From: M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake Date: Thu, 9 Jul 2020 03:29:16 +0000 (-0700) Subject: upgrade links on "The Social Construction of Reality" X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?a=commitdiff_plain;h=3ed44f6e65fd2ca8b2d3341320d43c3a22e25bd0;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git upgrade links on "The Social Construction of Reality" --- diff --git a/content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md b/content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md index e07f659..9f33f7d 100644 --- a/content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md +++ b/content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md @@ -21,7 +21,7 @@ Thus, trans women are women, where by 'women' I mean people who identify as wome If you can't win the argument (because the motte is genuinely a great motte) and therefore gain status by appealing to reality, and our minds are better at [tracking](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/01/advice-isnt-about-info.html) [status](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/12/forged-by-status.html) than [reality](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/06/doing-good-being-good.html), then eventually dissidents either accept [the narrative](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/resisting-the-narrative/) or destroy themselves. -[Autogynephilic males](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) are better at large-scale coalitional politics than actual lesbians for basically the same reasons that men-in-general are better at coalitional politics than women-in-general (as evidenced by [the patriarchy](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/patriarchy-is-the-problem/)), so once a political conflict arose between an [intransigent minority](https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15) of AGPs' right to choose their "gender", and women's/lesbians' right to [have a goddamned _word_](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) to describe themselves, it was a _fait accompli_ that the group sampled from the male region in psychological [configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) would win: male psychology is [_designed_ to win costly intergroup conflicts](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/). And in winning, they _create their own reality_. +[Autogynephilic males](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) are better at large-scale coalitional politics than actual lesbians for basically the same reasons that men-in-general are better at coalitional politics than women-in-general (as evidenced by [the patriarchy](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/patriarchy-is-the-problem/)), so once a political conflict arose between an [intransigent minority](https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15) of AGPs' right to choose their "gender", and women's/lesbians' right to [have a goddamned _word_](https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/canwehaveaword-why-talking-about-womens-issues-has-become-a-minefield/) [to describe](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) themselves, it was a _fait accompli_ that the group sampled from the male region in psychological [configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) would win: male psychology is [_designed_ to win costly intergroup conflicts](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/). And in winning, they _create their own reality_. Again, probably not literally: there probably really are biochemical facts of the matter as to what traits hormone replacement therapy does and does not change, and the biochemical facts aren't going to vary depending on the outcome of a political conflict—as far as I know. (I've never _seen_ an estrogen molecule, have you?) @@ -29,11 +29,11 @@ What _does_ vary depending on the outcome of a political conflict are which fact Once, in the hateful and bigoted days of our ancestors, people noticed whether babies were female or male, acculturated them into different social roles (childbearing and war being more relevant to their cultural systems then that of today's [barren](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/where-have-all-the-children-gone/594133/), [pacified](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23876) elites), and had [short, simple words](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) for the resulting clusters in personspace: girls and boys, women and men. -But the ancestors, in choosing the words to carve _their_ reality at the joints, didn't distinguish between the fact of sex, and social sex _roles_—from _within_ a given Society, there was no reason to make that distinction. For a brief, beautiful moment in the West, second-wave feminism's push to make Society [more congenial to masculine-of-center women](http://www.ericwulff.com/blog/?p=1861) provided a reason, giving us the sex/gender distinction. +But the ancestors, in choosing the words to carve _their_ reality at the joints, didn't distinguish between the fact of sex, and social sex _roles_—from _within_ a given Society, there was no reason to make that distinction. For a brief, beautiful moment in the West, second-wave feminism's push to make Society [more congenial to masculine-of-center women](https://web.archive.org/web/20190327152639/https://ericwulff.com/blog/?p=1861) provided a reason, giving us the sex/gender distinction. That incentive lasted about forty years. After its crowning victory in _Obergefell v. Hodges_, the [Blue](http://web.archive.org/web/20200623015648/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) [Egregore's](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/) LGBT activist machinery wasn't about to sit idle or quietly disband, so instead adapted itself to the obvious next growth channel of absorbing new neurotype-demographics into the "T": specifically, capturing a larger fraction of the ~5% (?) of men with intense AGP (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been [furtive, closeted crossdressers](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15859369)), and the ~5% (?) of [girls](https://www.parentsofrogdkids.com/) on the losing end of [female intrasexual competition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_intrasexual_competition) (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been anorexic). -Sculpting "trans" into an interest group large enough to serve as a pawn (well, [bishop](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/06/ol9-how-to-uninstall-cathedral/)) under the Blue Egregore's control required the LGBT sub-egregore to re-collapse the sex/gender distinction (pried apart at such painstaking cost by its feminist cousins two generations earlier)—in the _other_ direction: sex, having already been split into "sex" and "gender" (f.k.a. gender _roles_ f.k.a. _sex_ roles), must now give way entirely to the latter. In [Hoffman and Taylor's account of the precession of simulacra (following Baudrillard)](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), medical transsexualism of the 20th-century West was a mixture of simulacrum levels 1 (to the extent that hormones and surgery constitute a successful [sex change](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/changing_emotions/)) and 2 (to the extent that they don't, and transitioning consists of [lying](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/) about one's sex). +Sculpting "trans" into an interest group large enough to serve as a pawn (well, [bishop](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/06/ol9-how-to-uninstall-cathedral/)) under the Blue Egregore's control required the LGBT sub-egregore to re-collapse the sex/gender distinction (pried apart at such painstaking cost by its feminist cousins two generations earlier)—in the _other_ direction: sex, having already been split into "sex" and "gender" (f.k.a. gender _roles_ f.k.a. _sex_ roles), must now give way entirely to the latter. In [Hoffman and Taylor's account of the precession of simulacra (following Baudrillard)](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), medical transsexualism of the 20th-century West was a mixture of simulacrum levels 1 (to the extent that hormones and surgery constitute a successful [sex change](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)) and 2 (to the extent that they don't, and transitioning consists of [lying](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/) about one's sex). In contrast, post-_Obergefell_ gender theory belongs to simulacrum level 3: rather than having a non-circular truth condition, "gender" is just a free-floating Schelling point, a [role](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) or [costume](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PurelyAestheticGender) to be [symbolically identified](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/the-thing-and-the-symbolic-representation-of-the-thing/) with, meaning no more (and no less) what one can predict that others will predict that others will predict ... _&c._ that it means. Biological sex would continue to be a decision-relevant variable if it were cognitively available (summarizing a variety of physical differences, who can get pregnant, various game-theoretic social consequences of who can get pregnant, [personality differences to the tune of](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0029265) [Mahanalobis _D_](https://marcodgdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/delgiudice_2013_is-d_valid_ep.pdf) ≈ 2.7, _&c._)—but _no_ culture can provide all the concepts that _would be_ decision-relevant _if available_. Definitionally, you don't know what you're missing. ["The limits of my language are the limits of my world."](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein) Some claim to have [_seen through_](https://www.gwern.net/docs/philo/2012-sistery-tryingtoseethrough.html) to a world beneath the world, but without a way to _share_ what they've allegedly seen, to bring it within mutually-reinforcing consensus of the intersubjective, who's not to say that they only dreamed it?