replace Slate Star links with last Internet Archive version

[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / 2019 / the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md

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
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+++ b/content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md
@@ -15,9 +15,9 @@ And so sufficiently-widely-believed lies _bootstrap themselves into being true._
 
 If people are quantitatively less likely to do business with people who emit heresy-signals (even subtle ones, like being insufficiently enthusiastic while praising God), then believing in God really _is_ a good financial decision, which is a _successful prediction_ that legitimately supports the "Divine Providence financially rewards the faithful" hypothesis. With sufficient mental discipline, the occasional freethinker might be able to entertain alternative hypotheses ("Well, maybe Divine Providence isn't _really_ financially rewarding believers, and it just looks that way because of these-and-such social incentive gradients"), but given the empirical adequacy of the orthodox view, it would take a level of sheer stubborn contrarianism that isn't particularly going to correlate with being a careful thinker.
 
 
 If people are quantitatively less likely to do business with people who emit heresy-signals (even subtle ones, like being insufficiently enthusiastic while praising God), then believing in God really _is_ a good financial decision, which is a _successful prediction_ that legitimately supports the "Divine Providence financially rewards the faithful" hypothesis. With sufficient mental discipline, the occasional freethinker might be able to entertain alternative hypotheses ("Well, maybe Divine Providence isn't _really_ financially rewarding believers, and it just looks that way because of these-and-such social incentive gradients"), but given the empirical adequacy of the orthodox view, it would take a level of sheer stubborn contrarianism that isn't particularly going to correlate with being a careful thinker.
 

-Smart people in the dominant coalition have always been _very_ good at maintaining frame control. I don't know exactly what forms this has taken historically, back when religious authorities held sway. In my secularized world which is at least nominally managed under the auspices of Reason, the preferred tactic is clever [motte-and-bailey](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) language-mindfuckery games, justified by utilitarianism: speak in a way that reinforces the coalitional narrative when interpreted naïvely, but which also permits a sophisticated-but-contrived interpretation that can never, ever be proven false, because we can [define a word any way we want](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
+Smart people in the dominant coalition have always been _very_ good at maintaining frame control. I don't know exactly what forms this has taken historically, back when religious authorities held sway. In my secularized world which is at least nominally managed under the auspices of Reason, the preferred tactic is clever [motte-and-bailey](http://web.archive.org/web/20200529221511/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) language-mindfuckery games, justified by utilitarianism: speak in a way that reinforces the coalitional narrative when interpreted naïvely, but which also permits a sophisticated-but-contrived interpretation that can never, ever be proven false, because we can [define a word any way we want](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).

 
 

-Thus, trans women are women, where by 'women' I mean people who identify as women. Appeals to conceptual parsimony ("Yes, you _could_ use language that way, but that makes it [more expensive to express](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [these-and-such useful real-world probabilistic inferences](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/)—") don't work on utilitarians who _explicitly_ reject parsimony in favor of "utility," where utility is estimated by back-of-the-envelope calculations that seem like they [ought to be better than nothing](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/), but which in practice have so many degrees of freedom that the answer is almost entirely determined by the [perceived need to appease](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) whichever [utility monster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster) has made itself most politically salient to the one performing the calculation.
+Thus, trans women are women, where by 'women' I mean people who identify as women. Appeals to conceptual parsimony ("Yes, you _could_ use language that way, but that makes it [more expensive to express](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [these-and-such useful real-world probabilistic inferences](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/)—") don't work on utilitarians who _explicitly_ reject parsimony in favor of "utility," where utility is estimated by back-of-the-envelope calculations that seem like they [ought to be better than nothing](http://web.archive.org/web/20200518035012/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/), but which in practice have so many degrees of freedom that the answer is almost entirely determined by the [perceived need to appease](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) whichever [utility monster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster) has made itself most politically salient to the one performing the calculation.

 
 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.
 
 
 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.
 


@@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ Once, in the hateful and bigoted days of our ancestors, people noticed whether b
 
 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](http://www.ericwulff.com/blog/?p=1861) provided a reason, giving us the sex/gender distinction.
 

-<a id="blue-egregore"></a>That incentive lasted about forty years. After its crowning victory in _Obergefell v. Hodges_, the [Blue](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).
+<a id="blue-egregore"></a>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).

 
 <a id="re-collapse-the-sex-gender-distinction"></a>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).
 
 
 <a id="re-collapse-the-sex-gender-distinction"></a>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).