Well, let me start by saying there are 3 waves of feminism. The first wave is vaguely classified as pre 1960s feminism, and is largely wrong. The ideas that were listed above all come from that era and even for that era are considered radical positions.
I thought the point of the gender/sex distinction was to separate the social-constructedness of being a woman or man from the biological facts.
This is the idea of 2nd-wave feminism. That gender is socially constructed, but sex is a biological fact. Presently this idea has been disproven. Among 3rd wave feminists (which is the most advanced form of the discipline) it is accepted that BOTH gender AND sex are socially constructed. How could that be you might be wondering? Well, biologically the human species is capable of producing 5 sexes: Male, Female, Hermaphrodite, Mermaphrodite, and Fermaphrodite. Hermaphrodites have both male and female genitalia that are capable of sexual reproduction. Fermaphrodites have functioning male genital, but the female genitalia are not capable of sexual reproduction. Mermaphrodite is the opposite. Each has of these sexes is anatomically different. You may be thinking “well how come I never hear about 5 sexes?” Well because for thousands of years in western, as well as many cultures, hermaphrodites, mermaphrodites, and fermaphrodites have been eugenically diminished. Up until the 1990s American and European doctors would tell parents their child was born with a deficiency and perform an “urgent surgery” to make them either more male or more female. These operations were potentially lethal; many places still perform such operations, only now instead saying they are mandatory, doctors socially pressure parents into opting for them. Using such methods as telling parents “think about the life your child would lead,” don’t you want them to be normal?” There is nothing biologically threatening about being born a hermaphrodites, merm, or ferm. The only dangerous thing about it is the social stigmas it burdens a person with.
Anyway, the point is that a perception of what is normal (the male-female dichotomy) has resulted in the intentional out breeding of more sexes, thus making sex a social construction. If you would like to read more about this, or third wave feminism in general, I would suggest starting with Judith Butler. She is pretty much the matriarch of modern feminist thought. Her writing is highly influenced by Derrida. It has a post-modern air to it that at times is pretentious, but beneath that her ideas are really brilliant.
That is a lot to respond to. Yes, I’m mostly second-wave feminist. But I don’t think that commits me to ignoring things like how feminism is a different issue for blacks and whites, or accepting any idiocy from Mary Daly. Nor does it require me to support doctors who pressure parents into unnecessary “sex correction” surgery.
I accept that science is socially constructed. That doesn’t commit me to believing that there are no physical facts. I suspect that the five categories you listed will turn out to be misleading simplifications, and the truth will turn out to be closer to a continuum (cf. Kinsey). More generally, I think it is useful to distinguish between social constructions that are strongly tied to the physical world (sex) and social constructions that have low or no ties to the physical facts (gender roles).
More broadly, I think that the suffering caused by the social constructions of gender are much greater than the suffering caused by social constructions of sex. Further, I think improving the construction of gender will have the effect of improving the experience of people who have problems from the social construction of sex. For example, once gender role construction is improved, I think that people who desire sex-change surgeries will have a better life, even if nothing about the social construction of sex changes.
Finally, I like post-modernism—to the extent it is grounded in fact. Foucault is interesting because he was an excellent historian. By contrast, I once read a feminist paper on mutually assured destruction that was profoundly misguided. It attacked speakers at a conference on MAD for failing to explicitly note that megadeathes were a bad thing (as if everyone there didn’t know that and assume it implicitly in the conversation). Can’t find it online, or I’d give the cite.
That is a lot to respond to. Yes, I’m mostly second-wave feminist. But I don’t think that commits me to ignoring things like how feminism is a different issue for blacks and whites, or accepting any idiocy from Mary Daly. Nor does it require me to support doctors who pressure parents into unnecessary “sex correction” surgery.
Sure. Accepting feminism is a different issue for black women and white women is the major distinction between first and second wave feminists. I don’t think there is anything wrong if you have a stronger affinity to 2nd wave rather than 3rd. I mean, personally, I do think 3rd wave feminism is a more sophisticated level of analysis, but just as quantum mechanics does not necessarily make classical mechanics obsolete , I don’t think aligning yourself with the second wave is particularly detrimental. I do think aligning with the first-wave is detrimental, which is where a lot discussed above decreasing the population of men come from.
I don’t know if I would agree that the suffering caused by social constructions of gender is more damaging than that caused by social constructions of sex, let me think about it. I tend to think gender originates only after a construction of sex is created. For example, the NuGuo people in china accept hermaphrodites. Since they except them the develop gender roles for hermaphrodites.
I don’t know if I would agree that the suffering caused by social constructions of gender is more damaging than that caused by social constructions of sex, let me think about it. I tend to think gender originates only after a construction of sex is created. For example, the NuGuo people in china accept hermaphrodites. Since they except them the develop gender roles for hermaphrodites.
I’d like to try to convince you that gender construction causes more harm than sex construction. Basically, gender construction affects everyone that doesn’t fit well within ordinary gender expectations: nerdish boys who don’t do sports, girls who are discouraged from various careers or women prevented from advancing, women suffering from body image issues. (I’m omitting more contentious examples and historical problems for which substantial progress has been made). Even if you think that these harms are much smaller than the harms from sex construction, there are overwhelmingly more people who suffer from them. This justified a focus on those issues over sex issues.
Also, there is value in highlighting which social constructions are based on physical facts of some kind and those that are not. I think gender falls entirely in that later—if it turns out that something I’d been calling gender had a physical basis, I would acknowledge error in my classification.
Finally, I think that fixing gender constructs would be beneficial to transgendered and other sex-construct sufferers. For example, the social rules about men using women’s restrooms (and vice versa) are gendered, not sex constructed. But if we removed those social rules, transgender men using the “wrong” restroom would also suffer much less stigma (ideally, no stigma at all). Although this isn’t a point about relative harms, I think it is useful in deciding the tactics of advocacy.
Sorry for the late response, I have been really busy with work.
The variety of gender constructions in our society is the result of a societal objective to perserve a strict dichtomy of sex. Therefore while I would agree that more people are directly assualted with gender constructions, I would add that it is in protection of cultural beliefs about the construction of sex that a wide range of gender constructions are created and implemented. Or in other words, Gender constructions are the means by which constructions of sex are legitimized. Without importance on the later, the former would diminish into obscurity.
To illustrate this I would ask you to think about constructions of age in American society. As of late, there is not nearly as strict a dichotomy between “old” and “young” in American society as there is between “male” and “female.” Of course there is still a clearly defined dichotomy (one set by law). But America does not have a multitude of age related norms and customs that would equal the concept of gender for sex. We are not trained to strictly categorize the way old or young people dress. Perhaps 30 years ago there were many hobbies and professions that were normatively bracketed to either old or young (A young person might be ridiculed for drinking prune juice? An old person might be looked down on for being too adamant about video games). However, I feel current American society has become even more accepting of occupational and recreational deviations from these normative age construction. It is generally acceptable for a man in his 40s to like video games, and while a child may be labeled “weird” for drinking prune juice, they are by no means subject to persecution because of it.
I don’t think we have significant theoretical disagreement. I endorse the view that one of the social functions of gender constructions is to act as a firebreak for attempts to changes to sex constructions. That is, a strategy for improving the public’s opinions of sex reassignment surgery (both consensual and non-consensual) that doesn’t address boy-in-the-girl’s-bathroom or marriage equality issues is doomed to failure.
I’m making an assertion about tactics—that gender constructions are the low hanging fruit to target. I expect them to be easier to change because they are not as entangled with the biological facts (and history suggests that they are slightly easier to change). More broadly, I don’t think that the only purpose of gender constructions is to preserve sex constructions. For example, the guy-as-jock meme is independent of any modern biological facts about men, as far as I can tell.
Sorry for the late response, I have been really busy with work.
I think our disagreement is primarily a methodological one. You are aiming at the low hanging fruit, but I feel like if we don’t dig up the roots of the problem similar fruit will eventually grow again. I want a new tree.
I want a new tree, too. I think uprooting the current tree doesn’t guarantee that a better tree will grow in its place. In fact, I worry that the backlash from uprooting the tree will help plant the seeds for a worse tree.
Yeah that is a valid worry. I concede my point. The potential impact from uprooting the tree combined with the multitude of potential unknowns make strategic clipping of the fruit seem the better option. I never imagined that I would find an argument for moderate change in such a progress oriented community.
Yeah, this community’s meaning of progress doesn’t align well with a politically active feminist’s meaning of progress. For the most part, the majority of members of this community hope for scientific advances that make our questions moot. That’s not a totally unreasonable hope, in the abstract: many advances in female empowerment follow from the invention of The Pill—a reliable method for separating sex from procreation. Once that separation occurred, it became much more obvious how disconnected from physical fact many gender constructs really were.
That said, I think that the LessWrong community as a whole underestimates the impact of constructed social meaning. Part of that is unexamined traditionalism and part of it is the community’s well settled aversion to discussing practical social engineering.
I am not completely against change. I just think progress ceases to be progress if it accelerates to the point where humans are unable to acclimate to it.
A new technology is useful if it is serves a specific purpose for human manipulation of territory. The more unknown the technology the more dangerous it is to human survival, and thus can no longer be seen as progressive. Furthermore the introduction of new technology reshapes the social topography of a territory. If erosion/alteration of social topography happens at too fast a rate it becomes impossible to navigate based off the experiences of others. Just as if all the currents and depths of a channel suddenly changed the built up knowledge of generations of fishers would become irrelevant.
Whether technological/scientific advancement is progress or just impact depends on these two factors
1.) The degree of unknowns involved with the technology
2.) The extent to which social topography is eroded/altered.
If we look at cell phones and other types of information-technologies they have completely reconstructed the social topography of the world, and they continue to develop at an astonishing rate. As to the degree of unknowns, cell phones have already been completely integrated into everyday life, despite their relatively short lifespan. What happens when a person lives 70 years with a cellphone in their pocket, or an i-pad? We have no idea because they have not been around long enough to have any cases. There is still a huge degree of unknowns with these new technologies, yet we are already completely dependent on them.
I am not saying that this is not progress, it is not possible to say at this point; but I will say that we are walking a fine line between true progress and unrestrained impact.
I don’t think increasing our ability to control the world is an inherently good or bad thing (somewhat like how concepts like equality don’t have a particular political affiliation). The Spaniards did terrible things to the natives of the New World, but the proximate cause of their behavior was their extreme aversion to Otherness (like Orientalism, but worse). Spain’s technological superiority made their oppressive behavior possible, but it is insufficient to explain what happened.
To your specific point about cell phones, the data is pretty clear they are fairly safe. We have a good understanding of what radiation of various kinds can and can’t do. And social topography has nothing to do with this risk.
To your specific point about cell phones, the data is pretty clear they are fairly safe. We have a good understanding of what radiation of various kinds can and can’t do. And social topography has nothing to do with this risk.
I don’t think he means the biological effects of radiation, but the psychological/sociological effects of always being available for conversation. (Being unable to talk to me for one freakin’ day would bother the living crap out of my mother, for example. I’m not sure that’s a healthy thing.)
I agree that our ability to control the world is not inherently good or bad. What I am saying is that the rate at which we use this ability can be beneficial or harmful. In my mind it is analogous to a person running through a forest to win a race. There is no path, but they have a pretty good idea of the general direction they want to go. The faster the run the quicker they close the distance between themselves and their objective, but at the same time, if they run too fast they risk stumbling into a pitfall, shooting off a sudden drop, tripping, building up too much momentum on a downhill run. All these things are potentially dangerous.
The cellphones causing cancer was the wrong point to focus on. But it cannot be denied that cell phones in general have changed the structure of society at an alarming pace. Again, I am not saying this is inherently good or bad. It could be that our barreling through the forest brings us to our destination in the least possible time. I guess I am just a somewhat pessimistic person. I think rather than getting there faster, it would be better to minimize any chance of tragedy.
I agree that our ability to control the world is not inherently good or bad. What I am saying is that the rate at which we use this ability can be beneficial or harmful.
I think these two sentences are in quite a bit of tension. The speed at which we get better at controlling the world can best be judged by whether we should be trying to control the world at all.
But it cannot be denied that cell phones in general have changed the structure of society at an alarming pace.
I deny. Cell phones have changed the structure of society at a very high pace. Alarming? That’s a value judgment that needs a fair amount of justification. Even assuming that it isn’t possible to live “how things used to be” because of widespread expectations of cell phone usage (and I’m not sure this is true), why is this worse?
I don’t think there is a tension. It is kind of like I do not not think coffee is inherently good or bad. It is the rate of use that defines it as good or bad to me. Drinking 10 cups of day (a very high rate of use) I find to be bad for you; whereas if you have a cup of coffee a day (a slower rate of use) it is good for you. I think the same principle is true for technology. Developing too fast without regard for the societal impact or potential dangers of what you are creating is negative in my opinion.
The speed at which we get better at controlling the world can best be judged by whether we should be trying to control the world at all.
I don’t really understand this sentence could you explain it more. What I get from reading it is: “if it does not seem feasible it should be abandoned?”
Mobile phones have changed social interaction, how people think (through texting), the structure of business and economics, they have become a status symbol, do I need to keep going?
Coffee isn’t such a good analogy. That’s got a certain finite set of effects on a well-known neurotransmitter system, and while not all of the secondary or more subtle effects are known we can take a pretty good stab at describing what levels are likely to be harmful given a certain set of parameters. Social change and technology don’t have a well-defined set of effects at all: they’re not definitive terms, they’re descriptive terms encompassing any deltas in our culture or technical capabilities respectively.
Speaking of technology as if it’s a thing with agency is obviously improper; I doubt we’d disagree on that point. But I’d actually go farther than that and say that speaking of technology as a well-defined force (and thus something with a direction that we can talk about precisely, or can or should be retarded or encouraged as a whole) isn’t much better. It may or may not be reasonable to accept a precautionary principle with regard to particular technologies; there’s a decent consensus here that we should adopt one for AGI, for example. But lumping all technology into a single category for that purpose is terribly overgeneral at best, and very likely actively destructive when you consider opportunity costs.
lumping all technology into a single category for that purpose is terribly over general at best, and very likely actively destructive when you consider opportunity costs.
When I talk about technology, what I am really talking about is a rate of technological innovation. Technological innovation is inevitably going to change the dynamics of a society in some way. The slower that change, the more predictable and manageable it is. If that change continues to accelerate, eventually it will reach a point where it moves beyond the limitations of existing tracking technology. At that point, it becomes purely a force. That force could result in positive impacts, but it could also result in negative ones, however, To determine or manage whether it is positive or negative is impossible for us since it moves beyond our capacity to track. Do you disagree with this idea?
If that change continues to accelerate, eventually it will reach a point where it moves beyond the limitations of existing tracking technology. At that point, it becomes purely a force. That force could result in positive impacts, but it could also result in negative ones
This is essentially a restatement of the accelerating change model of a technological singularity. I suspect that most of that model’s weak predictions kicked in several decades ago: aside from some very coarse-grained models along the lines of Moore’s Law, I don’t think we’ve been capable of making accurate predictions about the decade-scale future since at least the 1970s and arguably well before. If we can expect technological change to continue to accelerate (a proposition dependent on the drivers of technological change, and which I consider likely but not certain), we can expect effective planning horizons in contexts dependent on tech in general to shrink proportionally. (The accelerating change model also offers some stronger predictions, but I’m skeptical of most of them for various reasons, mainly having to do with the misleading definitivism I allude to in the grandparent.)
Very well; the next obvious question is should this worry me? To which I’d answer yes, a little, but not as much as the status quo should. With the arguable exception of weapons, the first-order effects of any new technology are generally positive. It’s second-order effects that worry people; in historical perspective, though, the second-order downsides of typical innovations don’t appear to have outweighed their first-order benefits. (They’re often more famous, but that’s just availability bias.) I don’t see any obvious reason why this would change under a regime of accelerating innovation; shrinking planning horizons are arguably worrisome given that they provide incentive to ignore long-term downsides, but there are ways around this. If I’m right, broad regulation aimed at slowing overall innovation rates is bound to prevent more beneficial changes than harmful; it’s also game-theoretically unstable, as faster-innovating regions gain an advantage over slower-innovating ones.
And the status quo? Well, as environmentalists are fond of pointing out, industrial society is inherently unsustainable. Unfortunately, the solutions they tend to propose are unlikely to be workable in the long run for the same game-theoretic reasons I outline above. Transformative technologies usually don’t have that problem.
This is essentially a restatement of the accelerating change model of a technological singularity.
I was not familiar with the theory of technological singularity, but from reading your link I feel that there is a big difference between it and what I am saying. Namely that it states, “Technological change follows smooth curves, typically exponential. Therefore we can predict with fair precision when new technologies will arrive...” whereas I am saying that such prediction is impossible beyond a certain point. I would agree with you that we have already pasted that point (perhaps in the 70s).
Very well; the next obvious question is should this worry me? To which I’d answer yes, a little, but not as much as the status quo should. With the arguable exception of weapons, the first-order effects of any new technology are generally positive.
This I disagree with. If you continue reading my discussion with TimS you will see that I suggest (well Jean Baudrillard suggests) a shift in technological production from purely economic and function based production, to symbolic and sign based production. There are technologies where the first-order effects are generally positive, but I would argue that there are many novel technological innovations that provides no new functional benefit. At best, they work to superimpose symbolic or semiotic value upon existing functional properties; at worst, they create dysfunctional tools that are masked with illusionary social benefits. I agree that these second order effects as you call them are slower acting, but that is not an argument to ignore them, especially since, as you say, they have been building up since the 70s.
I agree that the status quo is a problem, but I do not see it as more of a problem than the subtle amassment of second order technological problems. I think both are serious dangers to our society that need to be addressed as soon as possible. The former is an open wound, the latter is a tumor. Treating the wound is necessary, but if one does not deal with the later as early as possible it will grow beyond the point of remedy.
Really nice post. I apologize about my analogy. Truthfully I picked it not for its accuracy, but its ability to make my point. After recently reading Eliezer’s essay about sneaking connotations I am afraid it is a bad habit I have. I completely agree it is a bad analogy.
As to your second point. It is a really interesting question that honestly I have never thought about. If you don’t mind I would like a little more time to think about it. I agree with it is improper to speak of technology as a thing with agency, but I am not sure if I agree that speaking of technology as a well-defined force is just as bad.
My point is that the factors that are relevant to deciding how fast to research new technology are the same factors that are relevant in deciding whether to use technology at all.
Mobile phones have changed social interaction, how people think (through texting), the structure of business and economics, they have become a status symbol, do I need to keep going?
The word I was disputing in your prior post was alarming. Cell phones have caused and are causing massive social change.
My point is that the factors that are relevant to deciding how fast to research new technology are the same factors that are relevant in deciding whether to use technology at all.
What do you see as the primary factors determining how fast to research new technology?
Ideally technology would be driven by necessity or efficiency, but that is an idea. In my opinion the driving factor for new technologies is profit. For example, my uncle installs home entertainment systems for the rich. He tells me that he gets sent dozens of new types of wire, new routers, new systems for free that some engineer is hoping to make it big off of. The development of new mediums of audio/video, drugs, TVs, honestly I feel like in most fields there is a constant push for innovation for the sake of entrepreneurship alone, and I don’t think that is relevant to the actual use of the technology.
P.S When I say technology I am using it as a extremely broad term for any tool used to manipulate the physical world.
Efficiency has to do with the use of the tool being created. An efficient ax is sharp and will not break easily. Profit has to do with the producer maximizing their intake and minimizing their costs.
A more efficient tool maximizes intake (by working faster) and minimizes cost (by being replaced less frequently). I respectfully suggest that efficiency and profitability point to the same thing in concept-space.
I am willing to accept the idea that the efficiency of a tool can be categorized as a type of profit. Still, there needs to be a distinction between maximizing the tool’s capacity for profit and maximizing the profit from producing the tool.
Profit-1: Maximizing intake (by working faster and more precisely) and Minimizing cost (by being replaced less frequently)
Profit-2: Maximizing intake (by selling the most product) and Minimizing cost (by being made in a cheaper fashion)
Profit-1 and Profit-2 are not always mutually beneficial. From the producer’s perspective the greater the tool’s capacity for profit the quicker they will deplete their markets. If I make an refrigerator that has a shelf life of a century. That means I am probably only going to sell 1 refrigerator per family (possibly 2), per century. I could either have to continuously expand my markets (which is both risky and costly), or make my product with a short shelf life, or in other words, needing more frequent replacement.
Another fairly common situation is where the most profitable model of a tool already dominates a market. Let’s say cereal is a tool for the sake of augmenting human nutrition. There are only so many ways to reconstruct corn. Instead of abandoning the market, the market is reconstructed to serve the needs of producers. A famous sociologist Jean Baudrillard talks about this process as the development of a symbolic mode of production as opposed to a traditional mode. In a system of symbolic exchange an object has four potential values: functional value, economic value, symbolic value, and sign value. The later two distort the former two. Functional value relates to the use of a tool and its ability to do it. Economic value relates to the need of that use in a territory which affects how desired the object is. Symbolic value and sign value relate to what objects represent in a social system. In my example of cereal, there are fruit loops and fruit hoops. Fruit hoops are basically fruit loops. But they are cheaper. They do not have a little prize, they come in a box not a bag, and they do not have Toucan Sam. You would think everyone would buy Fruit hoops since they serve exactly the same function for a much cheaper cost. However, this is not the case. People want the box, they want Toucan Sam. It is the same when you buy designer vs. knock off clothes.
My point is that in the production of new tools, the producer is not just trying to secure a functional efficiency; they are trying to create a symbolic value. Sometimes what is symbolized is the degree of functional efficiency, but often times it is not. There are hundreds of new technologies developed yearly that create new needs, new functions (many trivial) for the sake of securing symbolic value.
Baudrillard argues that the result is a symbolic mode of production is not one where demand drives supply; but where new demands are created by producers to meet their supplies.
There’s a story that Ford learned that there was one part of the Model T that wore out much later than the rest of the car—I think it was the bumpers. That is, there were perfectly good bumpers sitting on otherwise useless Model Ts in the dump. Ford’s response? He decreased the quality (and cost) of the bumper so that it wore out when the rest of the car did.
You seem to think this was wrong of Ford, because he was maximizing his wealth without passing along any benefit to society as a whole. I suggest that you will be more analytically clear if you separate the terminology about wealth-maximizing from the terminology about normatively appropriate behavior. Profit is not generally understood to mean “bad wealth maximizing” in the general community, and you do yourself no favors in persuading others by trying to smuggle in a normative connotation into a descriptive term.
Profit is not generally understood to mean “bad wealth maximizing” in the general community, and you do yourself no favors in persuading others by trying to smuggle in a normative connotation into a descriptive term.
I don’t think I am smuggling anything. I clearly tried to explain what I meant. Also, In the grander scheme of things for was wrong for wanting to maximize individual profit without thinking of group profit. Ford began making cars that were designed to breakdown faster so they could sell more. Because of this, by the turn of the century Ford was not as trusted by consumers as Japanese or European models. Now Ford is desperately trying to reestablish a basis of trust with a larger consumer demographic.
Instead of profit-1 and profit-2 perhaps it would be simpler to say that there is individual profit and group profit; and that without a balance between the two the stability of both an individual and a society is threatened. I don’t see this as a personal bias, do you?
What’s more, I think your example side steps my original point. Do you not agree that individual profit is a driving force for a large portion of technological development; one that does not necessarily result in a profit of increasing efficiency? With all due respect, it seems to me that you, and perhaps this community in general, share a normative connotation that all technological development is universally beneficial, in the sense that it increases efficiency and decreases cost.
I am not arguing that there is no technological development that is beneficial; but not all technological develop meets the ideal. There is Technological development-1: That increases efficiency and decreases cost.
Technological development-2: That does not increase efficiency and might increase or decrease cost.
Technological development-3: That decrease efficiency and increases group cost.
What evidence do you have to deny the existence of the third category of technological development?
I’m not sure that TD2 is a coherent category. If efficiency does not change, how can equilibrium price change?
TD3 could happen, but often won’t (absent a monopolistic situation) because the entity that could cause the change wouldn’t gain more from the change than society as a whole would lose. As I said, monopolist situations, such as industry coordination, might make this change more likely, but modern legal regimes frown on violations of anti-trust laws.
More generally, I don’t know how to calculate “group profit” except as the sum of every person’s “individual profit.”
I’m not sure that TD2 is a coherent category. If efficiency does not change, how can equilibrium price change?
Adding a social or signified value to an existing tool can affect the demand for that tool and other tools of its type, even though there is no new functional innovation. I guess technically you could call that increasing or decreasing its marketable efficiency, but I feel that it is important to acknowledge that this can happen completely divorced from any type of functional improvement.
TD3 could happen, but often won’t (absent a monopolistic situation) because the entity that could cause the change wouldn’t gain more from the change than society as a whole would lose.
I find this statement to contradict the reality of markets. Take the medical industry. There are constantly dozens of new pills, prescriptions, and other types of drugs vying for FDA approval so that they may begin mass production for sale. Lots of these products turn out to be harmful to individuals in one way or another, even ones that slip through approval. I would say to your point that there are very few examples of TD3 where the damage is immediately visible, on a large scale, and publically promoted. Situations like these are often shutdown fairly fast. However, there are tons of TD3s that are not quite as visible and have more long term effects.
For example, Right now there is a new energy product that is a pure caffeine spray attempting to prove that it is no more dangerous than coffee. In a flat comparison between the two they come out to be almost equivalent in terms of caffeine dosage. Because of this, the caffeine sprays will probably be approved, just like 5 hour energy drinks were. The effect on an individual is the same, but I would argue the relational effect is very different. Coffee is a slower more social stimulant. Whether it is where you buy it, where you make it, or who you drink it with, it fosters social relationships that I argue both moderate and benefit the user, curbing in some way the development of negative habits. Whereas the implementation of 5 hour energy drinks and caffeine sprays are faster and psychologically tied to paradigms of medical implementation rather than sociality. Burst sprays and quick gulps are common methods of medical implementation. Medical use, traditionally, is culturally private as opposed to social. I doubt there is any research on this at the moment, but I would imagine that because the later use faster, less social methods of implementation, they promote more negative side effects than coffee in its users (just a hypothesis).
As to monopolies, I honestly don’t think monopolies have anything to do with what I am talking about. I see the system of checks and balances placed on TD3s is inherently flawed due to the degree of individualism coveted by our society. The system assesses damage much like you assess profit, individually, rather than relationally. There are many things that are individually neutral or beneficial, which are relationally harmful.
More generally, I don’t know how to calculate “group profit” except as the sum of every person’s “individual profit.”
The problem with measuring group profit by individual profit is
1.) Defining what constitutes profit.
2.) The emergent qualities of systems.
By emergent qualities, what I mean is that often times the sum worth of the system cannot be defined by the parts. For example, human bodies can be segregated into individual organs, but to calculate the overall benefit of the body by net benefit to each organ is not realistic; just as if you were to further segregate the body into cells, it would be unrealistic to calculate the health of the body by the health of every individual cell. Some parts of the body, some cells, are designed to b degenerate quicker, some are designed to be more expendable. It is idealistic to remove the possibility that a species, let alone a primarily social species such as humans, would not function in a similar manner.
In my opinion, the historical atrocities of the 20th century have left western academics so disgusted with the perversions of hierarchy that the overwhelming desire to avoid past mistakes causes most of the system to shun this idea through connotations alone. In truth I am afraid by even voicing this idea I have severely stigmatized myself in this community. I hope that is not the case.
If you were to ask me how to generate group profit, I would suggest that what is needed is
1.) An algorithm that measures homeostasis between social harmony and dissonance.
2.) A Bayesian approach to determining a desired ratio between social dissonance and harmony.
P.S sorry for being so longwinded, couldn’t figure out a shorter way to say all that.
Your organ analogy is very illuminating. I agree that net benefits to particular organs is a funky way of trying to assess the benefit to the body as a whole (although it is probably possible). But note how you analogize individual people to organs of the body. Organs need other organs in a way that might not be true of human beings.
More generally, treating that kind of interdependence as inherent to human experience is almost totally inconsistent with micro-economic concepts like Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Concepts like profit and efficiency are heavily embedded in the individualistic model. In short, I think you should avoid using them to try to explain non-individualistic concepts. I would have understood your point much more easily if you had come out and said, “I don’t believe individualistic rational-actor analysis (aka economics) is maximizing what should be maximized.”
