True or useful ideas certainly have a selective advantage insofar as humans care about usefulness (I'm going to go out on a limb and just say outright that humans don't care about truth), but there can be other features of an idea that convey a selective advantage in memetic competition; for example, an appeal to alleged consequences of accepting the idea. This is the reason so many religions prominently feature promises and threats of divine reward or punishment: "Believe X and you'll be rewarded; believe not-X and you'll be sorry" is _more memetically fit_ than "It happens to be the case that X, but this has no particular further implications," because the former creates incentives for propogating itself that the latter does not. It doesn't _matter_ that the rewards and punishments don't actually exist—
-(at least, _I_ don't think they exist, because I am not a carrier of the religion-X meme)
+(at least, _I_ don't think they exist, because I am not a carrier of the X religion meme)
-—a human in the grips of the idea will still be genuinely terrified of the punishment. The forces of memetic evolution don't care about the human's fear and suffering, because _the forces of memetic evolution_ is just our name for the observation that ideas that are better at being replicated; it's not an agent that can care about _anything_.
+—a human in the grips of the idea will still be genuinely terrified of the punishment. The forces of memetic evolution don't care about the human's fear and suffering, because _the forces of memetic evolution_ is just our name for the observation that ideas that are better at being replicated, are better at being replicated; it's not an agent that can care about _anything_.
And of course, there are lots of other, subtler non-truth-tracking, non-usefulness-tracking features of an idea that could make it more memetically fit.
It _felt like_ I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people.
-Obviously I'm totally in favor of trans _people_ having access to the hormones and surgeries that they want, and having their preferred pronouns respected. But if this is what the _subculture of trans activism_ does to people's heads, then maybe your _shitty delusional subculture deserves to die_.
+Obviously I'm totally in favor of trans _people_ having access to the hormones and surgeries that they want, and having their preferred pronouns respected. But if Kevin is a representative example of what the _subculture of trans activism_ does to people's heads, then maybe your _shitty delusional subculture deserves to die_.
I understand that for people who have _already_ built up a self-image around the idea that they are literally women and always have been, the idea that their female gender identity arose out of a misinterpretation of misdirected male sexuality could be extremely disturbing.
+I'm happy to shut up about, um, enpvny qvssreraprf va VD, but this, _this_ is _personal_
+
But people dealing with gender dysphoria who haven't already transitioned deserve accurate information! This is _personal_ to me. If being a good person means submitting to social pressure aimed at getting me to _shut up and stop thinking_ about the true nature of the beautiful feeling at the center of my life for _twenty-five fucking years_ (!?), then I have _no interest_ in being a good person.
I'm certainly not _trying_ to say things that will hurt people—_least_ of all people who are mostly just like me but read different books in a different order and are living out a pretty decent approximation of _my wildest fantasy_.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff