Title: There's a Land That I See; Or, the Spirit of Intervention
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: commentary
-Tags: discourse
+Tags: discourse, transhumanism, bullet-biting
Status: draft
> _There's a land that I see
>
> —"Free To Be ... You and Me"
+<!-- separate blockquotes -->
+
> If you want to make your stupid dream real, you need to have a realistic picture of the world. If you want a society in which men and women have the same brain, or one in which feminism actually works, you would have to _make it so_, with advanced biological engineering. John Varley writes fiction: so did Joanna Russ.
>
> —[Greg Cochran](https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/internal-contradictions/)
-We socially-liberal individualist/feminist people—I _hope_ I'm still allowed to use the first person here, although the reader will ultimately judge that for herself—have this beautiful moral ideal, where we want all human beings to be free to maximize their potential, unencumbered by oppressive cultural traditions specifying roles and destinies in advance. We want everyone to be judged on her or his _own_ merits rather than treated as a representative of their race or sex.
-
-And _because_ we care about the beautiful moral ideal, we tend to assume that psychological group differences don't exist or are superficial or are socially-constructed,
+We socially-liberal individualist/feminist people—I _hope_ I'm still allowed to use the first person here, although the reader will ultimately judge that for herself—have this beautiful moral ideal, where we want all people to be free to maximize their potential, unencumbered by oppressive cultural institutions specifying roles and destinies in advance. We want everyone to be judged on her or his _own_ merits rather than treated as a representative of their race or sex. We believe that if a trait is virtuous in a man, it _has_ to be equally virtuous in a woman—as a matter of sheer logical _consistency_.
-invidious distinction
+And _because_ we care about the beautiful moral ideal, we tend to assume that psychological group differences don't exist, or are superficial, or are socially-constructed and will naturally dissipate after we muster the political will to achieve a more socially-just world.
(... the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.)
+But this is _so crazy_ on _multiple levels_.
+Firstly, philosophers since the days of D. Hume have recognized the distinction between _is_ and _ought_, and have identified the [naturalistic fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy) of direct inference from the former to the latter. That there exists a naturalistic explanation for the current state of affairs—and how could there _not_?—doesn't imply _anything_ about that state being good or just or worthy of being preserved.
-And this is _so crazy_ on _multiple levels_.
+Secondly, not only does the nature _vs._ nurture dichotomy fail to hold up to basic scrutiny (the question has been compared to asking whether the area of a rectangle is caused more by its length or its width), it also isn't even adequate to the inferential work we tend to expect of it: [not everything biological is immuatable, and not everything social is easy to change.](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/) (Consider the case of [spelling reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform): no one would suggest that the myriad quirks of English orthography are _genetically_ determined, and yet the entirely social difficulties of getting everyone to coordinate on more logical spellings seem insurmountable.)
+Because of these epistemological errors, adherents of the beautiful moral ideal
-analogy to spelling
+that may put us at a competitive disadvantage to our ideological enemies
-http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/
+
+I _want_ to believe that sex differences in personality and interests are small-to-nonexistent. I _want_ to believe that trans women are women.
-I _want_ to believe that sex differences in personality and interests are small-to-nonexistent. I _want_ to believe that trans women are women.
out of the three women present—
(or four if you believe in gender identities, because on that worldview, I'm obviously a trans woman in denial)
-—they're _all_ trans, and _none_ of them come _close_ to passing.
+—they're _all_ trans. (And none of them pass.)
-Maybe [Good Is Dumb](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoodIsDumb) doesn't have to be [Truth in Television](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TruthInTelevision).
+
+
+[...]
+
+Maybe [Good Is Dumb](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoodIsDumb) doesn't _have_ to be [Truth in Television](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TruthInTelevision).
_I want to make the stupid dream real._ But to _get_ to the good world—whatever you think that is—
... you're going to have to bootstrap from _today's_, unremediated, genderspace. Which requires _understanding_ it first.
+
+
+OUTLINE OF POINTS TO HIT—
+
+ * ✓ beautiful moral idea of equality
+ * ✓ —makes people believe that group differences are superficial/fake/social
+ * make sure to explicitly explain _why_ this is appealing
+ * ✓ but this is crazy because:
+ * ✓ is does not imply ought
+ * people feel the need to accept the naturalistic fallacy _inference_,
+ but deny the antecedent and perform _modus tollens_—I think it's more
+ tenable to reject the conditional
+ * ✓ social vs. biological isn't even the axis you care about
+ * but, we also assume things are biological/fixed when that's convenient for
+ "minority" things we want to protect (sexual orientation, gender identity)
+ * requiring crazy beliefs in order to be a good person is a drain, a drag, and
+ a tax on sanity
+ * _be specific_ about what's gerrymandered and wrong about "sex diffs
+ real/gender identity not"
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff