get into this grey zone where politics and biological facts both wield influence. And I'm trying to understand how practitioners navigate this.
Since this post is a can-of-worms-a-thon anyway, shall we open another one? How about "some degree of stigmatization of mental disorders is beneficial for society"?
I see some indications that the pendulum has swung from "mental disorders are bad, having them is a disgrace, we should not talk about them" to "mental disorders are cool and interesting, and we need to announce we have them (even if maybe we actually don't)"... which leads to impressionable young people brainwashing themselves into displaying (and probably feeling) ADHD, PTSD, ASD, gender dysphoria etc - to their own and their families' detriment.
Of course it sucks for someone who genuinely has a mental disorder if society stigmatizes them or doesn't even know what the issue is, but from a utilitarian perspective, if the alternative is to multiply the number of sufferers, maybe it's the lesser of two evils (or we should at least think about finding the optimal middle ground)?
This is a useful question. Probably a number of traditional stigmas are in place not because of wanting a few to suffer social insult on top of injury, but because having a few struggling was better that this being a widespread vice.
Well, the reason why "pendulum has swung" to a place where some people are incredibly supportive and even celebrative, is that it was in the place of stygmatization at first.
So even if it contributed to the increased rate of occurance of mental illnesses and not just decreased rate in false negatives, it would still be the result of the stigmatization.
What we want is neutrality, not stigmatization in such situations. If there is no controversy about being X than there is no coolness in being X.
> I see some indications that the pendulum has swung from "mental disorders are bad, having them is a disgrace, we should not talk about them" to "mental disorders are cool and interesting, and we need to announce we have them (even if maybe we actually don't)"
Maybe so. But is that, in fact, wrong? Can we think about this? This reminds me of https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/ . Whether a mental oddity is a harmful disorder or a fun quirk is situation-dependent, not absolute. If you're a caveman, having a strong sensory aversion to fur is going to be a problem. In the 21st century in the developed world, it's indistinguishable from any other preference about clothing styles. Plausibly we are, or are fast becoming, a sufficiently comfortable society that a lot of the social reasons why having certain conditions sucked are evaporating, hence the need to also deconstruct the social stigma around them.
(Being transgender is an example of that: it sucks if you're in a society that won't accept you and doesn't have the necessary tools to help you transition! But being trans within a welcoming and helpful community, with the ability to transition exactly how you want, isn't just neutral: it is in fact awesome. Trans people in welcoming environments talk all the time about "gender euphoria". More people in 15th century Geneva becoming trans would be bad for them; more people in 2023 San Francisco becoming trans will quite plausibly improve their life satisfaction!)
Freddie deBoer, who has spent time in a mental institution, argues here that homelessness is both inevitably going to be stigmatized and SHOULD BE because it has bad consequences:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/how-we-got-to-unhoused
Worth reading related stuff from him on mental illness.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/your-mental-illness-beliefs-are-incoherent
How is displaying a mental disorder a problem?
Ask teachers and classmates how students displaying ADHD are a problem in the classroom.
Ask the relatives of a depressed person how displaying depression is a problem for family.
Ask the relatives of someone with PTSD how them freaking out and having panic attacks on seemingly random occasions is a problem.
...should I go on?
I am confused by this, because whatever you think of ADHD fads, it seems like depression symptoms and PTSD symptoms are often unavoidably displayed by the sufferer of those mental illness. They do not seem like the sort of thing you can acquire by means of thinking that it is cool and interesting and somewhat fashionable. It is fashionable to try on self-diagnoses (people are always in need of ways of explaining themselves to themselves), but it is decidedly not fashionable to be a sobbing wreck who hasn't showered for two weeks and done laundry for even longer, or to suddenly freak out when your neighbor starts her lawn mower.
What benefit does stigmatizing either depression or PTSD bring, unless you mean for it to encourage sufferers to seek treatment by means of tough love? It may cause the opposite in marginal cases, since sufferers who are able to hide their illness may do so, and refuse treatment. Would you stigmatize cancer in the same way?
My proposed solution is teaching people some form of mental health preparedness prior to the acquisition of mental illness (knowing what to do when you get depressed or have been exposed to serious bodily or emotional trauma is a valuable life skill! Knowing what to do when you start having voices in your head might also be one, not sure?) If it's scary to tell people that you're having voices in your head, you might not get treatment until it's really really bad and hard to deal with and maybe harder to treat?
Can you replace the word “stigmatized” with a more detailed description? That is, do you want us to help provide people with alternatives to this behavior, or tell people they are bad people for having this behavior, or discourage people from mentioning to anyone that they have this behavior, or give people medication to stop the behavior? Any of those could fall under the term “stigmatization” but some seem more productive than others (and some might even be completely counterproductive).
How about:
- discourage bragging about having the condition, or using it to score oppression points
- encourage people with the condition to seek therapy (whatever seems promising - behavioral therapy, medication...)
- remind people that the behavior can cause problems or be a nuisance for other people, and encourace them to get it under control as far as possible
Having a mental disorder does not make you a bad person. Intentionally or negligently putting an unnecessary burden on other people because of it, does.
So, you want to encourage people to ask for help with their mental health issues, so long as they're appropriately ashamed about the burden they're putting on other people by doing so?
Makes perfect sense, that definitely won't discourage people from seeking help at all.
No, I want them to seek help with their issues such that they feel better AND put less of a burden on others in the long run. Seeking help requires accepting that having these issues is a bad thing, not a cool entry in your twitter bio. Is that clearer now?
Psychologist here. Lots of people with a problem that is *not* a mental health problem also brag about their problem, use it to score oppression points, fail to get help, and make themselves a nuisance to other people, and doing that stuff is quite unfair on the part of the person with the problem. We've all seen people who are having trouble getting a job do that, and people going through a bad divorce, people with asthma, people with an obnoxious boss, etc etc. I agree that having a mental health problem does not entitle someone to intentionally or negligently put the burden of the problem on someone else. My experience, though, is that a LOT of people with a mental health problem regard the problem as their ugly secret and tell very few people about it. Many I see have literally never told anyone about their weird fears or their secret belief that they would be better off dead. I certainly have also seen people who are quite flamboyant in their mental illness, and believe the world owes them all kinds of things because they have it, but it's not the norm.
Should we likewise stigmatize physical disabilities, for creating objective difficulties for other people and to avoid encouraging malingerers and clout-chasers? If not, why not?
Let me rephrase that: should we tell people to be careful and avoid accidents so they don't end up disabled? Should we encourage physically disabled people who can benefit from rehab and surgeries to get their problems fixed as far as possible? Should we teach disabled people as many skills as possible, so they can live as independently as possible?
I think we should, and I think western cultures do that, for the most part.
Physical disabilities are a bit different from mental disorders insofar as it's harder to convince yourself that you have them if you don't, but the principle - convincing people that having them is bad, not cool, and you should avoid them or get rid of them if possible, is the same.
What's the equivalent of "be careful and avoid accidents" for mental health disorders? Are you going to tell soldiers "be careful about going to war zones, that's a great way to get PTSD"? Tell workers "don't get fired from your job, that really increases your risk of depression?"
That's actually a good question.
I am not a professional, so if I am off-base, please chime in.
War and PTSD: step 1 - as a society, adopt an attitude of "war is a necessary evil", rather than "war is great for turning boys into real men" or "dying on the battlefield is a way to go to heaven/ Valhalla/ etc.". Step 2 - as a military organization, prepare soldiers that they may see and do horrible things, and that they may be terrified by what they learn about other humans and themselves. Offer counseling and therapy for those who develop issues.
Workers and depression: If at all possible, establish financial reserves and alternative career paths so you're not totally screwed if you end up getting fired. Prefer companies that don't habitually fire people for no good reason. Don't neglect your support network of friends and family (and church, if applicable) so you are not on your own when there are setbacks.
Generally:
- learn to identify sociopathic individuals, and avoid them if possible
- learn to identify sociopathic organizations (cults, radical political movements, abusive corporations), and engage with extreme caution
- monitor your own behavior for self-destructive habits before they turn into addictions or alienate your friends and family
- be aware that you are not invulnerable. Maintain some work-life balance, don't go overboard with drugs and partying, get enough sleep, eat healthy, work out.
That sounds like a generic recipe for a satisfied life, and in a sense, it is: avoiding falling off some metaphorical cliff is half the battle, and mental health issues constitute a good part of the most common cliffs.
I've personally never understood why the concepts of prejudice and discrimination, which I think are just as adequate to capture the social difficulties faced by people with disabilities as people with other non-normative identities, don't get used in this context.
Do you think working to reduce the prejudice and discrimination people with mental (or physical) disabilities face is also a worthy goal, and if so, compatible with the efforts you describe above?
> 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.
...and Twitter addicts don't? (SCNR.)
Can definitely see why you had to put those Ns in! Hope the trick works out for you. On the note of honosexuality being weakly linked to genetics, I thought that was actually quite strong. I remember studying that they found sex-linked genes on the X chromosome that could significantly predict it, also I recall that identical twins have very high chances of being gay if the other is (something like 50%), is that not true?
Identical twin concordance rate is much less than that. It's actually one of the LEAST heritable traits.
Ah I see. Just had a quick google and this came up https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8494487/
Pretty small sample size though, is there a bigger study that disproves this?
Closer to 25%:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/not-final/
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/biological-determinism/
When I said it was one of the least, it was from recalling this scatter-plot:
https://theeconomyofmeaning.com/2018/02/13/who-is-best-at-guessing-the-heritability-of-traits/
Which is from a paper currently made available by everyone's favorite internet researcher, Gwern: https://gwern.net/docs/genetics/heritable/2019-willoughby.pdf
The citation in that paper for the heritability of sexual orientation is:
Långström N et al (2010) Genetic and environmental effects on same-
sex sexual behavior: a population study of twins in Sweden. Arch
Sex Behav 39(1):75–80
Thank you for those great reads. I guess my point is still that even at 25%, I wouldn't describe this as a weak link, so am wondering what lead Scott to describe it so.
Basically everything is heritable, sexual orientation is on the lower end of measured heritabilities.
> Can definitely see why you had to put those Ns in!
> honosexuality
Oh. I see what you did there!
I think there *is* and we should *strive* for a purely biological, apolitical taxonomy (I'll abbreviate with "pure") possible, but that we will never achieve it. Because humans.
Let's start with a definition of "behavioural disorder": "A disruptive behaviour, causing distress or harm for the patient or their surroundings". So a behavioural disorder is already defined in two different levels: the *individual level* and the *inter-personal level*.
On an _individual level_, we can and should have a pure taxonomy, as it helps an effective therapy of the patient - without some kind of stereotyping, every therapy would start from scratch; having a stereotype (or taxonomy) helps to differentiate possible therapy paths to choose from.
It's also very open to the individual context. A married patient being in love with another person and wanting to marry them can be a distress, no matter if you're living in a country where multi-partner marriages are allowed or not (distress of not wanting to hurt the first partner). Being monogamous but living in a polyamorous group can be as stressful as being polyamorous in a monogamous group. Note that this is still the individual level, because no other person is affected so far - it's just "in the patients head", and they need a way to cope with their own expectations, assessments and distress.
On the _inter-personal level_, it's a lot harder - and this is where it is indeed impossible to get a pure taxonomy. This again can be split into two subcategories: What _society constitutes_ as distressed and harmful for the individual, and what _society constitutes_ to be distressing and/or harmful for other people, where others have to be protected - in extreme cases "for their own good".
The latter first: A woman wearing jeans (and being comfortable and non-distressed about it) can be deemed stressful for the society by some societal power. Or at what age it is appropriate to take mind-altering substances, getting married, join the military (increasing the individual risk of getting killed by a few orders of magnitude!) or have sex... That's as political as it gets and we'll never have a pure taxonomy here for what constitutes as a behavioural disorder or not.
The former subcategory is harder, but it still would be possible to have a _mostly_ pure taxonomy. I agree that we'll never get 100% there, i.e.: At what distress level of gender dysphoria is a life-altering and permanent sex change okay? What security should be build into the evaluation process to ensure, that there is no less invasive way to solve a patients distress - or that the persons evaluating it are being driven by other means (being payed by the institutions performing sex change operations)? At what age do we deem a person capable of that?
As for the "we need taxonomy to decide what needs to be payed by society": that's unnecessary. Having a look at other countries than the U.S.A. with a free healthcare system, a behavioural disorder (on the personal level) is payed for without any taxonomy¹ - e.g. germany. And that's as pure of a taxonomy as it gets - you're in distress (mentally or physically), society should help you (happy workers are less sick and work better and so forth). The opposite part - society does not want to pay for a (ineffective) psychotherapy forever - usually has a process attached (again germany: there's restrictions on how many therapy sessions you can get before they need to be renewed, and after two renewals there's special review protocols, etc. etc.), and that process again will be different from society to society... But still: _taxonomy is not needed for insurance coverage_. That's just _one_ possible solution - and a bad one IMHO.
---
¹ granted, the insurances will be more likely to ask for additional diagnostics, if the therapist applies for a therapy to be covered and only puts down the general category, but they'll have to pay nevertheless.
The most controversial claim here is that a Twitter addiction isn't bad for the person or society 😂
Well the Twitter individuals do get to keep their teeth. I’m not even going to try to make the case that society at large isn’t harmed by Twitter though.
I was under the impression that the DSM was primarily a tool for classifying various psychological ailments, and outlining the different methods of treatment for them. For this functionality, I see no reason why ethics or politics should play a role in the classification. Suppose a homosexual started talking to their therapist because they earnestly wanted to become straight. If there's it turns out that there's no relevant biological difference between homosexuality and pedophilia, wouldn't he be "treated" the same way a pedophile would be treated? What's so bad about having an entry in a mental disorder classification scheme that says so?
I agree that it's good to have a classification of mental disorders that prioritizes ethics and practicality, but I can also see value in having a more wide-ranging taxonomy of mental disorders that covers other ailments that aren't broadly stigmatized by society as "bad things." If people are uppity about the stigma behind the term "mental disorder," I suppose the classification system can refer to its entries as something else.
I have to admit this article was extremely unconvincing for me.
Suppose that there was a substantial minority of politically organized people born one-handed, say, 0.5 percent. Would you think it reasonable if they demand that being born one-handed should not be considered a developmental abnormality because it is not a moral/political issue?
To me, it is obvious that the correct stance towards it would be that it is in fact an abnormality, that this is important because not only they might need specific help for it itself, but developmental abnormalities tend to go together and we'd probably find a number of other abnormalities that this group will disproportionally hold, and they will need support for those, too. Any compendium of developmental abnormalities should clearly include them.
At the same time, we shouldn't morally lambast them for it. Nor should we force help upon them if they don't want it. If someone is fine being one-handed, just let them be. It also makes sense to accommodate them to some degree.
The same obviously applies to mental disorders. Homosexuality is clearly some kind of attraction misfiring. Yes, that means homosexuals will probably hold certain other disorders disproportionally (and there is substantial evidence for this as well). Yes, that means homosexuals need special help and accommodation (the most obvious being that can only have children through adoption or other nonstandard approaches). No, it does not mean we should discriminate them.
As long as we conflate biological and moral/political, we will fail to understand humans fully. That does not mean we should ignore the moral, merely that we should be able to consider them separately. I wouldn't mind separate compendiums for the biological and the moral side, nor if a single compendium would include both but with appropriate labelling. But the current positions where we pretend something isn't a biological disorder because we do not consider it a moral failing is nonsensical.
Your "one handed people" example has something very close to it in real life: "Deaf culture".
[Apologies for my bad English] "Scott Alexander did it again. This time he put homosexuality on an equal footing with pedophilia but he has improved his technique: now he asks not to take it out of context by using unintelligible signs between words"
My conclusion: we cannot negotiate with the Cathedral.
Just curious, is "some journalist quoting Scott Alexander on politics" something that happened more than once, that is outside of that incident?
Not sure if any journalists were involved, but I believe there was trouble over this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/
It’s N appalling N you N have N to N do N this.
Congrat's on getting back to posts you'll regret writing. They've been sorely missed.
>So N, should N your N purely N biological N, apolitical N, taxonomy N of N mental N disorders N classify N homosexuality N as N a mental N illness, N or N should N it N refuse N to N classify N pedophilia N as N a N mental N illness?
You just answered your own question: if my taxonomy don't classify H as a mental illness, it's not doing it's job, is being political, and is catering to political needs. That the mental illness is relatively harmless is irrelevant. Palilalia, for instance, is even more harmless, it's still a mental illness.
Addiction is a mental illness as well, be it to crack or to twitter. Even an addiction with beneficial side-effects (Have there been artists who produced masterpieces against their will, unable to stop? Maybe, but we can just fall back on the more grounded workaholic who -in some cases- create a lot more wealth than my lazy ass, and should receive both our gratitude and our help) would be a mental illness.
Refusing to cateforize mental illness as such in order to prevent social stigma seems a great way to end up with mentally ill people uncared for, and still socially shunned precisely because they're uncared-for. In fact I don't really buy that the DSM is driving the loss of social stigma, rather than simply people collectively changing their mind.
And then there's the idea that "it with insurances" line of thought, that's a recipe for disaster, from one side (insurances lobbying to declassify what they don't want to pay for) as from the other (lobbying to classify non-illness in order to get it reimbursed by insurances). You may argue "Psychiatrists & insurers are responsible enough to not have it happen", but this entire post stems from how self-serving & vulnerable you (as in, psychiatrists in general) are to social pressure & will classify or declassify illness according to "well i really want these guys to get reimbursed".
Is the job of the concept “mental illness” to get people cared for or to do something apolitical? You seem to move back and forth between these two conflicting ideas.
Both? The "accurate cataloguing" aspect allow the "care for" aspect.
As a parabole, consider an entreprise of cataloguing chemical elements. A potential benefit of doing so could be of getting an accurate picture of the nutritional needs of healthy humans. Now if, in the middle of your cataloguing, you decide that, for some DEI reason, magnesium "isn't actually a chemical element", and claiming it is would be discriminatory against some minority or another. So you remove it. And thus your entreprise becomes less accurate, and less useful for whatever purposes it could be used.
Scott, if you're that worried about being taken out of context, either don't say it or rephrase it to be more innocuous. You're a smart guy, you could just describe homosexuality as a sexual targeting error that doesn't harm anyone, and then in a separate paragraph discuss sexual targeting errors that we object to for moral reasons. At the very least, the amount of ellipses required to stitch together an Out-Of-Context quote would be suspicious.
I think the issue is that you want to write provocative things for impact (which is not a bad thing, it's part of engaging writing), but also don't want them to be taken out of context and used against you, and those are clearly in a trade-off - interspacing letters into the sentence means it loses whatever impact on the reader you were hoping it would have, and I can still paraphrase this article as "While discussing the flaws of a purely biological, apolitical taxonomy of mental disorders, Scott compares homosexuality to paedophilia", because nobody clicks links anyway.
If people want to attack you for political/personal reasons, you've already given them more than enough ammunition, and I don't think it's a great idea to spend however long you continue blogging in fear of your own words being thrown back at you, because they will be anyway.
He writes to find the truth.
That's already hard enough without having to also jump the hurdle of "Please don't offend anyone."
The truth will always win, which is why he's so well read - even by leftists.
To steelman the position that transgender is not stigmatised by the DSM: gender dysphoria is caused by the assignment of the gender being wrong, not by the experienced/expressed gender being wrong, and could be prevented by developing a technique for assigning the correct gender (ie the one this person will experience/express as an adult) at birth.
So the fault is not in the person, but they are being driven mentally ill by society and their body not being in alignment with their experienced/expressed gender.
That is... very hypothetical. There is no such thing as "gender assigned at birth". There is "biological sex observed at birth". Seeing how there's no clear distinction between the brain of a transgender person and a cis person even in adulthood, it's extremely doubtful that making this distinction is possible at birth, in principle. Also note that this would have to be extremely reliable, since the result of a false-positive would be to raise a cis child in the gender that's not even congruent with its body.
I can't really get the last sentence to make sense. "The person" is presumably the subject that is expressing/ experiencing gender. If that gender does not match their body, how is that not the fault (as in, misfunction, not necessarily moral failure) of the person? Like, if a paranoid person is wrongly perceiving a worldwide plot to hurt and humiliate them when there is none, that's the person's fault, not the world's, right? If a transgender person perceives themself to be of one gender while their body is of the other, it's the person's fault, not the body's, right? And if that mismatch didn't exist, society wouldn't have any reason to put pressure on the person.
"There is no such thing as "gender assigned at birth". There is "biological sex observed at birth""
Of course there is: if we take sex as being purely biological (the premise of this entire article), then all social characteristics are gendered rather than sexed. The first social characteristic most people are assigned is a gender ("it's a boy/girl") and the second is a name based on that gender. There is no biological requirement to do that, therefore it is gender (social) not sex (biological). Obviously the assignment of gender is based on the biological sex, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.
As for "this is not possible" - agreed, we do not have any idea of what a technique could be that would lead to a successful determination of gender at birth. The only one I can imagine is if you could develop time travel - go and see what gender they develop, if they turn out to be trans, time travel back and assign them the right gender in the first place. This is clearly science fiction rather than reality, but there are plenty of people with untreatable medical conditions, and we don't tell them that their distress at those conditions is their fault or that they are mentally disordered for not accepting their untreatable condition - so why should we not accept that the assignment of gender at birth was wrong in an individual case even as we acknowledge that we can't always get it right?
"If a transgender person perceives themself to be of one gender while their body is of the other, it's the person's fault, not the body's, right?"
Why? The gender cannot be changed (AIUI, that is the basis of the diagnosis of gender dysphoria; if it could be changed then the person should not be so diagnosed). The body can. This is clearly a physical problem in that the body does not align with the self-perception and the body can be aligned with the self-perception. The psychological problem is distress caused by the lack of such alignment.
"gender dysphoria is caused by the assignment of the gender being wrong"
"their body not being in alignment with their experienced/expressed gender"
These claims seem contradictory. Even if society is somehow able to divine and assign the "correct" gender, the body would still not be in alignment, and so dysphoria unavoidable.
I read the title very literally, and my immediate thought was that the obvious issue with purely biological, apolitical classification is that mental disorders are about how people function within a society, whereas a biological taxonomy would talk in terms of the underlying causes: genes and metabolic pathways and cell damage and head trauma.
I'm sure that, many decades (centuries?) in the future we'll understand enough about how the mind works to construct such a taxonomy, in the same way that we know that "deafness" can be caused by a variety of different genetic mutations, or by aging, or by bacterial infection, or by damage to the inner ear caused by loud sounds. This will be great to know, but the practical implications of this level of understanding for the deaf community seem to be pretty limited - obviously the distinction between being born deaf and progressive hearing loss is significant, but we know that already! I expect that understanding the exact causes of schizophrenia will also be restricted in its impact.
I work in gov't employment agency myself and 20% of my job is assessing if sick people are capable of work. We use the diagnostic system for this too, and things outside it don't practically exist to us, even though the symptoms are really real and hell for people. And that sucks, but we live in a society and if we didn't have it we'd have to make a lot of really complicated decisions and we'd fail hard at that.
Diagnoses inform multiple governmental needs, from care and treatment to identifying beneficiaries of welfare to insurance and actuarial decisions, and they're laden with serious moral/political weight, because they impact people's lives in so many ways.
I do understand the general motivation behind this thinking, but semi-equating "political" with "pragmatic and ethical" less so, and the example with punching bags and kittens completely lost me.
The biology of muscle movements is the same, but the effects are not: one inflicts suffering, the other one doesn't. Now, I understand the argument: "'suffering is bad' is a moral/ethical judgment, and we want to do without those". But is that really true? Why then not go on to claim that pain is, in principle, no different from any other sensory perception? And why the label of "disease" and "disorder"? Heck, what's with all that fuss about "pure biology"? Isn't biology just a man-made and thus political label applied to some physical and chemical processes and phenomena which obey the very same laws as everything else in the universe, "dead" or "alive"? So how could it possibly be pure?
Obviously, this would be a ~wrong~ useless basis for any such taxonomy, or even any conversation about disorders, mental or otherwise. "Disorder" always implies some judgment. I get that this post is fundamentally about how hard it is to decide whether some concrete phenomenon is a disorder or not, but this is not the same as saying "disorder as a concept is meaningless independently of how it is defined", which would be the more consequential position. "Pain and suffering are bad" to me seems like a reasonably minimal assumption to overcome this meaninglessness, and I think it would be fair to grant at least that to the authors without accusing them of politicizing.
If we accept that:
1. biology as a concept makes sense
2. some or all biological organisms have subjective experiences
3. some of those experiences, that we label "pain" and "suffering", are "bad", i.e., we seek to reduce or avoid them
then it becomes fairly easy to distinguish between punching a punching bag and a kitten, or between consensual homosexuality and pedophilia. It's easy to see that one of those actions statistically increases the overall experienced suffering much more than the other.
Cats are evil, but what did a punching bag ever do to anyone :)
Scott:
It's probably net-negative for your Substack income to put the Ns in. You've already lost anyone who cares about what the outrage machine thinks; all the Ns do is annoy the people who remain - and either avoid or discourage the people who come here precisely *because* they're defying the outrage machine. Remember, you got a whole pile of new subscribers from that NYT article.
You're on the Blue Tribe's shitlist. Sunk cost. Relish in the freedom to ignore that sunk cost.
It would have been easier on readers to state at the top that for purposes of *this* post anything italicized is not to be taken out of context.
The N thing drove Scott’s point - and his sense of frustration - home better though.
On one hand I get it - today's media is Baphomet, with a unique ability *and motivation* to seemingly destroy people's lives and livelihoods out of sheer glee.
On the other hand, I'm a "purple" triber (I have one foot firmly in each of the two "tribes" so to speak, in terms of lifestyle and deep culture), I have firmly conservative Republican views on most issues, and yet I am an unapologetic gay man who thinks those who see homosexuality as immoral or bad are full of themselves and need to get a grip.
Despite this hodgepodge of views I am turned off by the seeming instinct to attempt to appease the Blue Tribe media in any way. At this point I simply see the mainstream media as malevolent, and think there is no point in even attempting to reason with them. I am instinctively turned off by those who do not realize this and still see them as an authority to try and reason with.
My interpretation of this is that Scott still has tons of bridges in his social and professional life that cross into Blue territory, and he is not yet ready/willing to burn them. Hence the obligatory salute to the Pope.
The other interpretation is that Scott spent a lot of time on 4chan lately, and this whole story is just a 5D troll to find an excuse to insert 'N' between every 2 words in a way that everyone who spends time on 4chan knows what it means.
Oh god. I don’t buy this for a second. If you have something to say, kindly say it.
I don't understand, are you doubting my sincerity ? or Scott's ?
In case you're doubting my own sincerity, I *do* believe that my first explanation is a big part of why Scott usually avoids being too offensive even after the Blue tribe has already shown its disdain for him and his community multiple times. I don't claim it's true, but it's what I believe. The second explanation is of course an obvious joke.
Okay, I’ll take you at your word about the joke. No harm, no foul.
But really I think the reason Scott is not being offensive is because he’s simply a decent guy.
You have all my respect, but the entire concept of "Offensiveness" as understood by the Blue tribe is bullshit. A tool of control.
There is far more to decency and being a virtuous person than a simple list of words that you're allowed or not allowed to use. I can see why those words are hated and how some subset of people who use them are not decent, but to extrapolate beyond that and just ban the words entirely is such bullshit and simple-minded thinking.
I believe you, Scott, and every other "Heretic Blue Triber" guy or gal has a lot to learn from 4chan. Specifically, you have to learn the concept of cry bullying, that when someone makes a big deal about "ohhhh my god that's so fucking offensive" they are not really hurt and they are not really offended, they are using your easily convinced social instincts to exert power and control over you.
To be entirely honest with you, I enjoy saying the N syllable to people who make a big show of being so offended by it. Nothing about black skinned people irritates me, I just love to see the faces of those who use them as a tool of control when it fails.
The thing is, you know very little about me and are making some terribly inaccurate assumptions.
II got my first Union card at 16 working after schools and Saturdays in a factory. At 18 I started a decade long stint as a laborer in an iron mine.
I don’t whine and I don’t cry.
I worked my way through university as a student doing heavy labor moving lab equipment and working in the university bone yard and it’s heating plant.
My wife worked 5 ten hour shifts and 8 hours on Saturday on a Ford plant plant assembly line in San Jose before becoming a mine millwright.
She doesn’t whine or cry either.
She is offended by cruelty and ignorance but does not tattle or try to cancel. She gets in the face of the cruel and ignorant and tells them to fuck of.
I am offended by cruelty and ignorance too. But I don’t tattle or try to cancel either. I get in their face and tell them to fuck off too.
Quit stereotyping me. No one at MSNBC tells me what is right and what is wrong. I’ve learned those things first hand. Yes I am an old school, blue collar liberal. I’ve had coworkers killed by accidents on my shift. I am not some thin skinned, whiny little bitch.
I think that the main issue is that Scott just gets very distressed when people publicly disparage him, the more public and seemingly unfair the worse. He's more or less made his peace with the shitlist status, but prefers them to hate him quietly.
Perhaps this is an artefact of Scott having much stronger Blue Tribe affinities than I do. Despite a very Blue Tribe upbringing myself, and a mess of contradictory and contrarian views in all directions, my political loyalties have always tended Right (as have many of my lifestyle preferences, in this world where basically everything has a political valence) and thus I've never really cared what the Blue Tribe organs of Correct Thought think about anything. Perhaps Scott, having views much more toward the Left than me, still feels at some subconscious level that these are "his people" and ought to understand him better. He's clearly not enslaved to such illusions but there may still be some yearning deep down.
How about a less sensitive example: left-handedness. Nobody considers that a disorder, mental or otherwise, today. But when my father was a child, his teachers would slap his hand with a ruler any time they saw him write left-handed. (It worked, sort of: he still prefers to use his left hand when nobody is threatening to slap him with a ruler, but he ended up being ambidextrous.)
So would it be correct to say that left-handedness is not a disorder today, but it was back then, because of the problems of living in a society which did not accept it? Or should we say that no, those teachers were just stupid, left-handedness is not a disorder and it never was.
How about if you lived in a stone-age tribe where it is super important that everybody is able to hunt with a bow and arrow, and all their bows are made to be used right-handed and for some good practical reason it would be super inconvenient if the tribe had to make and maintain a separate left-handed bow just for you? Would left-handedness be legitimately classified as a disorder then?
I don't actually know what point I am trying to make with this analogy -- I just figured it can't hurt to have an example to discuss which doesn't map to a topic that's already a political hot potato..
>because of the problems of living in a society which did not accept it
You can see a technological reason, sort of. A fountain pen and left-to-right writing make a mess of handwriting, because your hand is prone to smear wet ink on paper.
Lefty here: This still happens with pencil and ballpoint pen, just less so. Back when I had to handwrite a lot I'd end up with graphite smeared across my hand, and I'll smudge ink if I'm writing too fast. (rarely a problem nowadays, but annoying in college)
I guess the other option, if pencils haven't been invented yet, is brushes like in East Asia. Then your hand isn't supposed to touch the paper at all.
> It’s just the claims to be able to avoid political bias in what is vs. isn’t a disorder that I find compelling.
There's a "don't" missing from that sentence, isn't there?
Also, I've seen you use "transgender" as a noun on a lot of occasions and that feels weird to me. I don't think I've ever seen it used like that by transgender people themselves; they use it exclusively as an adjective. I'd use "transgenderness", maybe "transgenderism" at a push.
There is a fair amount of sophistry at work here. You are effectively asking to subordinate biological taxonomy to the rules governing insurance policies. I would like to think it would be easier to change insurance rules than biology. If something is harming an individual or others around them ,it needs to be addressed by the society, whether or not it is a biological disorder. Conversely, some biological disorders are harmless and require no treatment.
How does the bureaucracy of private health care get you to this conclusion?
You said meth instead of Twitter as the addiction that's clearly bad for both self and society, but that appears to be backwards.
Is it necessary that these 3 things are all the same?
- being a mental disorder
- getting insurance coverage
- be viewed as a problem to be solved
In an alternative world could we have a DSM that talks about things that are unusual to help with destigmatizing (not just "disorders") and then have some subset get insurance help because they're serious enough? It would be a bigger tent, so people wouldn't feel bad about homosexuality or being trans being included, and whether treatment was covered would be an independent axis.
One of the core problems with the taxonomy of mental disorders is that our conception of a mental disorder involves causing dysfunction for the person within the major areas of what we consider to be living a fulfilling, independent life, and whether a behavioral or thought pattern causes that is intrinsically dependent on the surrounding culture. It can be what causes the dysfunction is societal treatment.
This isn't a novel observation and psychiatry and abnormal psychology try very hard to separate out what appear to be arbitrary cultural factors, but this is a difficult task.
A substance use disorder - a drug addiction if you prefer - is at its root a compulsion to engage in a behavior despite the negative consequences it invites. Addictive chemicals work because their biochemistry has a quirk that allows them to trigger the mammalian reward-motivation pathways in the brain and produces reinforced behavior. The negative consequences part; however, cannot be completely disentangled from societal response to this. Certain substance use disorders are much worse because people will risk severely harmful consequences that the state actively dispenses in response to use.
But suppose a state banned women reading books under threat of long prison sentences. Would women persist in trying to read books despite this penalty? I bet they would. Would this prove that women reading books is a mental disorder because they are compelled to do it despite the negative consequences it invites leading to a loss of global functioning? I think the answer is plainly no, but why that might be is interesting. I think the answers to this question outside of, "Well, we just don't find that legitimate" to be not compelling. You can't escape making moral judgments about what society ought to do and how that interacts with human behavior.
> But the whole point of wanting a purely biological apolitical taxonomy of mental illness was to make sure we would never again repeat the DSM’s error of calling homosexuality a mental disorder!
Not to Greg Cochran, who says diseases should be conceived of in terms of reducing Darwinian fitness. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/paternal-age-and-homosexuality/
By that standard, pedophilia is LESS of a mental disorder: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/pedophiles-are-long-term-maters.html
By such a definition, it seems like we would have to conclude that most people living outside Africa are suffering from the immensely debilitating disease of birth-control usage. I think that would be at odds with how most people use the term "disease".
Isn't the problem here that our current culture derives its morality/ethics in part from the psychological classification system? That seems the fundamental error at play here. People should stop doing that. To develop true ethics you need to actually know how the world is. Classification systems are about learning how the world actually is. Morality/ethical systems are a different thing. I am a short male. This could be considered stigmatizing to me. The culture accepts that as an accurate description despite the danger of stigma. Morally/Ethically everyone pretty much agrees not to be a jerk to me because of my height but we don't feel the need to reclassify me as "normal height-ed" or to avoid using rulers.
It's moreso the inverse. The classification of mental health disorder necessarily depends on what society deems to be a problem. The various theories of mental illness never quite escape importing cultural judgments about what sorts of behaviors and cognition people shouldn't have.
The difference between homosexuality and paraphilic disorders is that the former is morally permissible unto itself and any psychological distress it causes the person is because of errant societal disapproval. But we'll deem pedophilia a disorder because it is *not* morally permissible and the social consequences it invites on some level are warranted. It's a disorder because it makes a person want to do something morally wrong or, more accurately, is the condition of wanting to do something morally wrong.
This is in large part because, outside of clear-cut physical brain trauma, most mental illness is in a spectrum of normal behavior, where “illness” is on the extreme edge of the distribution. Everyone experiences some anxiety. How much is dehabilitating is circumstantial inherently. Ephebophilia is probably a common thing, but social conditions and alternatives act as a strong check. Similarly I suspect that is true of the broader set of chronophilia and other “targets” per Scott. There are probably more people out there with wider preferences, that can easily focus their interests in practice. The impact of self-control is a big factor. Similarly there seems to be a muncher wider spread of psychopathic behaviors, some of it conditioned on habitation. But plenty of people of are fully functioning in society without other factors contributing to drive the worst in behavior.
So you have spectrums and plenty of cofactors that might influence the expression of both behavior and inner-states. No wonder the definitions aren’t clear cut. We are talking about extremes that require multiple things to be true, that might even be fine in other circumstances. Simple definitions are going to be hard to come by on the margin.
My understanding of the HITOP model is that it would ideally be able to identify a series of dimensions upon which we all sit. It attempts to determine the dimensions atheoretically, (sort of like the Big 5 personality traits). This would be useful information for each person to have and may help them gain insight into the distress they feel. It is the distress that would be the focus of treatment. The idea is that this side-steps the morally wrong=disordered or disordered=morally wrong problems outlined above and provides a more individualized experience. It is of course true that 2 people with identical profiles may have differing levels of distress entirely based on the culture they are in at the time.
My rephrasing of Scott's observation is that tying specific complex instincts/behaviors down to genes is impractical for nature, that nature can either hardcode simple rules which leads to e.g. birds misidentifying their parents, or rely on higher-level cognition filling in the details of a fuzzier idea, which leads to e.g. mistargeting. A few thoughts that lead me to find the idea unsatisfying, despite having a pretty compelling premise.
Caveat emptor: I'm not certain I've entirely pinned down Scott's idea. To avoid accidentally equivocating, let me try to define biological here as a characteristic, or a change in a characteristic, with enough impact on effective reproduction and a solid enough grounding in genetic material that it can ends up naturally selected for or against in a meaningful sense, in a reasonable time-frame. By contrast let define a moral as something that is mostly left up to society by default of nature not biasing it very much one way or the other.
>If this is accurate, the N relevant N difference N between N homosexuality N and N pedophilia N is N moral N, not N biological. Both are sexual targeting errors, but one re-targets sexuality onto other people who can consent and won’t be harmed, so it’s fine. The other targets people who can’t consent and will be harmed, so it’s bad.
Under the sexual targeting error hypothesis, it would seem that homosexuality is not determined biologically, rather something that develops from a different interpretation of our fuzzy instincts and drives.
That there must be environmental causes, before sexual drives are fully developed, that pushes them to unfold in a different way.
1/ Wikipedia estimates a quarter of black swan — Cygnus atratus — couples are homosexual. It describes males as larger, with a straighter and longer bill. Presumably it is not exceptionally hard for natural selection to unearth genes that visibly differentiate male and females, so that I wouldn't expect hacks of the same kind that some species of birds use to recognize their parents to be exceptionally harder when it comes to recognizing potential sexual partners. Pedophilia in nature, or at least in black swans, seems much less notable than homosexuality.
