If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them — LessWrong
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> "—but if one hundred thousand [normies] can turn up, to show their support for the [rationalist] community, why can't you?" > > I said wearily, "B…
  • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
    9·
    1 年前

    Someone asked in the comments that Zack clarify wtf the claim is, and Zack posted this abstract:

    Does this help? (159 words and one hyperlink to a 16-page paper)

    Empirical Claim: late-onset gender dysphoria in males is not an intersex condition.

    Summary of Evidence for the Empirical Claim: see “Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies” by Anne Lawrence, published in European Psychologist. (Not by me!)

    Philosophical Claim: categories are useful insofar as they compress information by “carving reality at the joints”; in particular, whether a categorization makes someone happy or sad is not relevant.

    Sociological Claim: the extent to which a prominence-weighted sample of the rationalist community has refused to credit the Empirical or Philosophical Claims even when presented with strong arguments and evidence is a reason to distrust the community’s collective sanity.

    Caveat to the Sociological Claim: the Sociological Claim about a prominence-weighted sample of an amorphous collective doesn’t reflect poorly on individual readers of lesswrong.com who weren’t involved in the discussions in question and don’t even live in America, let alone Berkeley.

    so this is a two-hour post about Zack’s arguments with unnamed Bay Area rationalists. Today, in posts that should have been a Discord chat.

    (the paper he names is a Blancharding ramble)

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      11 个月前

      Sociological Claim: the extent to which a prominence-weighted sample of the rationalist community has refused to credit the Empirical or Philosophical Claims even when presented with strong arguments and evidence is a reason to distrust the community’s collective sanity.

      Zack my guy you are so fucking close. Also just fucking leave.

    • locallynonlinear@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      11 个月前

      One day, when Zack is a little older, I hope he learns it’s okay to sometimes talk -to someone- instead of airing one’s identity confusion like an arxiv prepublish paper.

      Like, it’s okay to be confused in a weird world, or even have controversial opinions. Make some friends you can actually trust, aren’t demanding bayesian defenses of feelings, and chat this shit out buddy.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      1 年前

      And the arguments seem to boil down to them saying “if you wanna transition, just do it”, and Zack is all like “nooooooo you must convince me not to via Rationality!!!”

      (sorry if I’m being flippant, this person seems to be in a lot of mental distress, but they’re also kinda big deal in the community? Like fucking gwern weighed in a bit sarcastically?)

      • Phil@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        11 个月前

        Who knows? They seem to know all these people personally, so I guess they attend rationalist cuddle puddles in SV or something.

        I ran into them online a year ago when a Twitter follow shared their last essay with some acerbic comments about the lengths (both in the mental & absurd word count senses) they were going to do deny their desire to transition & they appeared in the comments after I made a snarky remark along the lines of “methinks the lady doth protest too much”. Still quite proud of that one.