Epistemic status: Confidence: Strong idea, weakly held. Provenance: My own lived experience, put down in words by myself before even hearing about Ziz. All I know about Zizianism I have learned very recently (mostly from this thread), and I have a very negative opinion of it.
Masculinity and feminity have a biological basis, but most people’s experience of them are strongly influenced by cultural factors. These cultural factors have been selected for being economically beneficial to agrarian societies. They are quite misaligned with what is beneficial for the happiness of post-industrial individuals. Poor societies made up of dumb people could not afford to not pigeonhole everyone into “straight men” and “straight women”. We can now afford to have those categories and also the whole LGBTQ set of categories, although sometimes with a bit of friction when it bumps against the poorest and dumbest parts of our society. These frictions (and also in some cases a descriptive inadequacy of the LGBTQ labels) hurt people. Still, most individuals who are confident that their environment affords them to do so would probably benefit from a bit of experimentation / de-pigeon-holing.
When/if we get to a good post-TAI future, we will be able to afford to drop the concepts of discrete genders and discrete sexual orientations altogether. This will be a good thing, because it will make individuals freer.
Epistemic status:
Confidence: Strong idea, weakly held.
Provenance: My own lived experience, put down in words by myself before even hearing about Ziz. All I know about Zizianism I have learned very recently (mostly from this thread), and I have a very negative opinion of it.
Masculinity and feminity have a biological basis, but most people’s experience of them are strongly influenced by cultural factors. These cultural factors have been selected for being economically beneficial to agrarian societies. They are quite misaligned with what is beneficial for the happiness of post-industrial individuals. Poor societies made up of dumb people could not afford to not pigeonhole everyone into “straight men” and “straight women”. We can now afford to have those categories and also the whole LGBTQ set of categories, although sometimes with a bit of friction when it bumps against the poorest and dumbest parts of our society. These frictions (and also in some cases a descriptive inadequacy of the LGBTQ labels) hurt people. Still, most individuals who are confident that their environment affords them to do so would probably benefit from a bit of experimentation / de-pigeon-holing.
When/if we get to a good post-TAI future, we will be able to afford to drop the concepts of discrete genders and discrete sexual orientations altogether. This will be a good thing, because it will make individuals freer.