We should expect making females birds instinctively recognizable as sexual partners in DNA to be in the same category of difficulty as than making younglings and parents instinctively recognizable, so instincts being hard is not a compelling explanation for why the sexual-partner-identification instinct would have been pushed to cognition in birds.
2/ But let's assume sexual targeting has a good reason to be pushed to cognition, perhaps because parent recognition is needed from a very early age and needs a hardcoded rule more than sexual targeting does, and I can try to make a different point.
It seems to me that given nontrivial reward, we should still expect natural selection in birds to not have had a great difficulty in unearthing some sort of hardcoded anti-homosexuality distaste in birds, or that the difficulty of conjuring this hardcoded rule should not be much greater in the case of homosexuality than for pedophilia.
If homosexuality and pedophilia are equal and purely moral differences, with no biological basis, all else equal we would not expect the rate of homosexuality in birds to be very much higher than the other. And it seems vaguely reasonable to assume all else is roughly equal, or close enough to not matter too much.
So, it may not be inconsistent to hypothesize that the rate of pedophilia being lower than the rate of homosexuality — at least in birds — could have a biological basis. Possibly, and I may be going out on a limb here, pedophilia bad. To an extent where it would be selected against with categorically more urgency than homosexuality, way upstream of the effect of any moral constructions or culture war topics.
3/ I'd like to hand-wave something about how you may be a little quick to dismiss harm as a biological issue, because trust and social cohesion is good, as we know. If you have to isolate some subgroup of birds from the other birds to avoid scary bad outcomes, maybe this is meaningful to point to in a less subjective sense than purely calling it a moral issue.
4/ Back to talking about people directly, there it makes more sense to me that we would generally have fuzzy instincts over hardcoded rules for picking sexual partners. We have complex societies, what makes a good partner in a human is more complex than in a bird. We've likely greater-or-equal cognitive capacity available for evaluating fuzzy instincts than birds do.
But, it's not clear to me that it should be exceptionally hard to add a hardcoded rule on top of the fuzzy instinct, if that were beneficial. Our fear instinct is fuzzy rather than hardcoded — we can fear complex abstract things at our core, and with intensity — but we also have hardcoded fears on top of that (say the sight of blood, insects, mice), and those vary with considerable individuality!
Here's how I would try to refine the idea of instincts being hard: It is impractical to try to encode firm rules for the selection of sexual partners in DNA, so we have fuzzy rules that are more open to interpretation. In the same way that not everyone has the same instinctive fears, despite fears having a fairly uncontroversial tie back to reproductive fitness, there may exist a set of more specific fuzzy rules to refine sexual targeting. This may be without those rules having to be either entirely hardcoded or entirely open to interpretation.
It is presumably hard to find a genetic correlate for specific instinctive fears, and presumably the same would be true for pedophilia, or homosexuality. Still, there is a real sense in which explaining instincts as untethered from biology doesn't make for a very compelling explanation, regardless of how hard a time we have looking for those ties.
It is possible that pedophilia or homesexuality are natural variations on either the *specificity* of an instinct (in a sort of "openness to experience" sense, perhaps how much an instinct is open to interpretation is itself a variable trait), or more directly variations in strength of components that compose the instincts for sexual preferences.
This variation would still reflect the reality of instincts being hard.
The key factor that puts me in a rage over this subject is the bit about imprinting. Many schools are encouraging experimentation with homosexual acts at an early age -- when the hormones are raging and imprinting is possible.
I used to be a Libertarian, and worked on the campaigns of gay candidates.
The current effort by the alphabet community to imprint children in a gay direction has changed my mind dramatically on the subject. I now miss the Moral Majority and was to bring back sodomy laws. Take this a data point. Helnlein's prediction of Crazy Years followed by a Cromwellian revolution could well happen.
1) I work in the deaf community. Its not just these people do not hear as you would think. Especially if you do not hear from when you were born, you will have hard time to read thw "written language" and visual languge (sign language) will be natural for you. You will very probably be part of "Deaf community" which involves a specific culture and you will have your way of cognitive processing. To feel better, the "Deaf community" uses "D" and not "d" and is holding the idea that "deafness" is not a disease but just a human variety and the reason is prevent others to stigmatize them. At the same time in many countries these people have state half-rent, social help and insurance coverage for various conected problems happily using this (because they are not disabled (they can do everything but do not hear) but they are disabled (they are foreigners in their country - can not communicate with people around them and often also psychiatroc problems are involved...well....not from deafness but from depression that follows it?) You see, it is a perfect parallel to this post.
2) I know there are probably many evolutionists here but actually many astronomers and other field scientists **secretly** believe there is an engineer behind life (or maybe a group of engineers). If so, we are biological machines and it seems we consist of a hardware and software. What is making this more complicated, we can produce (involving a small factory in women to produce other machines) and there is adaptation and other weird mechanisms. Let us say, our friend Elon Musk would miniaturize his factory and place it in a car booth, so the car itself can produce another car. The car would also adapt, evolve to some extent etc. Building would be based on a design plan called MNA (Musk DNA). No one can deny, after some thousands of years, Elon would be capable of constructing such a car (there is just no motivation, where would come the profit from??). Now, these cars start to reproduce, adapt etc and small mistakes show here and there. A car is born without wheels. A car is born with a software for a cattle. Etc. How would you call these? How do we know it was Elon's plan or it is too deviated from his plan? Etc. Let us say, we can not meet with Elon. We just have understand from how the cars look and what they do etc.
> "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."
It's not incoherent if their politics is the one good, true politics derived scientifically from nature. In that case, the taxonomy will follow nature, just as the politics follows nature, and each will be aligned perfect with the other without any effort beyond what's required for true knowledge of nature. The one true natural scientific taxonomy will be 100% politically correct, without thinking about politics at all, because the politics is also the one true natural scientific politics.
Reading over that, it sounds to me like I'm being ironic, but I'm genuinely not trying for irony. Lots of people really think that their politics is derived scientifically from nature. And to them, an apolitical taxonomy such as Scott describes here isn't incoherent at all. It's only incoherent under the assumption that their politics isn't the one true natural scientific politics.
How do those people never run into the "is/ought" divide? You can have a million true observations about nature, but you will never observe a naturally formed stone plate with ten commandments written on it. Politics is not about what the world looks like, it's about what people should do, and there was never a scientific experiment establishing that.
Some people look too much to manuals like the DSM to inform their opinion of whether or not something is bad or not. Pedophilia's badness has nothing to do with whether it is in the DSM. Making it a diagnosis makes it something that it is considered appropriate for health care professionals to treat. It's not really even a statement about what kind of thing pedophilia is.
Similarly, in my opinion, some people misinterpret what it means when it is said, e.g. "alcoholism is a disease". They think this is a scientific discovery that we have made about alcoholism that takes it from one category and puts it in another (like discovering that coral is an animal and not a plant). This isn't really true. Saying alcoholism is a disease doesn't mean we have discovered it is just the same kind of thing as influenza or thyroid cancer. "Alcoholism is a disease" means that we consider it is something that is a distinct entity that is appropriately treated by (among other people) health care professionals, who need to make it into a diagnosis because that is how medicine works. Sure, thinking this way is informed by scientific discoveries, but it doesn't depend on them. We could consider alcoholism a disease even if we knew nothing about its etiology or pathophysiology.
Also, sometimes people think that mental disorders aren't as real as somatic ones because they aren't as well defined. However, it is easy to forget that the distress caused by somatic disorders is also subjective, and the distress is actually why people get treatment, not something objective about the disease. Acne is just as clearly a disease, objectively, as cancer (by this I mean it is possible to identify parts of the body that are abnormal), but for a supermodel to have acne is a much greater problem (for the patient) than for some random guy who doesn't care at all.
(Of course, whether or not the DSM actually categorizes mental disorders correctly is another question.)
> 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 - you’re the wrong gender, but you’re crazy for being unhappy about it? Also, I can’t find support for this distinction in a literal reading of the DSM criteria themselves
The DSM says that there must be evidence of distress about the incongruence between a person's assigned and experienced gender for a gender dysphoria diagnosis. If someone is transgender but does not experience distress, they are not suffering from a mental disorder according to the DSM. I would probably put myself in this category, as a non-binary/agender person who doesn't experience any gender.
I think the same principal should be applied to everything. If a condition doesn't cause distress or impairment to the person who has it, it should not be seen as a mental disorder. This means that I think the definition of mental disorders should be individual rather than political or societal.
A test for whether someone is suffering from a mental disorder could be whether they are experiencing significant distress or impairment, and whether they would still be experiencing significant distress or impairment if they were transported to an alternate universe where everyone was like them. I believe only people where the answer is 'yes' to both questions are suffering from a mental disorder. Perhaps the definition could be made more precise if expanded to take account of whether one condition impairs the ability to feel distressed about something associated with another condition (e.g. a paedophile with ASPD who doesn't feel distress about their paedophilia because of ASPD), but I think even the simplified version makes more sense than any definition that pathologizes dissent to societal norms.
So, a serial killer that feels no distress or impairment due to his psychopathy would have no mental disorder? I guess that such definition is coherent, but I'm not sure that it makes more sense.
“teleology is a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her, but he is unwilling to be seen with her in public”
Fascinating post! I was just these days thinking about exactly this topic.
So, to sum up: if homosexuality and paedophilia are congenital, biological and immutable (as it seems we are supposed to believe these days), yet paedophilia is clearly morally illegitimate, then the fact that a trait is congenital, biological and immutable does not automatically make it morally legitimate (as is the case being made for homosexuality).
On the other hand, if these traits are not congenital nor immutable, that means they are at least partly (mostly?) sociocultural, in which case, whether they are to be encouraged/discouraged become a matter of individual ideology, no?
Except "homosexuality is natural" has never been an argument *for* homosexuality. Indeed, assuming something is good simply because it's natural is a fallacy. Murder is natural, rape is natural, and yes, pedophilia is most likely natural, and it's perfectly reasonable to oppose those behaviors in spite of their natural origins.
"Homosexuality is natural" is merely a counter-argument *against* the idea, frequently espoused by social conservatives, that homosexuality is specifically wrong because it's unnatural. That argument is doubly wrong, because not only is it an appeal to nature fallacy (in other words, saying "homosexuality is wrong because it's not natural" is just as fallacious as saying "murder is right because it is natural"), but it's also based in an assertion that's just outright false, since homosexual isn't actually unnatural at all.
The reason that most people in modern Western countries accept homosexuality while rejecting murder, rape, and pedophilia has nothing to do with how natural or unnatural any of them are. It has everything to do with the fact that the first one doesn't cause harm to anyone (and furthermore, that trying to suppress it does cause harm), whereas the latter three are all extremely harmful. Sure, social conservatives can try to make the argument that it's "harmful to society," but that's such an incredibly vague argument that it can be and has been made about virtually anything and everything (e.g. porn, alcohol, cannabis, caffeine, Adderall, fatty/salty/sugary foods, vegetarianism, meat-eating, low tax rates, high tax rates, car culture, violent movies, edgy adult cartoons, rap music, pop music, rock music, heavy metal, video games, Dungeons & Dragons), so people tend not to take it seriously.
People did take it plenty seriously for many centuries. But these days the reasons to do so no longer have the same cultural force, so we'll just have to establish the harmfulness of that stuff in practice.
People took it seriously in large part because of religious prohibitions on homosexuality, but religion no longer has the cultural cachet that it used to. Even among devout Christians, there's a LOT of people who don't really care about adherence to traditional sexual morality, viewing it as more of a cultural artifact than a central pillar of the faith. And in a society where the vast majority of the populace doesn't have any problem with sex outside of marriage, and even considers it a totally normal part of life, then saying "okay but when it's gay sex then it's *really* bad" isn't going to be persuasive. (Some of the more devout Christians might assume that the solution is to take a harder stance against premarital sex among hetero couples, in order to push it into being considered socially unacceptable again, but every attempt to do this outside of isolated hyper-religious enclaves has backfired and driven people away from the faith altogether.)
Leaving aside the issue of religiosity, a lot of people are also just burned out by the sheer abundance of moral panics over the past few decades, especially when most of them have turned out to be misleading exaggerations or just total bullshit. From "rock & roll is the devil's music," to "Satanists are kidnapping and brainwashing children," to "D&D is a pathway to real occultism and human sacrifice," to "gangsta rap is causing a rise in youth crime rates," to "The Matrix and Grand Theft Auto cause school shootings," to "teenagers are throwing Rainbow Parties where girls all take turns having oral sex with random boys," to "college students are getting dangerously drunk off alcohol suppositories," a lot of people have wisely grown skeptical of any claims that some new trend is hurting society.
Attempts to "establish the harmfulness of that stuff in practice" will usually be perceived as bad-faith arguments because, quite frankly, they almost always *are* bad faith arguments.
Oh, I didn't mean to say that I a priori assume that all of that stuff is indeed harmful, even if some of it was when Christianity and co. were codifying their dogmas. I simply made an observation that its harmfulness will be established, one way or another, by people practicing it, since there's nobody there to forbid it any longer.
Indeed it's possible there could be some reason, based on long centuries of human experience and social practice, that homosexuality was considered morally illegitimate by practically all (all?) major religions since the dawn of humanity, no? And even those cultures that really went in for it, such as the Ancient Greeks, I'm pretty sure would have been shocked by the idea that two men in a sexual relationship should be considered a marriage, and that they, therefore, could and should raise children. But it is just so passé these days to try to learn anything from thousands of years of human experience and traditional wisdom... I agree with you that at this point, we are immersed in one gigantic social experiment and only time will tell if we are on the right track...
I am not talking about natural or non-natural, obviously nature is not a guideline for any kind of morality (in most religions, including atheism, morality is based around striving to limit certain instinctive, natural tendencies). I am talking about whether a trait is congenital and immutable, for a trait which is congenital and immutable, it would be very hard to argue that it could be immoral (would indeed be like saying that being ginger is immoral). But certainly the attempt is being made to put homosexuality (and transsexuality) on an even footing with purely genetic traits, such as race, in order to bullet-proof them against any possibility of considering them less biologically or morally valid than cis/heterosexuality. Once that has been achieved, then anyone who does not wish to encourage homosexuality/transsexuality as perfectly valid and interchangeable options vis a vis heterosexuality/cis, is tantamount to a racist.
If something as basic as taxonomy is based on practicality and ethics, rather than science, then is anything about clinical psychology scientific? Are some disorders more scientific than others, schizophrenia perhaps?
What in principle distinguishes therapy from the kind of ethical and practical counseling you might get from a priest or a fortune teller? What justifies the professional licensure of therapists, when we wouldn't dream of licensing priests and fortune tellers? I get that psychiatry is different, you're prescribing drugs, you have to know what's safe, and what might be effective. That's got to be based on evidence. Is therapy really medical or scientific at all? Or is it just talking to someone about your problems?
Hey Scott - I've been thinking this for years and I'm so glad that you've written it out. To discuss this is very taboo.
"Born this way" as a criteria of whether a behavior or identity is moral is an extremely conservative idea. In regard to LBGT identities, for conservatives this criteria was fulfilled by reproductive ability between a pair. Progressive people decided to not question the criteria, but instead cultivated evidence that the brains or early-age behavior of LBGT individuals are different from others, which indicated biological determinism of their identities. So, weirdly, conservatives and many progressives agree on the criteria, and simply disagree on what evidence should used for determining that the criteria are fulfilled.
The truly progressive thing to do would be to question whether this is the right criteria to use. And, its definitely a terrible criteria, because too many undesirable behaviors have biological components, like mental illness and addiction. Honestly, most human behavior is a combination of biological and social inputs, so it feels pretty meaningless to create a dichotomy based on those qualities.
Plus the biological determinism approach to describing LBGT identities has always struck me as sad, because it implies you would be different if you could actually chose, and it undersells the tremendous creative work humans put into developing their identities.
Morality should just be how your actions effect other people and yourself. There shouldn't be a component of fatalism or biological determinism. But a lot of people believe in God, so fatalism and determinism are important to their worldview.
What if we just strictly defined "mental disease" as something that impairs the functioning of the mind or causes distress in the individual with the disease (defined by the individual in question), just as we do for bodily diseases.
Paedophilia N wouldn't N necessarily N be N a N disease by that metric, but that doesn't matter as coercing and punishing people is the job of the justice system, not the health industry.
This would also make clear that psychosis etc on it's own is not a thoughtcrime and does not deserve punishment or a forced cure.
I am here, FULLY agreed with your idea... but you must bear the responsibility of your idea.. What if, for instance, someone comes to you and he says "I am gay, I am a man who loves men", etc. but ALSO he says "but I wish I was not, and the practicing of my homosexuality feels like something beyond me which I cannot control, which harms me"... I think this is very marginal and (hopefully?) a small number of people, but what with today's ethic do we say? "No, sorry, you are deluded, homosexuality is etc. you must reconcile yourself to this and rid yourself of your homophobia". I don't say that this is wrong, but what is to delineate the 'lived experience' of someone like this from the pedophile who says his desires terrify him, or the pornography addict who wants to be rid of desires which he feels his addiction created within him..? Do you agree that already your notion of 'causes distress' is very personal, and that to decide the question of whether or not to attend to 'distress' we sometimes ARE in fact willing to tell the patient that he is deluded (he is homophobic and hates himself), and other times are not (you are correct that you have an addiction)? Maybe in the case I gave we choose this secret third option, "yes you are right, your sexuality is harming you, but ONLY in some specific of its presentation (e.g. you choose to go with strangers rather than a close, loving partner who you trust blah blah), and so we will cure you of that part of your disorder rather than the other part which is not a disorder.."
if there was a broader understanding of disorder or "impairing the functioning of the mind" as you put it, then we should PRECISELY be prepared to cure things which we do not even know we are curing...
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.
The two choices you present for "purely biological, apolitical taxonomy..." seem clearly delineated, and I think we ought to just choose the 2nd one without any problem. Your language is also very clear: "things which don't deserve stigma", "make everyone mad at you", "have everyone end up thinking you're even more political" (not concerned with the 'truth'; if you had said these things about the conclusions of a physicist, he might say 'why should I care?'). Consistent with this, you are very mindful and careful of the fact that e.g. in (certain) biological terms, homosexuality and pedophilia share a taxonomy, AND you are clear that this is NOT in itself a moral/ethical fact (in particular because each treat the matter of consent differently). The fact alone that you write about this distinction means that there is (at least in your mind) a 'matter of fact' about the taxonomical approach, AND that there is a corresponding social/political/etc. pressure exerting itself regarding this approach. So in the sense that you are arguing against pursuing apolitical taxonomies, you nonetheless appeal to some external biological approach & show that it does not give a complete moral account --i.e. it does not tell us what we ought to do.
You say also "That is, we want our definition of “mental disorder” to be ethical (eg not stigmatize people who don’t deserve stigma). And we want it to be practical (eg identify a group of people who need and deserve care)."... In the first sense, what I am asking is 'why can't we have a non-ethical taxonomy?' Obviously, there is no need to ask this question in spheres of thought which don't concern the (practical) affairs of human lives. And obviously the possibility of "stigmatiz[ing] people who don't deserve stigma" is the reason we want to be "ethical". However, let's be good analysts and forget all the nice and pleasant work "being ethical" is doing for us here: ""[t]hat is, we want our definition of “mental disorder” to ... not stigmatize people who don’t deserve stigma". So now we can see the operation of this sentence properly. But in the sense of answering the question about a taxonomy and its definitions, it still is difficult to see how the former part relates to the latter. Turn to your fellow mathematician and tell him you want his definitions not to stigmatize people who don't deserve it.
(1) -- Our definitions are erroneous, people who do not need to be 'cured' are labelled as in-need-of a cure. (But don't we think this problem can be solved within the scientific framework?)
(2) -- Our definitions are _correct_, in that the delineate without much error treatment-wise, but outsiders make use of our terms in a moral sense and cause harm to those our definitions concern.
If we were talking about (1) the actual meaning of the quoted sentence (avoiding creating stigma) is that we ought to censor scientific work -- which then represents the meaning of "being ethical".
So since we are probably talking about (2), what if we replaced "mental disorder" with some distant and cold terminology bereft of meaning? After all, its purpose is only to delineate "in need of cure" from "does not need medical treatment". (And perhaps now we see that the symbol isn't so relevant as the fact that we have the "sick" and the "healthy".)
No: stimga, stigmatizing... These are not what is at stake, here. What is at stake is treating those who do not need treatment. In the case of homosexuality and its perception, what has changed is that it was once indistinguishable from 'unhealthy', 'sick'. The fact that this was overcome is their main victory.
There is a good debate (https://sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literature-and-performance/ICA-talks/024M-C0095X0856XX-0100V0) involving Paglia here, and Watney here attacks her (around 45:30 mins, if you can bear it) & the British government etc. for a lack of education and spending in healthcare for gay men. The point is that it doesn't matter how massive a disaster the HIV/AIDS pandemic was/is, the government(s) are totally responsible for it because they are assumed to have the power to effectively prevent it. Without the condition of responsibility, one cannot be held morally responsible; hence the pandemic has to be within the government's power. Similarly, here, the one addressed by my moral speech designates the responsible one. The diagnostic methods, and all the structures by which the doctors abide, are precisely what allow us to make the doctors and the medical world accountable for all the sufferings we can throw at them.
What I want to say is that already we live in a culture which designates the medical approach to mental issues, or issues of the behaviour rather than the physical; when a suffering is easy to see (heroin addiction) we can trust the medical response, but in nearby cases (Twitter addiction, infamous deaths playing video games, where we cannot literally see the needle going into the arm or whatever) we cannot, because the ethical system decides first. Likewise the issue at hand for mental health is not "you are stigmatizing me," and so on, but "you are not offering me the cure to my condition which I demand".
We are now more than ever in need of explicit, cold, taxonomy, but already by the title of this article we can feel how the medical establishment is somewhat defeated by this goal .. "can we really practice today the science of mental disorder, when already we inherit so many mistakes and biases, my god...". If there is this entity, taxonomy, which speaks to us from some scientific perspective, which places demands and limitation upon us morally, OK then we ask the question: to what extent ought we to obey it, blah blah.. but THAT question is moral, and relies on taxonomy practicing freely (which is to say non-ethically). To say again what I am saying: either we have (as this article seems) given up on being able to practice taxonomy for fear of saying something dangerous (note the special care this article pays to being misquoted), OR we believe that taxonomy is possible, is clear, but is nonetheless itself dangerous... in which case I am pessimistic about my next doctors appointment, when he already will tell me exactly what I want to hear..!
Ah - the weight of proper classification in a social-political lodestone. Reminds me of the uncertainly principal in that the more closely we attempt to define one aspect, tge more slippery the rest becomes. I N did N chuckle N at N your N solution.
So, the question boils down to: How can we get groups that we like everything that they want and nothing that they don't? How can we consider these surgeries and treatments medically necessary, non-elective when there is nothing medically wrong with these people and we don't want to say that there is something wrong with them mentally?
I feel very uncomfortable in this middle aged out of shape body. I identify as young and athletic. Why won't you pay for my surgeries?
No matter how afraid you all are of the dudes in skirts you eventually have to tell them that if they eat their cake it ain't still on the counter.
Isn't the obvious solution simply to consider whether the condition causes harm to oneself or others? If it does, then it's a disorder. If it doesn't, then it isn't.
This would exclude homosexuality but include gender dysphoria due to it's high incidence of suicide, and pedophilia due to the mental distress and possibility of child molestation.
This might be a good starting point, but harm is very broad, as is what causes it. Is being a woman in Afghanistan a disorder?
Homosexuality on its own doesn't cause distress, but homophobia does. And similarly, being a woman on its own doesn't cause distress, but misogyny does. Meanwhile, gender dysphoria is distressing on its own (from personal experience, gender dysphoria is not the *only* part of being trans as you wouldn't stop being trans/become cis by quashing dysphoria, but the disorder of gender dysphoria is still an aspect of being trans; hence why people may call gender dysphoria a disorder but not being trans a disorder, dysphoria is just one aspect).
I think by "harm", Sandro might mean the thoughts & emotions *directly* caused by the condition. Is the harm INHERENT to the condition of the mind, or is the harm being caused by the condition of being in an environment that considers people with condition to be "lesser"?
Taking trans people as an example again: Gender dysphoria is inherently distressing. Transitioning in order to alleviate dysphoria may or may not be distressing depending on societal attitudes (like transphobia). This makes one aspect of the transgender experience disordered & harmful to the individual, and the other neutral (harmful only because of external influences like transphobia).
I happen to agree with all of your specific points personally, but the point I'm trying to (poorly) make is that we can't really trust specific societies to have a good idea of where the harm comes from.
There's other commentators here that are making the point that homosexuality decreases fitness for the individual in some Darwinian way and qualifying that as "harm to self", and while some of them are making this point only in some kind of detached evolutionary sense, some are sincere in the thought that someone not being attracted to the opposite sex for the purpose of procreation is some kind of harm to self or others.
I personally think those definitions aren't only wrong but actively harmful and the thought process that produced them is harmful, but do I qualify those people who sincerely believe that as having a disorder of some kind?
> we can't really trust specific societies to have a good idea of where the harm comes from.
Sure, but rooting out causal factors is exactly what science is for.
> do I qualify those people who sincerely believe that as having a disorder of some kind?
Being wrong is not a disorder, even if it can be distressing. "Harm" is not merely distress, it's a high level of distress that causes physical or mental damage from which the individual may not recover for a long time, if ever.
> Sure, but rooting out causal factors is exactly what science is for.
I think we're waiting on neuroscientists and others to nail down a lot of these things, but in the meantime, we have to, as a society, practice medicine and justice and other things without this knowledge. This doesn't necessarily counteract your point here.
> Being wrong is not a disorder, even if it can be distressing.
While I would generally agree - when I say the thought process is actively harmful, I mean that this particular though process has been followed to extreme ends - chemical sterilization, anti-gay conversion camps, and, uh, similar. These thought processes and similar have led to this harm - should this kind of thinking be classified as a disorder?
> While I would generally agree - when I say the thought process is actively harmful, I mean that this particular though process has been followed to extreme ends - chemical sterilization, anti-gay conversion camps, and, uh, similar. These thought processes and similar have led to this harm - should this kind of thinking be classified as a disorder?
That same process would lead you to healing therapies given different assumptions, so I don't see how the process itself is the problem so much as the assumptions and beliefs that fed it. If anything is a disorder in the scenario you outlined, it's the lack of empathy while enacting those "corrections", not the thought process that drove you to it.
Banned for this comment.
"This would exclude homosexuality"
Why? Consider monkeypox, for instance.
> Why? Consider monkeypox, for instance.
Correlation is not causation. Since not all gay people have monkeypox, and since not being gay doesn't prevent you from getting or transmitting monkeypox, then being gay is not what's causing the harm.
Behaviours that conduce to higher risk of contracting disease are what is causing the harm, and "it is my human right to go to a piss orgy" is one such behaviour.
I really, really wish I didn't stumble across stuff like that, I don't go looking for it but somehow it turns up on my radar, and I'd be perfectly happy not to learn about gay men with piss kinks who go to orgies where they have unprotected sex with multiple men and then worry about "gosh guys, does this sore I developed look like monkeypox to you? because it looks like the descriptions" as they post photos online of said chancres for others to help them identify.
If there are straight people going to piss orgies and contracting diseases, this is also equally harmful behaviour. But it's hard not to see how the figures stack up, which of course then gets you in trouble for seeing the emperor is not, in fact, clothed in Armani from head to toe.
> Behaviours that conduce to higher risk of contracting disease are what is causing the harm
Yes, but those aren't exclusively gay behaviours. Condemn the behaviour that's causing harm, not some group of people only some of whom are doing it.
> But it's hard not to see how the figures stack up
I'm fairly certain that piss orgies were not causing most of the harm from monkeypox. Furthermore, people could be more diligent about checking for symptoms before engaging in risky behaviours, so you don't even have to condemn the behaviour so much as being reckless about it.
Argue all you like but the facts are that both monkeypox and HIV only became epidemic infections in populations of gay men who practice promiscuous anal sex.
Gay men suffer higher rates of std infections. That's not a moral judgement, just an irrefutable fact.
> infections in populations of gay men who practice promiscuous anal sex.
Right, so warn against reckless promiscuous sex, not against being gay.
"I really, really wish I didn't stumble across stuff like that, I don't go looking for it but somehow it turns up on my radar, and I'd be perfectly happy not to learn about gay men with piss kinks who go to orgies where they have unprotected sex with multiple men"
Where are you seeing this stuff? I'm a bisexual, polyamorous, fairly sex-positive transgender woman who's at least peripherally involved in the kink community, and I've never seen anything like this. Maybe it's selection bias, but most of the queer kinksters I know are incredibly cautious about monkeypox and sexually-transmitted diseases in general, probably considerably more so than the average person. Many of the kink events I've attended have explicitly prohibited any sort of penetrative sex, and they've all had very strict rules to prevent any sort of bodily fluids from being exchanged or spilled anywhere, and to ensure that the venue is kept as clean and disease-free as possible.
I know that's all anecdotal evidence, and I'm not saying it should be taken as representative of the norm for kinky queer people. But I don't think your examples are representative either, particularly if they come from some of the nastier corners of the internet.
By speaking to gay men in the real world and observing what actually goes on. Many societies didn't give gays the death penalty for no reason, but due to basic concern for the well being of the innocent. Monkeypox and HIV and who knows what else didn't come from nowhere.
What does "in the real world" even mean? I'm queer myself and I know plenty of queer people in the real world, including gay men. I've spent a lot of time in queer spaces, not just on the internet, but also in person. I'm certain I have a better idea of what real queer people are like than you do.
Men are an order of magnitude more likely to engage in violent, destructive behaviors than women.
Being a man is not a disorder. In fact I think it's pretty great.
Homosexuality in men is harmful in multiple ways.
Not so much women.
That's not a moral judgement by the way - just referring to the stats on mental health, STD infection rates, life expectancy etc.
I read all the "N"s as clapping emojis, and that made this much more fun!
All rants against "politicizing" are hypocritical. The speaker wants to make his own political assertions, then preemptively prohibit counterargumentation.
Substack drinking game: take a shot every time a flood of transphobes show up in the comments
You want everyone to die of acute alcohol poisoning, don't you?
Not even just transphobes, who are par for the course, but also some straight-up homophobes in this one.
It's especially frustrating because Scott really went out of his way to clarify "no, I do NOT think that homosexuality should still be considered a mental illness," but there are a ton of people reading it that way regardless.
I think fewer of them would have come if the controversial example was simply swapped out for something else, and I'm not sure why it wasn't. The point would have remained the same
Better for people to show who they are than hide their true nature.
>It's especially frustrating because Scott really went out of his way to clarify "no, I do NOT think that homosexuality should still be considered a mental illness," but there are a ton of people reading it that way regardless.
We're not reading it that way regardless, we're arguing that
1-By some of his criteria, it is (or pedophilia isn't, pick your poison)
2- His other criteria, with which he explains why it isn't, are bad.
Can we all agree that twitter is just as bad for individuals and society.. lol
You know, you could just rename it "Taxonomy of Human Psychologies," without any implication that some genera are bad and some good, and all the PR problems would go away. Can't see how the insurance industry would care either, they just need a number to write down on a form somewhere.
This seems to me like a psychiatrist/psychologist guild own goal, and that you can solve the problem any time you like. One assumes it suits the field somehow to keep the contraversy alive and periodically visibly fret about it.
We believe that some mental conditions need to be ameliorated and others do not, and you need some way of classifying and understanding the ones that do in order to do that.
Even if diagnostic codes for insurance weren't involved at all, you'd still have a need to understand what mental conditions require treatment separate from merely classifying them.
Ordinary medicine doesn't have this problem. Each diagnosing physician, in consultation with his patient, decides whether a condition needs to be treated or not, for a wide variety of reasons, and nobody needs to have all the decisions written down in some official manual. Insurance companies don't require it, either. Oncologists don't need to have a big public breast-beating and hand-wringing session every five years in which they classify certain prostate growths as "Cancer! Evil! Must be Treated!" and others as "Meh Just Old Age Something Else WIll Kill You First So Don't Bother." I don't know why the mental health field needs to be drama queens about this, but my working hypothesis would be that it brings in income, or influence, or both.
I don't think this is an accurate description of what goes on in medicine at all and there are, in fact, constant debates over what sorts of things ought to be treated (and how) or just left alone with professional organizations sometimes getting awfully heated with disagreements about formal standards of practice. Physicians as islands of independent judgment in consultation with patient wishes seems like it is from an alternate universe.
Well if I meant that particular straw man, you'd be right to object to it. But fierce and ongoing debate within the community of surgeons, oncologists, cardiologists, et cetera, with many varying philosophies. making many varying decisions, with many options for patients, and a focus on the provider-patient nexus as the primary decision locus != "we have to write everything down in this one sacred Dictionary of Things That Need Treatment every five years and then robotically apply it."
And at that I don't even think the actual treating community *does* robotically follow it, or even feels strongly compelled to do so -- cynicism seems rampant -- so once again I don't even see the reason the giant Sturm and Drang exists at all.
The community could solve this easily. Make a big taxonomy of Human Psychology, so you all speak the same language. Great stuff, very helpful, no longer useful in idiotic culture wars. Then go have a second argument with CMS about what Medicare will and won't pay for, just like the drug companies do. Since that is manifestly a political/social/economic fight, no one will be surprised if culture plays a big role, and indeed there's no reason it shouldn't.
If your complaint is with having a single manual and not, you know, professional standards of what constitutes illness and best practice for responding to it with intradisciplinary disagreement, then your initial objection to my response loses all its force.
"Why not just have a descriptive manual that tries to categorize the varieties of human behavior and cognition," besides being an impractical task, still seems to zip right past that we still have to have some way of identifying which kinds of mental states represent problems to be fixed. Whether the best practice collection of human knowledge on that is summarized in a single large manual or is spread out over a larger collection of sources is irrelevant to this point.
Given that I am part of the "treating community" I'll note that no one thinks of the DSM as the sum total of guidance on mental illness, which is why we're able to have fights over what should go in and what should go out. Those ideas have to come from somewhere separate from the previous iteration of the manual.
If you just rename it Taxonomy of Human Psychologies without any implication that some are bad and some are good, then you become a big fat target for the other side in the culture wars. Social conservatism, most often expressed as religious fundamentalism, _centers_ on identifying which behaviors are good and which are bad so that the bad can be punished until eradicated. For social conservatives, if we're letting the "others" just walk around and be free and happy members of our society then we're doing it wrong.
Psychiatry/psychology as a profession has lots of collective experience and history of being in those crosshairs literally since the invention of the concepts of psychiatry/psychology. And Father Coughlin et al were not just playing, back in the day....the profession seems very unclear right now about how to navigate our contemporary cultural/political reality. But it is collectively quite clear about the consequences of being a big target when/where the pendulum swings back to the overall framing which used to be culturally dominant.
Your description doesn't match any real life social conservative I know, and seems more like a caricature of the bogeymen that haunt the nightmares of social liberals who don't take the time to understand their fellow man.
Any anyway, if that were true, it would be a cowadly and dishonest course of action, and I would not respect it.
I know several social conservatives right now who fit exactly that description; in fact I am related to a couple. For that matter there are plenty currently holding high elective office.
But anyway you have entirely missed the actual point of my comment which was about the collective shared experience of the psychiatry/psychology profession. Even if we pretended that a lot of social conservatives today didn't want what I described, that wouldn't erase the recent-historical facts of it, and the collective memory of it within that professional field.
Sure, but since I don't believe you understand the wide population of social conservatives -- and your credulity is at issue because you heedlessly extrapolate from the few you do know -- I equally don't believe you about the broad experience of the psychiatrist/psychologist community[1]. You can certainly speak for yourself, and your own experience, and I respect that, but I don't think you speak for an entire community, and so any argument you make based on that assertion will not be credible to me.
-----------------
[1] And if it comes to that I also know a few psychiatrists and psychologists personally, and they don't seem to share your view of victimization, which lends additional weight to my skepticism, although I don't claim to understand the entire community.
So what is your opinion of the attempts to stigmatise by medicalising conditions like "homophobia" and "transphobia", then? Sure sounds like "identifying which behaviours are good and which are bad so that the bad can be punished until eradicated".
There hasn't been any serious attempt to medicalize homophobia and transphobia as mental illnesses. Now, I don't doubt that you can find a tweet from some wannabe-clever activist saying "homosexuality isn't a mental illness but homophobia is," or maybe even an entire article on some clickbait-ridden thinkpiece site about how homophobia is a pathological condition, but that's just because you can find people saying *anything* somewhere on the internet. It's not an idea with any real support among any notable group of people. Even among the most radical progressives, the vast majority of people would say "no, of course homophobes aren't mentally ill, they're just assholes."
I would be willing to bet a significant amount of money that "transphobia" will be listed as a disorder in the next edition of the DSM.
Progressives want dissent from their beliefs to be both a crime and a mental disorder.
Doubt it. Even putting the usual arguments aside for the moment, isn't the DSM also heavily used in other countries that are far less afflicted by this particular American madness?
I had no idea, so I Just googled "Is DSM used in the UK".
The answer is no.
If it were used anywhere else I imagine it will be dropped now the latest edition has been infected with woke craziness.
I should also point out that the argument about disorders being covered by medical insurance is very parochial. It's not applicable outside the USA.
Racism is not so listed in the DSM, nor is misogyny, nor xenophobia or homophobia.
There are of course calls from various quarters including some psychiatrists for some of those things to be categorized in the DSM. That's nothing new, you can easily find essays and book chapters and earnest announcements of committees formed to lobby for that going back years. (Decades, regarding racism or "extreme racism"). There's no particular sign of the APA being about to agree to any of it though.
So yea, I'll take that bet -- I'll offer $1,000 that transphobia is not listed as a disorder in the next edition of the DSM. It doesn't appear that a DSM-6 will be produced for some years yet though....how about we ask Scott to hold the funds from each of us until then?
$1,000 seems a bit low, but I'll take it.
There was no sign at the time of DSM IV of the APA being taken over by a cult, but then it happened.
Whereas social liberals expend an awful lot of time and energy on trying to categorise thoughts and individual people, rather than behaviour, into good or evil.