As an aside, I would be careful using the word “emergent” in this community. There is a historical usage of that word that was highly confused and misleading, and one of the foundation sequences attacks that precise type of confused thinking. In brief, saying “Human life arises out of the interactions of the organs via emergence” is no better than saying “Human life arises out of the interactions of the organs via magic”. I don’t think you are making that mistake when you use emergence, but the word is a trigger in this community. More on this general idea here, with some follow-up here. The whole first sequence is very interesting, if you have the time to invest.
Organs need other organs in a way that might not be true of human beings.
Peter L. Berger is a fairly famous sociologist who suggests that the human body is an organ within an organism constituted by a social network, a specific environment, and a specific culture. He argues: language acquisition is fundamental to being “human”; the initial development of a language comes from interaction with a specific environment, its further growth is dependent on a network of other actors; thus since language is dependent on networked bodies, places, things, and ideas he argues that the human organism is defined by this network rather than simply by the individual body.
I don’t believe in the individualistic rational-actor period. I agree that traditional economics is heavily embedded in the individualistic model, but there are plenty of branches of economics as field that reject this assumption.
As an aside, I would be careful using the word “emergent” in this community. There is a historical usage of that word that was highly confused and misleading, and one of the foundation sequences attacks that precise type of confused thinking.
Thanks for telling me. I must admit I have recently been a fan of emergentism as a theory within academics, but the critique you provide of it is interesting. I will be sure to read those articles.
For example, the social rules about men using women’s restrooms (and vice versa) are gendered, not sex constructed.
Huh? I remember an Italian female senator making a big fuss when a male-to-female transsexual senator (who hadn’t undergone SRS yet at that time, IIRC) used the women’s toilet in the senate.
Lots of gendered rules differentiate based on sex. Once upon a time, there was the rule “No women lawyers.” I think it’s pretty clear that there is no physical basis for this rule.
Or consider the Old Testament rules on cleanliness and menstruation. Cleanliness didn’t mean anything in relation to decreased frequency of disease—it was a requirement of social isolation of women from men at certain times of the month. Although menstruation is a physical thing, I would assert that these rules were gender constructs, not sex constructs.
Likewise, I assert that the rules about which gender can use which bathroom are gender constructs that use sex to differentiate. If the male and female genders were constructed differently, the Italian senator you mentioned wouldn’t have felt justified in making the complaint she made.
Sorry, but why are you telling us all this? Yeah, feminism is pretty interesting (at least it interests me) but why are you giving a lecture on it? It would seem that most people interested in a spontaneous intro to feminism have already received it, and are currently picking nits with the five-sex model of intersexed people or post-third-wave developments.
(...plus, c’m’on, second-wavers totally sucked at telling gender from sex. Just ask Bindel or Daly about trans women.)
I apologize if I offended you. You stated something you believed to be true that I knew to not be true. I thought you would want to know that you were wrong since I assumed the goals of this cite is to become “less wrong.” I did not mean to lecture; I just thought a more detailed explanation was what you wanted rather than just a jargon packed sentence or two. Jargon is used because it condenses a huge amount of ideas and intellectual data into a few words. I did not realize that it would be offensive to explain it in this way. Honestly I thought I was responding to you not the general body, and I was really excited to share this idea with you because I find it fascinating. Like you said I am new, I will try to adjust quickly to the norms here.
You stated something you believed to be true that I knew to not be true.
Nah, we agree on the facts. You just posted a reminder that the thing I said had happened wasn’t happening anymore. Maybe you mean TimS, not me? That’s still not really wrong—Tim said “sex is the biological bits, gender is the construct around the social bits” and you said “sex is more like the construct around the biological bits”.
Correcting people is still a good idea in general.
you said “sex is more like the construct around the biological bits”.
Correct, except the construct is not only built around the biological bits, the construct transforms the biological bits. We actively weed out sexes that are not male or female, and in doing this over time we breed humans to meet our desired dichotomy.
Yep, sorta like gender roles affect gender, so if you wear dresses you can’t be a Real Man, etc.
We actively weed out sexes that are not male or female, and in doing this over time we breed humans to meet our desired dichotomy.
The second part doesn’t follow from the first. We give intersex babies unnecessary surgeries, but these surgeries try not to cause sterility (correct me if I’m wrong), we don’t discourage fertile intersex people comfortable in the gender they were raised as from having children, we don’t selectively destroy gametes and embryos likely to result in intersex children, and we certainly don’t chide binary-sexed people from having children likely to be intersex. (We do sterilise trans people, though.)
No you are correct. My response would be that an inefficient cleansing is still a cleansing. At this time we do not stop intersex people from procreating. We do highly stigmatize in society and we do traumatize them by denying their existence as natural and forcing/pressuring them to undergo extreme operations. Isn’t this a more PC way of intentionally limiting their reproduction?
Imagine if you were playing a game where you had to obtain 100 signatures to win and before that game I told everyone else in the room that you were a child molester, and if they gave you their signature that meant they wanted a child molester to win. It would make it significantly harder for you to win right? This situation is analogous for the intersex person’s situation in a society that views anything existing outside the traditional dichotomy as unnatural. They are stigmatized. It becomes significantly harder to find a job, mate, to feel self-worth, build confidence, trust, all the things humans need to successfully establish themselves and their genes in society. Sure, there is a lower tier of society bracketed off for them. They can work in the carnivals, whorehouse, etc, but they are in some sense blocked from “normal” society.
It would be interesting to look at suicide and marriage rates among hermaphrodites in Europe and America. Which would you guess is higher?
Aren’t most intersex individuals infertile to begin with? It also seems valuable to point out that the sterilization of trans people is generally at their request.
My experience with intersex individuals is limited to one, but he deeply wishes he had had the ‘unnecessary surgery’ when he was young instead of after years and years of infections.
Aren’t most intersex individuals infertile to begin with?
Lots are, lots aren’t, I have no idea where to get reliable stats.
the sterilization of trans people is generally at their request
Much of the time, but “you must be permanently sterile to change your legal sex” is a completely unnecessary law. I’ve known someone who isn’t getting a vaginoplasty just in case uterus grafts become possible in her lifetime and the op would compromise that. Trans men don’t usually get bottom surgery, so sterility is impermanent (just get off T when you want kids); many do get hysterectomies, but only get their ovaries removed because of legal requirement. And there’s no reason not to freeze gametes.
he deeply wishes he had had the ‘unnecessary surgery’ when he was young instead of after years and years of infections
Well yeah, that’s one reason we shouldn’t give kids surgeries just to make their junk look normal—so that we can actually believe doctors when they say it would improve their health.
intentional out breeding [elimination] of more sexes
A comparative analysis of Mammalia shows this to be extremely doubtful, unless you think that only humans have these extra sexes. In all mammals the vast bulk of individuals can be cleanly assigned to male or female without ambiguity, and no such intentional elimination was required. [Note “outbreeding” means something else.]
You have to look at quite distantly related species before hermaphrodites show up at interesting frequencies. Certainly some fish can be hermaphrodite.
I don’t think only humans have these extra sexes. Could you direct me to the comparative analysis of Mammalian reproductive systems that discusses hermaphrodites in other species? I am sure most gonochronistic animals have cases of hermaphrodites or other genetic mutations.
You are right, outbreeding is not what I meant. That is why I split the word up, hoping to convey my point. Intentional elimination is a good way to say it. If Hermaphrodites were not so stigmatized they would not be abandoned/killed/maimed as children; if they were not on average abandoned/killed/maimed as children then there would be a decent size population of hermaphrodites able to develop a stable social station; if there were a stable hermaphrodite community their genes would spread; if there genes spread their would be more hermaphrodites. I think the intentional elimination of hermaphrodites has made a huge impact on the demographic of humanity, do you disagree?
Also I don’t think you can use the fact other gonochronistic mammals have not developed more sexes as a reason why humans would not.
Could you direct me to the comparative analysis of Mammalian reproductive systems that discusses hermaphrodites in other species?
What I meant was that we can think about other mammals ourselves, and note that no other mammal species has hermaphrodites at significant frequencies. I had no specific research in mind.
there would be a decent size population of hermaphrodites able to develop a stable social station; if there were a stable hermaphrodite community their genes would spread
This depends both on a genetic cause, and also on hermaphrodites having equal fitness to males and females.
I think the intentional elimination of hermaphrodites has made a huge impact on the demographic of humanity, do you disagree?
Yes, I disagree, for the reasons I’ve stated. Other mammals have had no “intentional elimination”, yet hermaphrodites remain at very low levels. So “intentional elimination” isn’t the reason for the very low levels.
Also I don’t think you can use the fact other gonochronistic mammals have not developed more sexes as a reason why humans would not.
Of course I can; humans aren’t particularly special, at least not in relevant ways.
Of course I can; humans aren’t particularly special, at least not in relevant ways.
Humans are incredibly special. Humans are the only single species mammal. In that sense given the diversity of human ethnicities, humans are the most specialized-unspecialized species in the world (specialized in the sense that the species allows for the vast degrees of ethnic traits to be completely compatible with any human; unspecialized in the sense that we remain neutral enough to adapt to almost any environment and have not biologically chained ourselves to a particular habitat). Humans are the only species that we know of that creates a shared reality of perception (meaning that if I point at something, you know not to look at my finger but look for what I am pointing too; we are able to see our goals, victories, and aspirations as shared with a larger social entity). Humans are the only creature with a cultural paradox (A cultural paradox is where what is prescribed by their tribe often times is detrimental to their survival, but to go against the tribe is equally if not more detrimental.).
Biological classification is useful for organizational purposes, but the categories created are often times severely lacking. In this case, I think humans are so different from most other mammals that it is not useful to use them as an insight into human nature/ the development of the human species.
Well I guess this is another flaw of classification. Species is defined as “Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups” (Futuyma, 1998). The reproductive isolation can be genetic, or it can be simply geographical or habitual. There is no criteria that says two distinct species cannot interbreed, even though some species can and others cannot. For example dogs, wolves, and coyotes can all interbreed, but within the Felidae genus there are cat species that cannot interbreed.
What I was saying is that humans are the only living member of the Homo family. Homo sapiens exist as a single species because to some degree their is no limitation on our interbreeding. Sure there are many cultural norms and customs that have discouraged inter-racial, inter-class, inter-ethinicity breeding, but it has not stopped these things. I would argue (along with some evolutionary biologists) that the fact that homo sapiens exist in one giant gene pool is pretty unique among animals given the wide amount of territory that we populate.
The reproductive isolation can be genetic, or it can be simply geographical or habitual.
This is probably not relevant to our point, but Futuyma (2005) Evolution p356 defines reproductive isolation as “reduction or prevention of gene flow between populations by genetically determined differences between them”—i.e. it’s not enough that they are geographically separated.
homo sapiens exist in one giant gene pool
This just seems to be a claim that the population size of our species is quite large. There are other species of mammal with large populations. Again, the relevance of any of this to sex-determination is rather doubtful.
It should be pointed out here that biological genuses, families, orders, and so on do not exist. If you discover a new continent full of organisms not previously known, there is no observation you can make to decide whether two of their species are, or are not, members of the same genus. It would be a wrong question. Every classification above the species level exists solely for the convenience of biologists talking about the organisms they are studying. Even at the species level, where we can talk about interbreeding populations, multiple definitions are possible and edge cases exist (sometimes so large as to make the very idea of a tree of descent moot).