Are you sure that's any better?
"all the PR problems would go away"
Oh I wish. In an ideal world, maybe, but this is not that world. I am perfectly comfortable with the idea that my own twist of the genes, asexuality/aromanticism, is a mental disorder and a genetic dead-end because no babies, and also because no personal emotional connection with spouse and family or other person. If that is deemed "bad" or "wrong" or "immoral", then that's something I have to live wit (and for some cultures/beliefs, it is immoral because it is your duty to marry and have children so that family lines continue and the ancestors are properly cared for with descendants to perform rituals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitru_Paksha on their behalf). But you can bet your socks that if there was a "Taxonomy of Human Psychologies" that classed aroace people under a pathology, there would be a roaring rage of activists demanding that this awful slur on perfectly normal people be removed (and all the usual stuff about stigmatising and encouraging violence and discrimination and the whole bingo card).
We have to bear in mind that the bulk of a Taxonomy of Human Psychology would quite naturally consist of what is generally considered "normal" behavior. Necessarily, since far more people are "normal" than are not, pretty much by definition. So the appearance or not of Psychology A.II.1.c in the Taxonomy doesn't seem likely to provoke controversy all by itself, because *everything* is listed there. Whether it's weird or not is not addressed, although to be sure people can (and no doubt would) go through the book afterward with a red pencil and circle this or that.
Consider the equivalent of a giant book on biology. Most of what it lists is how normal cells function, but it also includes how cells function in ways that are unusual, and in some cases pathological. We don't have giant fights over what gets included in human anatomy or biochemisty textbooks because we don't want to stigmatize people who happen to be 7 feet or 2 feet tall, or who have liver cells that are/are not degrading cholesterol at a high/low rate, or digestive tracts that do/do not metabolize lactose correctly, with/without embarassing side effects. We just describe everything, and we have separate fights about whether this or that process is "disease" or "a variation on health" or something which insurance pays for something that doesn't. I don't see it as a logical or even social requirement that a taxonomy be subject to pre-publication ideological vetting, lest The Wrong Ideas get into print.
It happens rarely in other fields. Economists can describe Marxist thought in books without having Austrian school fanatics go apeshit over them even putting the forbidden ideas into print. Even the most rabid evangelicals don't insist that archaeoligists be prohibited from publishing their findings from Olduvai Gorge. I don't see any good reason why the study of psychology has to be a unique victim of some hypothetical social intolerance of mere description, and I rather suspect it's because it chooses to be, like the victim of abuse who returns again and again to the control of the abuser -- there is something to be gained, the victim is not just a victim.
Parenthetically, on the personal subject, it sounds to me like you are much too hard on yourself. You seem clearly to form emotional connections, indeed quite deep ones, and to people. It may not be to people who are in your physical life today, and it may not even be to people who are now alive, but connection is connection, and human is human. What would we be if, like animals, we could only form connections to those whose butt we can immediately sniff? Surely there is much more to the human spirit.
So (although I know little of you of course) you do not seem to me to differ importantly in spirit from the whole human, except perhaps in fairly unimportant and transient ways. It may just be reflection of our crassly materialist age that definitions of what it means to be a complex and engaged soul has become stuffed into the cramped little cardboard box of animal functions[1]. It would be regrettable if someone as independent-minded as yourself were to overinterpret these shibboleths -- they're just current habits of thought, fleeting, and do not represent the considered wisdom of Man, let alone the mind of God.
----------------------------
[1] Like what is to me the flabbergasting assertion by some that chastity is some unbearable situation that might as well be torture or death. Are we all just the basest hedonists these days? There's no recognition of the spiritual qualities of the voluntary fast? Amazing.
You've convinced me that I do want a purely biological, apolitical taxonomy of mental disorders. Sorry for all the people in the world who feel stigmatized, but it sounds really useful.
It does, yep.
But I can't think of a society on Earth right now that would plausibly produce it (or allow it to be produced).
Regarding the "pedophilia as a sexual targeting error" debate: I recently read an article about a man dating an adult woman who looks like a small child, and it's caused an enormous amount of controversy and heated debate. (https://nypost.com/2023/01/23/im-dating-a-23-year-old-woman-who-looks-like-an-8-year-old-girl/) On one side, there are people saying that he's not doing anything wrong, since she's a consenting adult. This is obviously true in the legal sense (he hasn't committed any crime) and in a consequentialist moral sense (she's a consenting adult of sound mind, so there's no harm being done to her). On the other side, there are people arguing that having a romantic and sexual attraction to someone who looks like a child is a sign of innate pedophilic desires. So even if he's not breaking the law or hurting anyone directly, they still consider him a pedophile at heart, which is effectively synonymous with "bad person" in their eyes. Maybe they think he's more likely to pursue actual children in the future, maybe they just think it's gross. Then there are counter-arguments from disability activists, who say that expecting this woman to be totally celibate because of her appearance is extremely unfair to her; if you condemn anyone who has sex with her, that's functionally the same as saying she shouldn't be allowed to have sex at all, which amounts to severe discrimination against someone with a medical abnormality.
Now, I strongly disagree with the idea that this guy must secretly be a pedophile. He's had prior romantic relationships with physiologically-normal adult women, and there's zero evidence that he's ever shown any sort of sexual interest in children. I think there's a very good chance that he isn't actually attracted to childlike bodies at all, he just happened to develop a relationship with this particular woman and was willing to look past her physiological abnormalities. But even if he was specifically attracted to her body type in particular, I still don't think he'd be a pedophile, because pedophilia is "attraction to children," not "attraction to adults with childlike bodies." Classifying him as a pedophile would be a category error or, at most, an example of the non-central fallacy (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world). He'd be more comparable to disability fetishists, like the sorts of people attracted to amputees. And while disability fetishists are considered very weird, and sometimes seen as off-putting or socially problematic, they still aren't viewed as inherently sick or evil the way that pedophiles are.
I don't think that "sexual targeting errors" should ever be considered a mental illness in themselves, especially because it's not entirely clear what even counts as an "error." While we don't know for sure yet, there's some evidence that homosexuality is evolutionarily advantageous to the homosexual's family and tribe, in which case it's not an error at all. And even if that theory turns out to be false, there are major problems with the idea that any preference for non-reproductive sex constitutes a mental illness. If homosexuality is a mental illness, then what about a straight person with a fetish for oral or anal sex? What about a man exclusively attracted to older woman who are no longer fertile? Should the DSM include a category for men who browse the GILF category on PornHub? The reasons why pedophilia should be considered a mental illness go well beyond any issues with "sexual targeting," and for some (possibly many) pedophiles, it seems to be a largely or purely pathological issue that might have nothing to do with sexual targeting at all.
I think our paedophilia taboo is entwined with the incest taboo, and if anyone chirps about "but is incest really that bad, really?" with that dumb thought-experiment about "two adult siblings using contraception decide to have consensual incestuous sex once; since there won't be any offspring to be horrible twisted mutants, is this really so bad?", I am virtually dunking their fat heads in a virtual barrel of virtual water until the ooze is washed off.
In what sense is paedophilia entwined with Incest except the trivial "Both are Extremly Wrong" sense ?
an adult who has sex with a child is often biologically related to the child (father, uncle, older brother). Sex between relatives = incest.
Youthfulness. Paedophilia is classically "older/adult male with younger boy/girl" and incest is often "older family member/younger family member" (think of the Hapsburgs and all the uncle-niece, cousin-cousin marriages).
If we have a taboo about incest and one about paedophilia, they might be linked on the basis of "older sexually mature person with younger immature person ends up in not good result".
I agree that incest almost certainly has a very strong correlation with pedophilia. Not to the point where there's a complete overlap, since there are cases where incest occurs between siblings and cousins of similar age, but I'd imagine a lot of incest cases (quite possibly the majority) involve large age gaps.
In contrast, I think the correlation between homosexuality and pedophilia is low, despite the constant attempts by social conservatives to equate the two in the public eye. My guess is that male homosexuality is correlated with pedophilia to exactly the same degree that male heterosexuality is (and that has far more to do with the fact that men in general seem to be attracted to younger partners than with sexual orientation), while female homosexuality seems to be correlated with pedophilia *less* than female heterosexuality. Both "older male/young female" and "older male/young male" cases are sadly commonplace, and while "older female/young male" cases are less frequent, they still happen often enough that they're hardly unheard of. But "older female/young female" cases appear to be extremely rare, to the point where it's hard to find instances of it happening at all. (I only know of one situation where a woman was arrested for having sex with an underage girl, and the woman in question was an 18 year old high school student who was only a few years older than the girl she slept with. I don't really count that: From what I could tell, the only reason the older girl was arrested at all was because the younger girl's parents were homophobes who really had it out for her, and they lived in one of the few states that didn't have Romeo and Juliet laws.)
I think Necrophilia is another interesting example, where there isn't even as big a consent problem, but it's still taboo.
New York times article from 2025:
In the past, Alexander wrote a controversial piece on homosexuality and mental illness. In this article, he obscures his meaning with a strange code to protect himself from public scrutiny. According to a leading Alexander scholar, Emile Torres, the decrypted version is the following:
Ooooof.
I ruefully LOL'd at this comment....I would not accept a wager against this prediction, put it that way.
This is probably something that others have thought of and that has been articulated and more fully fleshed out elsewhere, but while reading this, something clicked for me about why efforts to change language in order to avoid stigmatizing a group have always seemed misguided to me.
The core issue is that a group gets stigmatized primarily because some people want to stigmatize the group, and only secondarily because of the language used to refer to or describe the group. Changing the language used to refer to a group will only help destigmatize the group among people who already don't want the group stigmatized, but as long as there are enough people who continue to want to stigmatize a group, even the new language will (eventually) start to seem like it stigmatizes the group, and the language will need to be changed again.
I'm sure it's more complicated than just this (e.g., there's probably a role for preference falsification, it's easy to imagine the ways in which the act of proposing destigmatizing language would be mocked), but it seems pretty reasonable to me to put the responsibility for stigma on the people doing the stigmatizing rather than the words used to do it.
There are already too many comments on here for anyone to ever read this, but what the hey. What I can determine from use of ctrl-f is that folx have been discussing evolution without plucking the obvious, low-hanging fruit. This will sound sarcastic, but I am serious when I say that:
1) a la Henrich, the real watershed period was when culture-gene co-evolution took off, creating a feedback loop different in kind than with other previous changes due to evolutionary pressure
2) we can solve both the insurance problem and the stigma problem by categorizing everything that our common ancestor with the chimpanzee would not have recognized immediately as ordinary.
3) "but leo, insurance can't pay for the treatment of every single human trait" well no obviously not. But insurance only pays for clinicians to treat people who are in enough distress to seek treatment. If someone is in enough distress because of an excessive tendency towards imitative learning or copious sweating or needing to buy clothes to cover his hairless body, I say treat him -- him and every other person with distress from any human-specific condition.
4) "But leo! Bonobos constantly exhibit homosexual and pedophiliac behaviors! Are you saying pedophilia isn't a mental disorder?" Yeah thos are bonobos. Our common ancestor with chimps would have classified that whole species as a bunch of slutty little weirdos.
Have you read "The Goodness Paradox"? (He compares us to the slutty weirdos... oh if only the women had domesticated humanity (rather than the men.) and I could hump all the women as a means of saying hello each morning.
All the women? You have an exaggerated view of your prowess there, and if compulsory sex in order to keep the social hierarchy in place and you not to be kicked out or on the bottom rung of the pecking order is necessary, you might not enjoy having to hump all around you simply as a survival tactic.
Oh no it's just an old man's dream.
I agree with your analogy.
I need to think this through.
I'm going to think about conditions where you become at risk of damage by factors in one's environment which have no significant effect on most people.
" If I understand journalistic ethics correctly, they can’t edit the sentence to remove the Ns"
Journalists have ethics?
Yeah, I can see why this is something Scott needs to be VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY careful about because oh me, oh my.
I'm glad to be sufficiently obscure that I could express an honest opinion and nobody would care because nobody knows me. But starting a fire in the comment thread here is not a good thing to do, so I'll just shut up now.
Well then, call me Carrie, because I'm all about firestarting. I think that we need to stop taking journalists seriously, because it's pretty obvious by now that they have no ethics and are bound by no rules. They no longer need N some N kind N of N a N fig N leaf N to smear Scott (or anyone else); they can just do it de novo. Fortunately, they are also getting closer to bankruptcy every day (the financial kind, not the moral or intellectual kind, they're way past that). The way to beat them is to make them irrelevant, by amassing a large audience who simply doesn't care whom the journalists have designated as the enemy du jour; and I think Scott is quite far along this path already.
Yes. The media is an enemy of the people. Donald Trump was bang-on right about this.
As a skeptical contrarian, it's been a trip seeing how the right-wing media has increasingly been more accurate about most things since ~2015 than the mainstream media.
Hey Scott, thanks for sharing my post!
To be fair to the HiTOP authors, the problem (if it is a problem) of stigma/bias in the DSM isn't one of the big issues they're trying to address. They're more interested in technical problems like the DSM's arbitrary diagnostic cut points etc. I included this because it's a common criticism of the DSM that I believe is partly addressed by HiTOP.
What the HiTOP offers that the DSM doesn't is continuity with ordinary human experience. Anxiety isn't some weird catchable virus, it's something that everyone feels sometimes - it only becomes a problem when it begins to significantly impact a person's life. This perspective is built into the HiTOP, and is why I think it reduces (but doesn't eliminate) the potential for stigma.
That said, I do agree with what you've said here. As long as there's power and/or funding tied to the diagnosis of mental disorders, it can never be a passionless academic exercise. I wasn't around at the time, but my understanding is that the removal of homosexuality from the DSM was largely a social/political decision with a thin layer of scientific backing, not the other way around. The debate about transgender/gender dysphoria seems to be something similar, except that there are actually medical treatments and funding available for people with GD, so no diagnosis might mean no treatment.
Many of these issues are high-level consequences of deeply flawed systems. It's just what happens when post-agricultural primates industrialize the entire goddamn planet. A postmodern society built on false meritocracies and the illusion of scarcity.
/grumblegrumble
This is the sort of comment that sounds "deep" but doesn't actually say anything meaningful. It's a deepity, to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett. (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity)
How are "these issues" the result of "deeply flawed systems," precisely? What are these systems and what are their flaws? How do they connect to whether homosexuality, gender dysphoria, hitting punching bags, social media addiction, or meditative bliss states should be considered mental disorders or not? What does the "illusion of scarcity," a theory of economics, have to do with any of this? If you want to make a serious argument that there's a connection between all of these things, you have to actually explain that connection, or at least outline it. Just cryptically alluding to some unknown connection with vague gestures and implications isn't enough.
No shit, but that's a novel and not a comment that I can leave after my morning coffee. Nobody required you to write a paragraph explaining this either, hence the /grumble. I appreciate the - presumably - real entreaty to adumbrate my thoughts, but this comment just comes across as hostile intellectual posturing.
And your comment comes across as vapid ideological crap. What was the point of making it if you're not going to explain anything specific about it?
> This doesn’t seem especially destigmatizing to me - you’re the wrong gender, but you’re crazy for being unhappy about it?
This is coming from someone who has never read a diagnostic manual, but: one would assume that it's possible to be in so much distress that it constitutes a mental illness, even though you're not crazy and the degree of distress is justified by the circumstances.
Or are mental illnesses usually defined so as to exclude “normal” / “expected” reactions to difficult life experiences?
Yet a black in 1950s Mississippi, or a woman in Afghanistan, could be under a tremendous amount of distress for the same reasons (although of course the distress takes a very different form in terms of views toward the self). Yet it would be insane to call being black or being a woman a mental disorder.
It's weird how when you read a new book, with new ideas (new to you.) it tends to color all your thoughts for a while. Such is the case with "The Goodness Paradox" which I've almost finished (chapter 12 of 13) One of the main ideas in the book is that humans self-domesticated themselves, and in this case domestication means specifically, being selected for less aggressive behavior. The classic example is silver foxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox Now being domesticated (less aggression) has all these other traits, which get dragged along with it. These are mostly just details of our development process... floppy ears, white spots, smaller heads... And one of the traits is increased sexuality and homosexuality. Huh. I'm not sure this makes any difference to the above discussion, but less aggression and increased sexuality, is just part of who we are.
(This blogger sometimes, for idiosyncratic reasons, inserts a capital 'N' between every word in a sentence. To preserve readability, these 'N's have been omitted from quotations.)
> That means that a purely biological apolitical taxonomy of mental disorders which classifies all things with similar biological causes in the same way would also probably classify homosexuality as a mental disorder. But the whole point of wanting a purely biological apolitical taxonomy of mental illness was to make sure we would never again repeat the DSM’s error of calling homosexuality a mental disorder!
That is certainly not the whole point of wanting a purely biological taxonomy of mental illness. One point might be (indeed, should be) to try to stop using the same treatment on unlike problems that show similar symptoms (when that treatment is differentially effective). One point might be to inform our views of what we should properly consider a mental illness -- why are we sure that, when the old DSM and the new DSM disagree, the new DSM is necessarily right?
"But the whole point of wanting a purely biological apolitical taxonomy of mental illness was to make sure we would never again repeat the DSM’s error of calling homosexuality a mental disorder!"
I mean, it wasn't an error, so the apolitical taxonomy would, by definition, not correct this.
My thoughts immediately went to issues like depression and ADHD, which are multicausal, and defined by their symptoms. It's hard to look at something as a proper cause when it is defined as "a collection of symptoms that impede normal function without a single or even any specific known cause".
Agree with the general point, but I don’t think the idea of a purely evolutionary or biological view of human sexuality is that coherent either.
Most of the sex that people actually have is an error if you mean anything that doesn’t directly result in reproduction. A lot of those sex acts could have some indirect evolutionary benefit in the right context, that we'll never be able to prove. Why draw the line at homosexuality and not eg. oral sex? I've read plausible evolutionary benefits for both.
Sex is partly a social thing for humans. (So too for some other social animals, or have I been very mislead on what hyenas and bonobos get up to?) Sex acts are gestures, they have meaning. Those meanings vary widely between cultures, and within cultures there are smaller disagreements.
It seems significant here that autistic people are more likely to be asexual!
When I say that the meaning of sexual acts is social and subjective I'm not saying that it should be anything goes - if someone waves a swastika flag around in public in a western country and their defence is that it meant something positive in India then they’re an edgelord at best. In their own home though, why not? When you’re little if an older kid tells you that showing your middle finger to people means hello and you decide to do it to everyone you meet then you’ll be mortified when you find out what the consensus is on that meaning.
>Why draw the line at homosexuality and not eg. oral sex? I've read plausible evolutionary benefits for both.
It's not the act of having gay sex that is dysfunctional. It's being exclusively attracted to a person of the same sex. From an evolutionary perspective, this is fatal.
And importantly, having non-reproductive heterosexual sex isn't some genetic or hormal thing. We didn't start having so much non-reproductive heterosexual sex because we were "born this way". It's a choice, and a choice in a way that a gay man forcing himself to have sex with a woman isn't.
And the evolutionary benefits of homosexuality are wrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QsMJQSFj7WfoTMNgW/the-tragedy-of-group-selectionism
"We have to classify pedophilia as a mental illness, because we want insurance to pay for treatment"
Scott, most insurance payers including Medicare and Medicaid exclude paying for treatment of pedophilia. People have to self pay.
Necessary but insufficient is the operative term here.
I'm grateful Scott brought this up. Like nearly all the jargon associated with gender ideology, changing the public ideation of homosexuality by changing the DSM was a blatantly political act. Queer Civil Union doesn't have the cache of Gay Marriage. But Pregnant Persons is a bit much.
Or perhaps it was political to have homosexuality in the DSM in the first place.
The question of "purely biological " vs politicized (culturally inflected) concepts of mental disorder was nicely tackled by philosopher/psychologist Jerome Wakefield in his 1992 article "The concept of mental disorder: On the boundary between biological facts and social values" (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1992-23607-001). Wakefield proposed that in order for a condition to count as a mental disorders it must meet TWO criteria: It must be the result of a biological dysfunction, AND it must be deemed as harmful - and what we deem harmful is inevitably is a matter of social values..
Some conditions may be the result of a dysfunction but, if we agree they are not harmful, under Wakefield's analysis, they are not a disorders.. For instance, homosexuality. Conversely, some conditions may not be the result of a dysfunction, but we agree they are harmful!. These are also not disorders. Surprisingly, an example might be antisocial personality - a very adaptive social strategy that parasitizes social cooperation. We would not find it in a manual of "disorders", but that would not mean we wound not be justified in "treating it" - say, in persuading the sociopath to change.
So, we need three "diagnostic" manuals! :1) A manual of mental conditions that are indeed mental disorders -they are harmful dysfunctions 2) A manual of mental conditions that are mere biological dysfunctions that are not harmful (it may be of scientific interest to classify them somewhere) and 3) A manual of mental conditions that are not dysfunctions, but are harmful - these conditions are of great social interest, and merit "treatment". That is, we are justified in trying to change them.
I would suggest there is a biological difference between homosexuality an paedophilia.
First, I think everyone is a little bit gay - or put better, humans are on a continuum of sexual attraction between homo and hetero.
I would go further and say that all women are essentially bisexual.
I don't think that everyone is a little bit paedophile.
Also, while homosexual attraction is biologically sub-optimal at the individual level, some have theorised that it had benefits at the group level.
There is no such benefit of paedophilia.
I don't think that homosexual attraction is just a case of incorrect sexual imprinting.
>I don't think that everyone is a little bit paedophile.
Uh huh. Incidentally, the term "ephebophile" is basically a punchline these days, and being attracted to 17-year-olds is unthinkable depravity.
"First, I think everyone is a little bit gay - or put better, humans are on a continuum of sexual attraction between homo and hetero."
No, we are not. This is a common error from both bisexuals and a certain type of heterosexual feel-good liberal.
If this were true, I wouldn't have spent years self-flagellating by trying to force myself into expressing some sort of sexual attraction to women for years on end.
I get that it's trendy to claim there are no distinct categories and everything is a continuum (sometimes followed by the idea that categories themselves are a patriarchal oppression or something - bang on job, queer theory!) But it's better to accept that while there will often be some deviations, the categories usually have a point and there is a lot of accuracy to them. For instance, the existence of a small number of intersex people does not make it false that sex is binary. The existence of people without arms does not make it false that humans have two arms.
The fact that you personally are at one end of the continuum does not disprove is existence.
Sure, some people are more or less all one way or the other, but if human (male) sexuality is as binary as you say then how come bisexuality was the norm in pre-christian Rome & Greece?
Sex is binary for certain. I don't agree that sexuality is, so sorry I don't fit into your pigeonhole.
Also I think that male sexuality is very different to female, and that camp/effeminate males are their own distinct category that I don't much understand.
Maybe I'm completely wrong and I'm just projecting my own experience.
>The fact that you personally are at one end of the continuum does not disprove is existence.
The fact you say you 'think' it exists isn't proof it exists.
>Sure, some people are more or less all one way or the other, but if human (male) sexuality is as binary as you say then how come bisexuality was the norm in pre-christian Rome & Greece?
It wasn't the norm. And even if it were, I have no idea on earth why one particular society in one point in history should be considered the natural state of man.
It is considered normal in every society that wasn't subject to the moral code of one of the Abrahamic faiths which teach that gay sex is a mortal sin.
The fact I'm completely outside of your continuum disproves your continuum. If I was 99% gay and 1% straight it wouldn't disprove it. I'd just be at the far end. But if you posit that everyone is some level of bisexual, then yes, me being 100% gay and 0% straight does disprove that.
>Sex is binary for certain. I don't agree that sexuality is, so sorry I don't fit into your pigeonhole.
More that I don't fit into your pigeonhole.
>Sure, some people are more or less all one way or the other, but if human (male) sexuality is as binary as you say then how come bisexuality was the norm in pre-christian Rome & Greece?
Bisexuality was not the norm in classical Rome and Greece. It was very much an upper-class affectation. Aristophanes pokes fun at it in his play "The Clouds".
>Maybe I'm completely wrong and I'm just projecting my own experience.
I think so, yes.
No, it just proves that you are on one end of it.
You say you are 0% straight, but how do I know that this is true? You say yourself you have had difficulty coming to terms with your sexuality, so it is not certain that you have it completely right now.
The whole of Spartan society was structured around male same-sex relationships. In Rome it was considered entirely normal and proper for men to sodomise other men. It is only the Abrahamic faiths that imposed the morality that gay sex was sinful. No other society ever thought so.
> I think everyone is a little bit gay
How do you quantify being gay ? or being straight for that matter ?
I find myself "Trapped" by people like Finnster (https://twitter.com/F1NN5TER?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor), i.e. attracted to (very convincing) cross-dressing femboys. But - if anything - this only proves I'm straight, the only men that attract me are those who look so much like women that even women wouldn't know better.
"Attracted to cross-dressing femboys"
Absolutely 100% straight for sure mate.
I'm glad you found 4 words in my comment that you can reply a snarky twitter reply to and feel good about yourself.
But the entire point of the "cross-dressing" part of "cross-dressing femboys" (of the kind in the link) is that they look so much like women that every *woman*, let alone man, is like "I wouldn't know you're a man if you didn't tell me". So it's indeed to be expected that a straight men would be attracted to them, it would be a bit suspicous if I wasn't attracted to something that looks better than 60% or so of women.
>First, I think everyone is a little bit gay - or put better, humans are on a continuum of sexual attraction between homo and hetero.
I think they aren't.
>I don't think that everyone is a little bit paedophile.
More adult men have had sex throughout history with non-adult women than with adult men. And since we're all about sexual spectra, where does pedophillia end? The moment a girl is sexually fertile? What if she looks more like a child than a sexually fertile girl? Men were having sex with them based on their appearance, not whether they were strictly sexually mature or not.
>Also, while homosexual attraction is biologically sub-optimal at the individual level, some have theorised that it had benefits at the group level.
Such theories are incoherent: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QsMJQSFj7WfoTMNgW/the-tragedy-of-group-selectionism
>I don't think that homosexual attraction is just a case of incorrect sexual imprinting.
There's literally no possible selective benefit to it, and signficant selective risk for anyone who at least didn't also have sex with women.
Depends how you define "non-adult".
If you mean under 18 then sure. If you mean obviously well under the age of sexual maturity, then I would like to know how you ascertained that claim.
Men have a powerful biological imperative to have sex with a girl as soon as she becomes sexually fertile. Or do you not agree with that?
It is therefore expected for men to play close to that point, as it were.
That is not the same thing as being attracted to children who are obviously well under the age of sexual maturity - that is what we call paedophilia.
>There's literally no possible selective benefit to it
What if it is like sickle-cell anaemia, or other conditions? You have a bunch of genes that individually increase a persons selective fitness, but if you get them all together then you are gay.
A population that has these genes in it is fitter overall, even at the cost of some percentage being made less fit.
"That is, we want our definition of “mental disorder” to be ethical (eg not stigmatize people who don’t deserve stigma). And we want it to be practical (eg identify a group of people who need and deserve care). But things that are biologically similar can be ethically and practically different”
After you’ve clearly demonstrated that “mental disorder” is NOT a moral matter, I don’t understand why you aren’t insisting that it is NOT a moral matter, and lobbying your professional organizations to insist the same. That way, people who have “mental disorders” would not be stigmatized.
Moral issues are clearly involved in a subset of “mental disorders” (again, as you have clearly shown), so why can’t they be classified distinctly, as, say, ”harm-inducing mental disorders” or some such? Then only that group will be stigmatized, as wished for.
I think if ya’ll would hold that line long enough, the public would come around.
"Causes harm to oneself or others" encompasses all mental disorders in the model of mental disorder most people are working with. If you look at the DSM diagnostic criteria, you'll notice that it is always looking for marked impairment of a person's daily functioning or severe personal distress. A condition that doesn't do this isn't considered a disorder. When people use pop awareness of mental illnesses to self-diagnose, a common area where they go wrong is in brushing this aside. They end up describing subclinical or even perfectly fine issues as qualifying in a way that is almost insulting to people who are severely impaired.
The harder part is deciding when something *is* causing harm, but shouldn't be thought of as a disorder. Some of this is when we decide the problem is with societal norms, not the individual.
To me, this seems to be the *easy* part of the demarcation - if it's not a problem for the subject or a problem for society, how can it even be called a disorder? To me, at least, this seems straightforward.
The tricky part is surely the *other* side of this - what issues that *are* a problem for the subject or for society are still not mental disorders?
Example: A pyromaniac who is obsessively unable to keep from starting fires would certainly seem to suffer from a mental disorder. But what about someone who simply loves to see things burn enough that he keeps doing it out of choice even though he could probably refrain from it at a loss of personal satisfaction? Or someone taking revenge on society for imagined slights through repeated arson?
I agree completely, especially with the broader principle that it is important to maintain the distinction between the biological and the moral, but I think a potentially solution to the issue presented of insurance coverage is specifically designating those (fairly few, I would assume) things that experience discrepancies between fitting the biological, practical, and moral definitions of mental illnesses as special cases that get insurance care but without being technically considered a mental illness. I do recognize the massive political and bureaucratic hurdles to such a systems, and the complications of infinitely designating exceptions, so maybe this solution is more ideal than practical. Oh well.
I saw a lecture where the author talked about how "crazy" is culturally defined. But in some cultures we will say people are crazy, in others they will say oh this person is possessed by a demon. Pedal to the metal, both cultures have to deal with someone who isn't fitting in.
Just a heads up, I am not sure that your N trick will work. 'Most reporters and editors see no harm in “cleaning up” quotes.' E.g. see https://ethicscasestudies.mediaschool.indiana.edu/cases/handling-sources/the-great-quote-question.html#:~:text=Most%20reporters%20and%20editors%20see,in%20%E2%80%9Ccleaning%20up%E2%80%9D%20quotes.
Also in law, it is now ok to use (cleaned up) syntax after cleaning up a quote https://k-glaw.com/blog/the-cleaned-up-parenthetical-a-new-way-to-tackle-ungainly-citations/#:~:text=But%20%E2%80%9Ccleaned%20up%E2%80%9D%20basically%20means,distracting%20them%20with%20the%20irrelevant.
We could also just admit, as Thomas Szasz said, that all mental health diagnoses are ethical/moral/political.
Psychiatry is all about labeling "problems in living." They sought to medicalize social problems, to transform political problems into purely technical ones. E.g., children don't like school because it's boring? Call it ADHD. A housewife won't submit to her husband's demands? Call her schizophrenic and give her ECT until she is docile.
The changing treatment of homosexuals by the DSM is just one more example of how psychiatry is defined by ethics, not medical science.
The function of psychiatry has always been to dominate and control those who do not meet society's expectations.
So let's just admit that all mental health disorders are social, political, and ethical, not medical. Just admit that psychiatry is a social science that works in tandem with the police state, not a medical science. Let's call a spade a spade.
Then, we can say that pedophilia is treated differently because of homosexuality because of its ethics.
Are people who hear voices telling them to harm others simply people failing to fall in line? Are people who are paralyzingly convinced that everyone is out to get them just 'failing to meet societies expectations'? Are people who experience profound, debilitating depression despite the material conditions of their life being great actually fine, and it's merely a judgemental and controlling social apparatus convincing them there something wrong with them?
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I've had severe OCD. It was a living hell. Medication and cognitive behavioral therapy may have saved my life.
Not "social, political and ethical" at all. Very objectively real.
Psychiatry sometimes does bad things (forcing kids onto literal amphetamines en masse because teachers don't want to deal with normal adolescent behavior). Psychiatry also sometimes does very good things.
I wrote a reply to this saying that Scott should bite the bullet. https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/homosexuality-is-a-mental-illness
Hopefully Scott responds to it. Definitely above my paygrade and expertise, but I love stuff that is intriguing and goes against the (public) consensus, even if it's wrong in the end
Homosexuality is not a mistake. It is an evolutionarily advantageous adaptation.
People are born homosexual in response to prenatal stress hormones while they were in their mother's wombs. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_hormones_and_sexual_orientation)
Humans evolved in small hunter-gatherer groups in competition with other groups of humans for limited resources (food, water and land).
In "good times" -- and by "times" I mean time periods spanning a generation or more -- when resources were plentiful and competition not intense, it was advantageous to have heterosexual offspring who would mate, produce more offspring, found new groups, or join other nearby groups. Surplus resources make the raising and feeding of children practical and sustainable by the group, and expectant mothers would be under conditions of little stress.
But in bad times, when resources were scarce or when competing groups threatened the group, having many babies, children and expectant mothers would be a disadvantageous burden upon a group fighting for survival. Pregnant mothers would be under stress, and that stress would select for homosexual offspring who would be less likely to reproduce and have families of their own, and more likely to become adults free to help care for their siblings, neices, and nephews, or participate in food-gathering or war-making activities on behalf of the group.
Hence, homosexuality is an advantage in groups facing hard times. The group is more likely to survive to see good times in the future thanit would be if burdened by the urges and outcomes of rampant heterosexuality.
First of all, please don't state this as if it's an ironclad fact. At best, it's an extremely speculative hypothesis. You are very certain of your claims and offer no probabilistic qualifications for any of them - this certainty is not warranted in any way. Even the extent of the role that prenatal maternal stress has on orientation is not that firmly established.
Secondly, this is based on the long obsolete theory of group selection that is almost certainly incorrect. Such a theory is literally incoherent.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QsMJQSFj7WfoTMNgW/the-tragedy-of-group-selectionism
Something cannot be an evolutionary adaptation if it STOPS your genes from propagating. What natural selection /means/ is some genes are selected for and passed on and other aren't. If you have the functional equivalent of an infertile offspring (i.e. gay kids who don't reproduce), any genes that code for the production of this 'infertility' will be lost.
That which exists is that which persists, and you're claiming that something exists that has no way persisting. A trait can only be passed on if you produce fertile offspring. The people having all the gay babies would have their genes not passed on, and the subsequent generations would be dominated by those having no/fewer gay babies.
The fact that having gay babies could (potentially) be beneficial to the group is irrelevant. It cannot possibly be good for the individual's fitness, and genes are passed on at the individual level. There is not mechanism for gayness to pass on. The group might benefit if such a thing came to be, but the benefit necessarily accrues to those having fertile offspring, passing along their non-gay-offspring genes. Even if you want to say everyone can have this gene and pass it on whenever they're having non-gay babies, no individual has a selection benefit from these genes, and those without the genes will have superior fitness.
I think homosexuality is probably a simple byproduct of a biological process, in this sense it makes the most sense – rather than strategy. E.g. there is a hypothesis that the same mechanism that causes cryptorchidism in some 3% of males is the same one causing homosexuality in males. Also the same for facial hair in women. It seems like regions of the brain and body in some small fraction of foetuses have reversed receptivity to masculinising or feminizing hormones, producing sex atypical traits in both men and women at a rate that is evolutionary costly.
Natural selection in social species differs from non-social species (like foxes, in the article you reference).
People are not octopoi who cast thousands of tiny offspring into the current, hoping on large numbers and chance to continue our line. Nor are we lone predators like the foxes in the article you cite. Every human depends on other humans to survive and thrive.
Social species like us cooperate to ensure the continuation of our genes.
Natural selection isn't about the "individual's fitness" or the individual's propagation. It is about the survival and propagation of the genes. And the gene doesn't care about the individual.
Siblings, cousins, neices and nephews carry almost exactly the same genes as any individual one of them does. Genes are "selfish" and do not care whether they are propagated by the individual or by a close family member.
Whatever strategy helps the progeny of the family survive well into their reproductive years helps the gene propagate.
Humans do not begin to reproduce until well into their second decade of life, and continue to reproduce well into their 30's (typically, for women). That is a long time for any given fertile offspring to survive, (nay, thrive, given the energy and caloric needs of a pregnant human female) before they can pass on their genes.
It has been said, "it takes a village to raise a child." If a doting, helpful and productive gay aunt or uncle makes the survival of his gene-similar family members more likely to grow and live to produce more children, then that gay relative has passed on his or her genes as well. A similar explanation has been posited to explain why we live so long after our child-bearing years into grandparenthood: because grandparents help younger family members during pregnancy and afterwards to raise children who then go on to repeat the process.
As for your critique that I state certainties rather than probability, well, that goes without saying, as natural selection is all about probably rather than certainty. FThe author's labeling of homosexuality (we may as well throw in asexuality while we're at it) as a "targeting error" is a presumption, and ignores the fact that these phenomenon exist in social species from honeybees through penguins to humans.
Social adults will care for offspring that are not their own, and natural selection selects for this behavior, because in closely related individuals, it passes on essentially the same genes.
Finally, there is likely no "gay gene" to either pass on or not. The trait/behavior is not genetic, it is epigenetic. Meaning, it isn't about whether a gene is passed on or not, but whether it is switched on or not. That is how prenatal hormones influence sexuality, through epigenetic switching. (Google it, it's fascinating.). The same prenatal epigenetic switching also is how mothers can pass on to their offspring whether to grow to be small or large, depending on the food supply available to the mother during her lifespan. This science is well established. In particular, a study of Dutch populations before, during and after the Second World War showed how malnutrition or good nutrition of a parent affected the adult height of the offspring, even into the second generation.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2579375/
>Natural selection in social species differs from non-social species (like foxes, in the article you reference).
No, it doesn't. There is no mechanism for passing on infertility genes. That's the whole point.
Read the article again. The point isn't some "takes a village" social aspect to child rearing. It's that you cannot pass on a gene for not having grandkids if you *don't have any grandkids*, which is precisely what such a gene would have to code for to have the effect you say it would.
>Natural selection isn't about the "individual's fitness" or the individual's propagation. It is about the survival and propagation of the genes. And the gene doesn't care about the individual.
The individual is the sole vehicle for gene replication and propagation. If you don't have fertile offspring and other individuals do, your genes for infertile offspring do not propagate.
>Whatever strategy helps the progeny of the family survive well into their reproductive years helps the gene propagate.
A gene for infertile offspring cannot be selected for!
The fact that you're using a gene-centered view of evolution to defend group selectionism is absolutely bizarre.
Genes are the unit of information that get selected for in evolution.
A gene cannot be replicated past one generation if it codes for something that prevents replication!
Evolution doesn't care about "family". Either other individuals have certain genes or they don't. If your sister has genes for fertile offspring and you have genes for infertile offspring, your sisters non-infertile-offspring genes are the ONLY thing that gets passed on. It doesn't matter if you share most of your genes with your sister. If she doesn't pass on your 'infertility' gene, the infertility gene *does not get passed on*.
It doesn't matter how well a gay aunt or uncle helps his family. An individual with 'infertility' genes cannot pass those genes into more than one generation. Individuals without those genes will pass on their non-infertility genes, even if their sister's infertility genes helped them.
>It has been said, "it takes a village to raise a child." If a doting, helpful and productive gay aunt or uncle makes the survival of his gene-similar family members more likely to grow and live to produce more children,
First of all, putting aside the absurdity of group selectionism, your explanation for this advantage itself makes no sense.
It makes no sense for gays to be produced during times of stress e.g. famine to help the group. A gay baby, child and adult will use an exactly equal amount of resources as a non-gay one up until the non-gay kids has babies of its own. That means the mother is helping the group TWO GENERATIONS LATER. The gay baby is using up the same amount of resources when the famine exists, and it only once they get to child bearing age any 'benefit' can exist, by which time the famine is unlikely to still even exist. And even if the famine still exists, there's no reason evolution would choose to have more kids now rather than later.
If your gay offspring consuming resources is fine because it helps raise its cousins, then why isn't having non-gay kids who have kids of their own fine? They'll consume more resources, but they'll also help raise their cousin's kids too! You're saying one thing is fine in one generation, but it suddenly stops being fine the next generation. And not only that, it's fine in the generation closest to the e.g. famine, but stops being fine only after an entire generation after this original famine has occurred.
Even if there were some mechanism for passing on these genes, it's plain dumb to think that evolution would reward infertility 2 generations out from a source of stress that may no longer be relevant any more than simply having as many fertile offspring as possible. Evolution doesn't work like this.
If we were talking about becoming infertile yourself as a defence against resource overconsumption, that would make sense, because there's a min. But saving resources only when after a bare minimum 13 years have passed from the time that there was a resource shortage is incoherent. Either babies are a resource drain and need to be avoided, or babies grow up to help their family more than the resources they consume. It can't work both ways.
>As for your critique that I state certainties rather than probability, well, that goes without saying, as natural selection is all about probably rather than certainty.
No. That's not it. It's not that natural selection is a probabilitic process. It's that you're stating that an evolutionary mechanism exists, but we don't know if it exists. It's extremely speculative to say it exists. You didn't say "one possible explanation is...", you just said it as if it's an established fact. It's not. Not even close.
>FThe author's labeling of homosexuality (we may as well throw in asexuality while we're at it) as a "targeting error" is a presumption, and ignores the fact that these phenomenon exist in social species from honeybees through penguins to humans.
All kinds of useless or actively harmful traits exist in social animals. It doesn't make them any less useless or harmless.
>Social adults will care for offspring that are not their own, and natural selection selects for this behavior, because in closely related individuals, it passes on essentially the same genes.
Natural selcetion is concerned with individual genes and their replication. "Essentially the same genes" isn't good enough when we're talking about a specific gene existing or not.
If my genes make me infertile, it doesn't matter whether I help my 'essentially the same' family members. If they lack this infertility gene, then the gene will not be passed on and cannot evolve as a group fitness strategy.
Let me be clear: I'm not saying that infertility can't be helpful for the group as a whole. I'm saying that infertility BY DEFINITION cannot be selected for, so no matter how beneficial to the group your infertility genes are, they will not be passed on and so cannot be selected for.
>Finally, there is likely no "gay gene" to either pass on or not. The trait/behavior is not genetic, it is epigenetic. Meaning, it isn't about whether a gene is passed on or not, but whether it is switched on or not.
Even if this is true, and even IF this epigentic trait is passed on, it STILL can't repilcate because people without this epigentic switching will still be selected for and those with it will be selected against. This is true even if it helps the reproduction of those related to you. Infertility *cannot be selected for*, genetically or epigenetically. The more fertile individuals will pass on their more fertile genetics/epigenetics, and the infertile genetics/epigenetics will not be passed on.
>he same prenatal epigenetic switching also is how mothers can pass on to their offspring whether to grow to be small or large, depending on the food supply available to the mother during her lifespan. This science is well established. In particular, a study of Dutch populations before, during and after the Second World War showed how malnutrition or good nutrition of a parent affected the adult height of the offspring, even into the second generation.
This is irrelevant because any analogy between this and gay babies completely breaks down for two important reasons.
1. This switching helps the propagation of this individuals height-switching genetics/epigenetics directly. The switching confers a direct selective advantage to the individual and so the genetics/epigenetics is *selected for*. It doesn't render the individual infertile and therefore by definition incapable of passing on this infertility.
In this case, having short kids *increased the likelihood genetics and epigenetics for short height would be passed on*. Having infertile kids for genetic or epigenetic reasons *eliminates the possibility of it being passed on*. You may help your siblings, but any siblings without these genes/epigenes will be selected for.
Having short kids in this environment increases the chances of your kids being fertile. Having gay kids in this environment greatly reduces the chance of them being fertile. There is no way to select for infertility because by definition you're *preventing the information for this trait being replicated*.
2. This has an effect, and therefore a benefit, from the very first generation. You're proposing some bizarre arrangement where this 'switching' has no benefit in resource savings until the second generation, because it only after one generation when the group population is affected at all. There's no reason evolution would select for something that helps later rather than sooner in response to acute stress experienced during pregnancy.
If resource consuming gay aunts and uncles are beneficial one generation, there's no reason they would stop being beneficial in the following generation. Such infertility can only ever be punished by evolution.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I think we might be talking past each other here, both making valid points, and I'm sorry if I haven't explained mine well enough, because your reply didn't really address or acknowledge what I'm trying to convey. Let me try again briefly, and then we'll call it a day, okay?
1) The latest research is indicating it's likely that there isn't a gay gener, per se, but that we all have within our genes the capability to be tall or short, energetic and slim or prone to store fat, as well as the ability to prefer the company of men or women. The genes for these traits exist in (most/) all of us and all of these genes are passed down together. Which genes are expressed (turned on) is a response to prenatal conditons and in some cases (e.g.the Dutch study) by the life experiences of the parents even before the conception of the offspring in which the genes are expressed.
Prenatal environmental factors are responsible for selecting whether certain genes are expressed. Did you know that in crocodilians, for example, the sex of the offspring isn't determined when the eggs are laid, but by the temperature of the nest? A few degrees difference in temperature changes the ratio of male and female offspring by a large amount (reference you can google). The genes of the offspring don't change in the egg -- they have the potential to be male and female at the same time -- what they become is due to the environment. And even then, not all of them become one or the other, there is still a mix. On an individual basis it's just the probability that changes. But crocs and gators lay eggs, and the environment is outside. The analog in mammals is where the egges develop and grow into individuals -- in utero, and the "environment" is transmitted through the mother's bloodstream, in terms of nutrition levels and hormones.
These epigenetic switches -- where the potential for several options or outcomes are preserved simultaneously in the genes while only one of them is selected based on environmental condidions -- are a very useful evolutionary advantage. They allow an organism to change it's adaptation from one generation to the next, much more quick adaptation than would be possible by selecting for genetic mutations alone. Natural selection for genetic mutations is very slow and can only happen over the course of many generations, and during that time the new trait, being a mutation (which is rare), is only expressed in a small minority -- sometimes just one -- of the offspring. Epigenetic switching, in contrast, is already there in the genes, in every offspring, ready to take effect when the environment calls for it.
Takeaway is that if homosexuality is an epigenetic, rather than a genetic, trait, as the evidence seems to indicate, then there's no "gay gene" to naturally select away due to not reproducing. Instead, the genes for preferring a particular gender, one or the other, already exist in us. It's only which one gets switched on in utero that determines our sexuality.
2) Epigenetic switches don't get "passed on," (as you assert above). They are set by environmental factors, each generation, early in development of the offspring (in the egg or the womb, or sometimes in the gamete (the ovary or the testes, before conception). Being gay, for example, doesn't make one infertile. Many gay men and lesbians have been married and have kids (usually due to societal pressure to conform) before they figure out they're barking up the wrong tree (for them). But these kids are just as likely to be straight as kids of straight parents. And conversely, most parents of gay kids are straight. And even gay individuals who don't have kids aren't infertile in evolutionary terms if there close relatives (99.999% same genes) have kids. And if these gay persons (otherwise nonreproducing adults) help their relatives who do breed to have more kids, and kids who are more fit to find mates of their own and reproduce, then their genes are replicated in greater number than the genes of competing families whose kids are less fit because they and their mother doesn't have that kind of help around.
Takeaway is: it isn't a gay thing, it's a "what kind of assistance the reproducing individual ahs, and how that helps them have more offspring and how it helps those offpreing be more fit to have offspring themselves" thing. It doesn't matter if the helper is a husband who sticks around and supports hie wife and kids, or a grandparent, or an aunt or uncle (gay or not) -- more help means 9on average) more kids and kids who are more fit.
3) Gay folks (and let's throw in grandparents and other nonreproducing adults here, because the same fact applies) don't just "consume resources" that otherwise might go to reproducing adults, causing a detriment to the society in which they live. On average, folks without kids create resources -- (people in a society create resources through the goods and services they produce through their labor, right?) -- and in functional families and societies, these resources are shared with the reproducing adults enabling them to have more and fitter offspring. And that makes these kinds of societies -- let me call them "sharing societies" for short -- ones where nonreproducing members produce surplus resources -- far more surplus than a reproducing family can produce, due to the demands of raising children -- and share these surplus resources with the child-raising families -- produce more fit offspring than societies where the child-raising families must struggle on their own.
That effect -- the benfits of sharing -- are especially magnified when resources are scarce or hard to get. More folks unburdened by children produce more surplus which can then be shared with the reproducing members, making the orffspring more likely to survive, thrive and reproduce. And these reproducing adults are passing on the same genes as their nonreproducing sisters and brothers, Except in the very rare instance where a beneficial genetic mutation arises and is passed on uniquely through the new gene, it's epigenetic switching that does all the adaptive heavy lifting.
At this point I can't explain it any better. I've reached my limit. If you get it, great. If you don't that's fine, too. It's easy to guess from your user name and image what your beliefs are, and that this idea that nonreproducing adults might be evoutionalrily advantageous might be a stretch, requiring you to question some basic assumptions you hold about what it means to be human. I obviously have a different opinion. But it's good to see that we can still discuss the matter respectfully.
Cheers.
Maybe just reconteztualize 'mental illness' as 'sufficient mental and/or emotional suffering to warrant treatment' so we can just move on without stigma.
Diagnosis: Human
A fun side effect of your disclaimer: I was curious how bad the sentences were out of context, so I skimmed the post, only read the sentences with Ns and then got distracted and forgot I had this tab open.
Going to read the rest of the article now, though. Definitely won't get distracted this time. Definitely.
pedophilia N is N not N a N mental N disorder.
"Acting on your desires on someone who doesn't share or can't consent" is a crime. pedophilia is a failure of understanding when your desires shouldn't be acted upon.
It's the same regardless if we're talking about children, animals or grownups that do not consent. We just call it different names.
No. Pedphillia involves attraction to a demographic of people who categorically cannot consent. If you're exclusively attracted to children, then by definition you cannot have consensual sex with anyone you're attracted to. That's what separates it from other modes of sexual orientation in this context. You have a sexual orientation that necessarily cannot be acted upon in a way that doesn't cause social harm, whereas the clear majority of homosexual and heterosexual sex is consensual.
Pedophiles by definition are sexually aroused by sex that is rape. Most homosexual and heterosexual people not only don't commit rape, but importantly in this context, they're not even interested in sex that is rape.
Not really sure where "homosexual and heterosexual sex" comparison came from, those weren't even part of my argument at all. As for everything else - my personal opinion is that difference between "cannot consent" and "doesn't consent" is artificial and unnecessary. Both cases are (arguable the same) crime and should be prosecuted as such.
You can be attracted to whoever and whatever. Ability to NOT act on your desires is one of things that distinguish humans. We should really be better at using it.
If it's not helpful to combine Biological and Apolitical, then let's separate into 2 concepts:
- Homosexuality is a Biological disorder that does not Require Treatment
- Pedophilia is a Biological disorder that does Require Treatment
in which, "Require Treatment" come from our society's concensus (aka politic), which come from various considerations such as technical feasilibity to treat the symptom, the cost-vs-benefit to society, the personal freedom of choice etc...
The question is: Whether marking someone as "Require Treatment" stigmatize them?
The big assumption this article is making is that the DSM or HiTOP or whatever we collectively use to understand mental health disorders decides what is a "mental illness" and therefore what is covered by insurance. This is true in the current system — but the article then goes on to say that a biological and apolitical taxonomy of mental health would not be a good thing because of this. Well maybe it is the current system rather than the biological understanding of mental health that is the problem.
You should probably write "NO" all over these parts of text instead of "N". N's just look like a weird gimmick. NO's , taken out of context, hint that you dissaprove of sentences' meaning, which is true for cases when they are quoted poorly.
I doubt I'm the first person on this ball, but no, the premise of this is incorrect. I'm fine with classing homosexuality as a mental disorder. Just note in the description of it that although technically a disorder of targeting, it almost never causes actual distress and that treatment is therefore contraindicated.
EDIT: Also, preventing stigma is a silly and nonsensical ambition to have in general, and particularly in a dry medical text. Anybody can call anything stigmatizing, heeding that is just a way of yielding power to society's whiniest, which I oppose. And if people really are stigmatizing mental disorders, confront that at the social level, not in the diagnostic manual. (If inclusion in the manual is stigmatizing, surely schizophrenia shouldn't be in there either, or bipolar disorder, or...?)
The point is not that it is a mental disorder. The point is that you cannot call pedophillia a disorder but not homosexuality on the basis of *biology* alone. It is a response to people who think a purely biological approach to classification will prevent things like homosexiality a disorder. You need precisely non-biological aspects to be considered if homosexuality isn't going to be recognised as a disorder.
I feel like you're not picking up what I'm putting down, here. Possibly just because you already had this conversation a few times in the comments and are skipping ahead steps? But my point is, I'm fine with calling both pedophilia and homosexuality disorders on the basis of biology alone, so the problem evaporates. Preventing things like homosexuality from being recognized as disorders is a fool's errand, partially precisely *because* it prevents sensible and rational solutions such as going by biology alone. A correct response to such people is just "you are stupid, we're doing it this way, deal with it".
Banned for high temperature low effort comment.
Comparisons to gay people misses a key point.
Bob likes men is a fact.
Bob is a woman is a lie.
SO many people here are convinced that homosexuality is a evolutionary strategy.
Putting aside the fact that even if it made sense it would still be simply a speculative hypothesis, it in fact makes no sense for two main reasons.
1. A gene that codes for infertile offspring *cannot possibly be selected for*. Genes are selected for when they get replicated successfully. Infertility by definition prevents replication. There is no mechanism for replicating something that prevents replication.
It doesn't matter if gay aunts and uncles help the group overall. It doesn't matter if you share most of your genes with your non-gay family members. Gay kids as a survival strategy *cannot be passed down*. Even if your group benefits, the ones without the gay-kid genes/epigenes will be selected for, meaning that subseuqent generations will be dominated by genes/epigenes which don't code for infertility. Even if the trait helps the group in one generation, it by definition cannot be passed to subsequent generations and therefore cannot be selected for. Even if the whole group benefits from individuals being infertile, the individuals who are most fertile will necessarily be selected for and the strategy dies out after one generation.
2. It doesn't even make sense as an evolutionary strategy!
If gay babies are made due to stress during pregnancy e.g. a famine, it makes sense to have less kids, not less fertile kids. Infertile kids still consume resources, and so this "strategy" is based on a benefit existing 2 generations after the acute stress was experienced by a pregnant mother.
Gay offspring will consume as much resources as non-gay offspring, so there can only possibly be a resource saving benefit in the second generation when the gay offspring aren't having kids.
Not only is this contradictory in that it says resource-consuming gay aunts and uncles are beneficial in one generation but not the next, it also means that it's better to save resource two generations after a mother experiences famine, rather than the first generation which is closest to the famine.
Evolution is not going to reward this weird delayed infertility that does nothing to save resources for an entire generation after an acute stress is experienced.
Why are resource-consuming uncles beneficial in one generation because they help raise other kids, but the next generation suddenly such people would be a resource drain? Why wouldn't kids of their own have the same benefit even though they're consuming the same amount of resources as their parents (except this time, further away from the famine).
Having shorter kids due to malnutrition makes sense, because there's an immediate resource saving that directly INCREASES the likelihood that this short height gene/epigene gets passed on. But a gene for infertility cannot possibly be propagated regardless of how much it helps your group because it is by definition a gene that prevents its own replication.
All of this positively reeks of ideologically driven people desperately looking for a way for homosexuality not to be a disorder or 'mistake'. I have nothing against gays, but I am completely opposed to people proposing incoherent scientific hypotheses because it suits their ideology better than the alternative. I'm not even saying its a deliberate act of dishonesty. I'm just saying that no smart person would engage in such sloppy thinking if their ideology wasn't getting in the way of them seeing things clearly.
What about classifying pretty much everything as a disorder, and leaving the political and insurance problems outside the classification? Would such classification be useless?
By "everything" I mean not just "pedophilia" or "homosexuality", but also any fetishes, and even "having sex not for procreation", or any "being dysphoric in own body".
This post continues Scotts tradition of having jarringly different Ideas about what relationship categories have to truth than me. Scott is of the opinion that categories are just word games and that technocrats should be able to shift their borders are any time to maximize public utility. Being rhetorically gifted as he is he describes this position well. There is no natural force that decides whether whales are fish or some other category so we ought to define fish however this best serves us. It's a difficult position to assail. And yet...
I think firstly that there is such a thing as a natural category. These are things people can intuit about the territory, like canyons etched by the simple combined implications of gravity causing water to flow down hill and precipitation taking that water back uphill. This forms natural borders between things. Creatures capable of flight are an intuitively useful category, people use it for things like determining if a wall is going to keep that creature out. This kind of category cannot and will not bend to our word games. We may call it something different or create new categories that mostly but don't exactly match this category(maybe you'd like to include or exclude insects based on some further need) but the natural category remains.
What people want out of things like the DSM is for it to have as its first goal to reflect a natural category. And there are a few options here, I think whether we pick a natural category that includes or excludes homosexuality is an important debate that could go either way. But it should be about which category to pick, not whether we should shift between different categorical systems from line to line. Because if you're switching up the justifying for inclusion from one definition to the next the actually underlying category is just "Whatever I find expedient" which is a maximally bad fit for a document meant to describe reality. It makes a farse of the whole project and in the end it turns the DSM into just another locus of power in the culture war with no more legitimacy than a piece of paper that says "I do what I want".
"Creatures capable of flight are an intuitively useful category, people use it for things like determining if a wall is going to keep that creature out. This kind of category cannot and will not bend to our word games. We may call it something different or create new categories that mostly but don't exactly match this category(maybe you'd like to include or exclude insects based on some further need) but the natural category remains."
But we don't actually have a term for creatures capable of flight! We have the term "bird," which refers to warm-blooded vertebrates with wings, feathers, and a beak. The vast majority of them can fly, but there are some bird species that can't. And there are also some creatures that can fly but aren't birds, such as bats. If you lived in an area that had no birds but still had a large bat population, it would be very foolish to say "don't worry, there aren't any birds in this region, so nothing will be able to fly over this wall." And if you lived in an area where the only birds were ostriches, it would be equally foolish to say "we shouldn't even bother trying to build a wall, those birds will just fly over it anyway."
Yet at the same time, we shouldn't just change the meaning of "bird" to include bats and exclude ostriches. "Bird" is a useful biological category. If there was a deadly virus that was killing off birds, then it would be an enormous mistake to say "these ostriches can't fly so they'll be fine, no need to take any precautions with them," or to say "we need to devote a ton of resources to protecting the bats around here, otherwise this disease might completely wipe them out." Scott was never arguing that categories were entirely arbitrary with no basis in the real world whatsoever; he was arguing that how we choose to categorize things is highly dependent on our practical reasons for wanting to categorize them in the first place.
But all of these categories you're talking about are also natural categories so I'm not sure you've addressed my point. I agree we utilize several different categories to refer to subgroups of volants. But we don't, with some Californian bee exceptions which I also oppose, just throw things into the bird category for political expedience. We don't allow and would be highly suspicious of a proposal to add tigers to the bird category on the grounds it would have huge tax benefits to that tiger king fellow. Scott's post argues that no, in fact we don't want a consistent biological category or avian because then all of our weird tax lookpholes won't work anymore, and I'm over here hoping we kill the tax loop holes and very much being in favor of a strict avian category being able to exist.
I don't remember Scott saying anything about how we should categorize Tigers as Birds for their tax benefits. I think he might have been talking about something entirely different.
Agreed. Scott's just wrong on that one. Man was made for the categories.
> What people want out of things like the DSM is for it to have as its first goal to reflect a natural category.
The problem is that people want different things from the DSM, which are in conflict. From my perspective, the question whether something is an mental illness/disability is separate from the question whether we want to treat it, which is separate from the question whether we want to make special acommodations, etc. Asperger's and homosexuality are limiting in some ways and in some contexts it can be useful to regard them as mental aberrations that require a form of consideration/help/whatever, but they also unrestrict people in certain ways and can be seen as valid ways of existing.
Of course, the exact same has been argued by some when it comes to pedophilia. Ultimately, it is hard to deny that the perception of harm done to others plays a major role in what is seen as acceptable and thus what people want to get rid of, by treatment.
Ultimately, what is unfortunate is that there is great power in pretending to be objective. In general, I think that a lot of power plays are justified by appealing to an objective good, which is used to cloak personal preferences and specific interests as things that cannot legitimately be opposed.
There us no rule that we have to have only one list. If you know anything about relational databases this problem us like thinking we can't have one to many relationships because we have made the poor decision to store everything in one flat table.
My argument is that this is in no way an impossibility, it is a choice. And it is a choice which gives more power to certain people than if you make a different choice, so there are reasons why people don't actually want to change it to expose what political choices are actually made.
There is a lot of power in presenting subjective choices as objective truth, because then dissent can be dismissed as anti-science, anti-establishment or such, rather than having to defend the actual choices.
Then I'm in agreement and depressed that we let these people win.
There are facts, sure. But categories, and categorization, is a thing humans do - not a thing nature does.
Why can't we have separate lists of
A) neurologically atypical behaviors
B) behaviors which are unethical and thus stigmatized
Lord bless us all with the power to decouple
I'm very confused. I thought biological and psychological were used as counterpart- and sometimes opposite- terms, where psychological areas are classified primarily by personal accounts and functionality in society even if the underlying biological causes have been partially identified. Given that, what does a purely biological psychological disorder mean?? Doesn't Scott, as a psychiatrist, look at a little checklist ten times a week about how much mental states are effecting the ability to function in day-to-day life to determine level of order or disorder?
Given that, it feels incredibly disingenuous to say "don't quote me out of context for saying these two topics are not functionally different, but also they're not functionally different only politically different." Is there a reason the resulting actions from expressing mental states with or against other people isn't being measured as a type of functionality here? I would think a consensual action that doesn't harm another person could be called more functional than a nonconsensual action that does harm another person & thus results in said person needing mental and/or physical treatment to be well/successful. That's simply a measurement: that's as apolitical as it gets.
(And given this straightforward way of measuring, it makes perfect sense to me to say "severe distress causing depression, discomfort, self-harm, etc. from untreated dysphoria results in low functionality and therefor is a disorder" and "a person that doesn't currently experience severe distress and happens to be wearing a dress doesn't result in low functionality therefor it is not a disorder". That's very simple logic, not some type of mess of caveats.)
This feels like a weirdly unconstructive article for such a charged topic.
The entire idea that any illness should be treated if a treatment exists and no treatment may be done absent an illness, consists of bureaucrats/technocrats trying to force a multi-faceted and complex question into an objective measurement. But no one likes the outcome of any objective measurement, which cannot capture the actual nuances and factors that exist, so then they covertly introduce politics into the objective measurement or slyly use the measurement differently in some cases.
If you look at the legal system, then they are much more sane (than healthcare) by not simply jailing everyone with aberrant behavior, but actually judging the impact on others and the acceptability to society, not based on a 'objective' standard, but based on a standard that is recognized as being political.
Good points made,
Could we not do some magic and label body dysphoria as a bodily disorder rather than a mental one? (If it really is a disconnect btwn mind and body, but -maybe politically- we choose the mind part to be truer?)
I'd still prefer to imagine an ideal body of law with which we can base a taxonomy off of. In that case, the society- gov and moral conscious included- is like the environment for which a trait is best adapted for. I'm really only stuck on this because I'm sad to have to say that concepts can't be organized logically, and let non rationalists win :(.
also, from a collectivist perspective, pedophilia is still much more of a disbenefit if it causes harm to others, unlike queerness. One might respond that evolutionarily it only matters to have an individualist perspective; not so if the gene is spread among the population.
I realized how strange it is to me that this article throws out the hairdryer theorem, arguing ethics over biology and ignoring utility.
Hairdryer approach had really gotten through to my dad more than anything else.
Homosexuality is obviously a *biological malfunctioning*, and as Emil Kierkegaard points out https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/01/homosexuality-is-a-mental-illness/
, it clusters with most other mental disorders . So if we are interested in the scientific project of identifying natural kinds, there is an obvious candidate for the meaning of “mental disorder” , that includes homosexuality. Obviously this a verbal dispute and nothing FORCES us to give “mental disorder” this meaning, but it seems like a fairly natural category we’d probably want a name for anyway.
Now, for me, it’s not that classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder is necessarily “stigmatizing”, more that it may come with the presumption that it is somehow irrational not to mind being homosexual, or that if it were possible I would be mistaken in not becoming heterosexual. This is simply mistaken. There is a very wide range of rationally permissible preferences. As long as I don’t have to deal with annoying paternalists who think they know better than me how I should want my mind to be, I don’t really care if people call homosexuality a disorder.
Yes there are certain respects in which being homosexual makes someone worse off. So it is better for people not to be gay in the first place. But people tend to intrinsically value certain kinds of psychological integrity, and a change in sexual orientation violates that for many people.
An AGI future seems more plausible than an embryo selection future. So biology and culture war considerations are less interesting to me than more abstract questions about people’s value systems. In a posthuman world, if all goes well, being homosexual likely won’t come with any negatives at all. I suspect the future trajectory of conditions like anxiety and depression to look very different from that of homosexuality.
PART 1 of 2
I largely like and agree with this post. I think the post’s comparison of pedophilia and homosexuality is debatable, but plausible, and certainly not unreasonable, and I won’t comment further on it. But I am bothered by the comments—not because many of them advocate ideas that are false, unreasonable, and harmful (though many of them *do*), but rather because they are mostly repeating debates that have already happened at a MUCH higher quality elsewhere, and it sure looks like nobody has mentioned this fact in over 1,000 comments.
VERY well-developed versions of these same debates have already been taking place for DECADES—in fields such as philosophy of medicine, philosophy of psychiatry, and sociology. I’ve skimmed hundreds of comments in this thread, and only a few people have mentioned any of the relevant literature. A few people have mentioned Szasz (though not so much his critics, who are possibly even more important!), and a grand total of one (1) person (singular!) has mentioned Jerome Wakefield, and not much else has been brought up.
I hate people who dismiss everyone else’s ideas by saying “Read the literature!” because this sort of comment is generally condescending and unhelpful. But I’m going to do it. Please read the literature. At least a little bit of it. Or at least become aware that it exists. For starters, I recommend glancing over the following SEP articles—
Mental Disorder (Illness): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-disorder/
Philosophy of Psychiatry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychiatry/
These articles provide decent overviews of, and extensive sources for, many of the debates being brought up again and again in the comments here. For one thing, look at the section 8 “Values and Mental Disorder” in the “Mental Disorder (Illness)” article. And for more generic discussion that I think can help reduce diseased thinking about disease, there’s also the following—
Concepts of Health and Disease: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/health-disease/
I don’t mean to endorse all the literature cited in these articles, or the articles themselves, in their entirety. They’re summary overviews with their own biases in what they cover and how they cover it. My point is more that they illustrate how these topics have been discussed extensively and for a long time, and at a high level of complexity—covering a great many topics discussed here, and doing so in a thoughtful and well-developed way. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel alone here. There is a cumulative tradition and set of communities and epistemic practices—resources of arguments, paradigms, theories, and criticisms, for copious object-level and meta-level issues here! There are specialist discourses on these topics that are worth engaging with, replete with useful conceptual distinctions and theoretical arguments which can be examined, adopted, rejected, criticized, and modified, for purposes of enriching the inquiry.
There is also, of course, a lot of meta-level debate over whether physical disorders are basically the same kind of thing as mental disorders, and/or whether we should engage in classification similarly or differently in these two areas.
The most notorious philosopher of mental illness might be Thomas Szasz, who advocates an extreme skepticism about mental disorders altogether. I’m pretty sure Scott is very much an anti-Szaszian. Szasz’s arguments probably don’t successfully apply to some more recent theories of mental disorders, so a lot of his ideas have been superseded. Hanna Pickard (a philosopher and psychotherapist) has defended a neo-Szaszian view in her book-chapter “Mental Illness is Indeed a Myth,” but she still shows that Szasz’s particular arguments and version of his theory were incorrect.
In the rest of this comment, I’ll discuss two anti-Szaszian theories of mental disorder (or disease more broadly, which is related) which I’ll discuss because I’m familiar with them and consider them fruitful to explore to improve the discourse. The first is a unified theory (Jerome Wakefield) which is realist and attempts to track the commonsense concept of disease or disorder. The second is a pluralist and pragmatist theory (Quill Kukla)—which I actually think closely resembles Scott’s revisionary pragmatist account given in “Diseased Thinking: Dissolving Questions about Disease.”
One major theorist is Jerome Wakefield (no relation to the anti-vax guy), known for his “Harmful Dysfunction” Analysis of mental disorder (HDA). (I’m pretty sure Wakefield also thinks the HDA is true of physical disorder, but he focuses mainly on mental disorder.) The HDA attempts to combine the need for a “biological” component (“dysfunction,” here a neutral term for, roughly, a failure of some bodily or mental element to perform its adapted evolutionary function) and a “normative” component (“harm”).
The HDA is supposed to apply to both physical and mental disorders. Wakefield has also compellingly argued that not all mental disorders are identical to, nor caused by, physical disorders. There can be mental disorder without (say) brain disorder. Nevertheless, this does not commit him to any kind of mind-body dualism. It is rather similar to how there can be software malfunctions even in the absence of hardware malfunctions, yet without any metaphysically dubious dualism that would say the software is a soul or anything like that. On this, see Wakefield’s article “Addiction and the Concept of Disorder, Part 2: Is every Mental Disorder a Brain Disorder?”
Not all harmful conditions are medical disorders at all, so something like a “dysfunction” component seems needed. But not all failures to perform evolutionary functions are bad, and (arguably!) it is misleading to call something a mental disorder if it is not at all bad—so something like a “harm” component seems needed. These statements are, of course, controversial.
Still, the HDA, or some variant of it, clearly has the ability to clarify a lot of the confusions that are messing up people’s thinking in some of the comments below Scott’s post—at the very least, by providing a body of empirically informed & logically rigorous argumentation and theory that can provide the basis for further discourse and debate! I think it should also disillusion some people of some beliefs they are highly confident in.
For example, some people in the thread have claimed it is “obvious” that homosexuality is a mental disorder, and that sheer political correctness is the only thing that prevents experts from admitting this fact. But really it is far from obvious that homosexuality is (or isn’t) a mental disorder—insofar as [1] it is far from obvious whether Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction account is correct or incorrect, and [2] it is unclear whether the HDA would imply that homosexuality is a disorder, because [2A] it is unclear whether homosexuality is a “dysfunction” in the right kind of evolutionary way; and [2B] the harm associated with homosexuality is caused by homophobia rather than homosexuality itself, and it is not entirely clear whether Wakefield’s analysis allows or disallows such extrinsically-caused harm to count as the right kind of harm to make a “dysfunction” qualify as a “disorder”.
Of course, the HDA has problems, and there is a lot of debate over it, and many theorists disagree with it. For an extensive recent anthology of chapters by Wakefield and fellow scholars who disagree with various aspects of his theory, see “Defining Mental Disorder: Wakefield and His Critics.” I haven't read much of it yet, beyond the intro chapter, but it looks fantastic and seems to be entirely open-access.
Defining Mental Disorder: Wakefield and His Critics: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5015/Defining-Mental-DisorderJerome-Wakefield-and-His
PART 2 of 2
Whether correct or incorrect (or some combination of both), the HDA is the kind of nuanced way of thinking about mental disorder that stands a chance of pushing the conversation forward. The discourse around the HDA is, to some extent, a better version of the discourse people in this comment thread are attempting to engage in. For a 20-page overview of the sorts of issues discussed in the anthology, see its introductory chapter here: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5015/chapter/2812043/Introduction
The DSM itself, and organizations such as the APA, also have various discussions on these topics, and there’s overlap and cross-pollination between these discussions and the literatures I’ve mentioned. Some of this is also discussed in the Wakefield anthology.
More broadly, in the related academic literatures, there have already been myriad debates on topics such as (1) what is even the point of having a category of “mental disorder,” and (2) what criteria (if any) for “mental disorder” classification would avoid both over-inclusiveness and under-inclusiveness? Many (and perhaps all) proposed criteria seem to either [A] include things that shouldn’t be included, or [B] fail to include things that should be included, as instances of mental disorder.
Also relatedly, there’s a debate over whether [A] we should define “disorder” such that a disorder is always bad (in at least some way) by definition, or if instead [B] we should define “disorder” neutrally such that there can be disorders that are not bad at all. Perhaps a mental disorder is usually bad but not necessarily. There are pros and cons to each one. If a “disorder” must be bad by definition, then this may make it a less scientifically objective classification than people believe it is—and admitting it isn't scientifically objective may be problematically revisionary. On the other hand, if a “disorder” can be neutral or good, then this may clash with the commonsense concept of “disorder,” so it may also be problematically revisionary. I personally think commonsense thinking about “disorder” is fundamentally confused on many levels—so, as a result, I suspect *any* plausible account of “disorder” (if we should even keep the concept, which is also debatable) will be revisionary and counterintuitive to at least some degree.
As I interpret him, the view Scott defends in “Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease” is, roughly, X is a mental disorder *because* it responds well to “medical” treatment (which, in mental disorder, I assume means something like “medication and/or counseling”). Or rather, we should call it a “disease” on the grounds that by doing so, we will assist the appropriate response of medical treatment. The appropriateness of treatment is in turn determined at least partly by the presence or absence of the various contributory qualities given in the post’s node diagram, which are connected to the ‘hidden inferences’ encouraged by the use of the “disease” concept. Pardon me if this isn't quite a faithful summary.
I think something like this is a plausible analysis, and one which is an interesting rival to the Wakefield view. (Scott also connects his analysis of disease to something like hard determinism and an instrumentalist or consequentialist account of warranted blame, but I don’t think these further notions are necessary for the core of his analysis.) Notably, Scott’s view is revisionary, I think, because it looks like the reverse of the commonsense view. I think the commonsense view is basically that X responds well to medical treatment because it is a disorder. By contrast, Scott seems to think X is (something we should define as) a mental disorder because it responds well to medical treatment. This isn't necessarily a problem though, since again I think *any* plausible account will be revisionary, since commonsense is kind of busted on this topic.
Finally, I will also note there are some analyses similar to Scott’s analysis in the literature as well, such as Quill Kukla’s account of “disease” (which is at least similar to “disorder”).
Kukla’s account, and Scott’s account, are both broadly pragmatist—they both say we (morally) should define “disease” in a manner that is sensitive to the humanitarian consequences of making such a classification. Kukla’s version helpfully addresses the diverse and contradictory rationales for why people are interested in “disease” concepts. As a result, Kukla’s analysis is explicitly pluralistic, claiming (I think correctly) that some conditions will be properly categorized as diseases only in some contexts and not in other contexts. But I think this position accords well with the spirit of Scott’s other work in conceptual analysis, such as in his post “The Categories were Made for Man, not Man for the Categories.”
Kukla’s article “What Counts as a Disease, and Why Does It Matter?” (free download): https://www.pdcnet.org/jpd/content/jpd_2022_0002_0130_0156
As a final note, I’ll also mention that there’s debate over the constellation of similar terms here, such as “disorder,” “disease,” “health condition,” “pathology,” and “illness,” among other similar or related terms such as “disability” (which is associated with yet more layers of controversy). And there is a variety of practices on whether some these are identical or distinct categories (some of which I think is arbitrary semantics, and some of which I think is substantive). Kukla alludes to this in a footnote.
Anyway, that’s about all I have to day on this for now. I highly recommend people interested in these topics check out some of these sources, and the broader tradition of scholarship surrounding them.
Interesting read! I’ve never thought about this topic before so thanks for writing about it.
I understand how most of the N'd sentences would sound bad without context, but one stood out to me.
"... it’s N important N for N your N sexual N partners N to N be N able N to N consent." At the very least, this particular clause seems quite safe to quote without context, and overall the whole N'd section prior also seems far more safe than all the other N'd sentences.
Good point on the general principle, but wrong on the specifics. Just as with homosexuality back in the day (pre-Hooker), most research on pedophilia uses hopelessly biased clinical and forensic samples, while statistical analysis of what good data exist shows that in the absence of coercion, negative outcomes are associated with social stigma and condemnation rather than with the contacts/relationships themselves.
What's significant in this article, but not mentioned, is the preponderance of homosexual males who are sexually attracted to boys or to teenagers. Pederasts. The youngster may be able to 'give consent' (especially if the youth believes that he *is* a homosexual) but the law says that an adult can't engage in sexual behaviour with underage boys without suffering some punishment if caught and convicted of so doing. The link between homosexuality and pederasty and paedophilia is not only linked in a diagnostic sense but is also subject to the same kind of consideration of 'politics'. For me, I'd say, 'to hell' with worrying unduly about 'stigmatising' homosexuality and homosexuals; get it on a list of mental illnesses so that parents and public bodies can lawfully keep kids away from being corrupted.