The higher-level classifications may (but do not always) correspond to subtrees of the evolutionary history, but their ranking into genuses, orders, subfamilies, and so on in the 40-odd different levels available in current taxonomical practice is a product of human convenience, nothing more.
So the statement that some genus includes only one species is not a statement of biology. It is a statement about biologists.
It’s not clear to me why you’re presuming social effects are the primary selection pressure pushing against hermaphroditism. I don’t know the genetics / biology / embryology involved, but my prior is that deviation from normalcy decreases the chances of fertility for that individual, and possibly more importantly, their children.
[Although I am not proud of this, reflecting on your question “why you’re presuming social effects are the primary selection pressure,” the conclusion I came to was] Because it is the political position I was indoctrinated into. in undergrad anthropology we covered feminism and the idea of sex as a social construct is pretty much the big idea of third wave feminism. It was such a unique and interesting idea that I accepted it into my own ideology pretty readily. However honestly, the counter-arguement that there there are other genetic factors that are more primary is potentially acceptable.
As to your prior
that deviation from normalcy decreases the chances of fertility for that individual, and possibly more importantly, their children.
I would respond that what is normal depends on the in-group of the individual/community defining normalcy. Since people to some degree define their in-group based on the people, symbols, media, and cultures they interact with, I would argue that the process of labeling what is normal is a social construction.
It’s not clear to me why you’re presuming social effects are the primary selection pressure pushing against hermaphroditism.
Because it is the political position I was indoctrinated into.
That’s a rather startling thing to say, at least on LessWrong.
Quiet honestly it was such a unique and interesting idea that I accepted it into my own ideology pretty readily.
As is this.
However honestly, the counter-arguement that there there are other genetic factors that are more primary is potentially acceptable.
Leaving aside the particular questions of sex, gender, and normalcy, what do you, and those who have influenced you, judge to be “acceptable” forms of argument? What should, or should not, give you a reason to believe something?
That’s a rather startling thing to say, at least on LessWrong.
Is it startling to be honest? Perhaps I was not careful enough with my wording, or my tone did not come across correctly, but the statement “Quite honestly it was such a unique and interesting idea that I accepted it into my own ideology pretty readily” was confessional. I said “potentially acceptable” because I feel that the speculation here is not grounded in expertise, and I don’t want to repeat the mistakes of my youth and be just as easily indoctrinated by your flashy idea as the previous one.
I really am not too familiar with this community, but personally, I try to be as critical and reflective as possible of the discourse that encompasses my beliefs. It is somewhat embarrassing that I never thought to question the biological fitness of hermaphrodites in general, but the truth is I didn’t. It would be nice to chalk that up to youthful naiveté at the time of indoctrination, but it just as easily could have been a blind spot in my reflections.
That definition of “normal” is irrelevant to the biological effects of mutation on fertility.
Here: If the human reproductive system has evolved over millions of years in a condition where the vast majority of the population are one of either two sexes, with particular chromosomes even being present in only one of the sexes, then a mutant that somehow ends up with both sexual organs is almost certainly going to having all sorts of problems fertility-wise. That kind of mutation breaks the assumptions the reproductive systems have evolved under (assumptions such as amounts of testosterone/oestrogen/whatever other hormones in the blood, the physical arrangement of the sex organs, and probably all kinds of other stuff).
Sex does not refer blanketly to physical varation, sex refers to varying reproductive functions. If 5 greatly underestimates the number of unique reproductive systems in the human species, please tell me some of the ones I am missing.
Saying “there are exactly 5 sexes” is roughly as bad as saying “there are exactly 2 sexes”—there is great potential for variation on multiple factors. It’s not even a spectrum, it’s a space.
Sorry if I was too ambiguous with my language. I highlighted the non-functioning genitalia because it is how I remember the distinction; but both ferms and merms have genital structures unique from hermaphrodites in that they are synthesized with quasi male/female structures. The processes of sex, birth, waste defecation, urination, ejaculation and menstruation are all somewhat different.
If you were looking for different variation in the sorts of things that are normally clustered with “sex”, then there are a lot more expressions. There are for instance ambiguous genitalia, unusual chromosonal sex, Aphallia, and especially human protandry.
You are right, I am not an expert on all this stuff and I should not have said “five” in such a definitive way. In general, I have developed the bad habit of writing with too much authority. I apologize for that it is a byproduct of my time debating. I shouldn’t have said “five” in such a definitive way. That said, the point I was trying to make is that the concept of sex is socially constructed, which what you are arguing does not change right?
That said, the point I was trying to make is that the concept of sex is socially constructed, which what you are arguing does not change right?
I was not particularly concerned about that.
But if you want my opinion, no—“2 sexes” isn’t “socially constructed”, it’s just a “false proposition”. We know better, some people haven’t gotten the memo, ::shrug::.
Or to flip that over, we can look at it empirically rather than logically: “male” and “female” seem to be useful clusters. If we’re going to go all clustery on it I’m not sure there’s a better number for k than 2. It’s one of the better one-bit predictors for questions like “Is this person going to show up to the wedding in a dress?”.
But the human position goes beyond simply labeling, it is breeding. For thousands of years we have killed/maimed infants who do not fit the dichotomy manipulating the gene pool towards a social agenda. In the same way we breed race horses and pea plants. I agree that there are biological limitations on the extent of malleability, but I think to say that it is simply a “false proposition” is an understatement. It is condoned eugenics in a very hitler-esque way.
Calling that process “breeding” is quite strange. There aren’t many genetic facts that survive consistent selection against them over thousands of years.
Foucault would call it biopwer if you like that term better, but it is essentially breeding. The reason it is not as effective as a geneticist in their greenhouse is the scale. Even if a government has a policy of “fixing” hermaphrodites, the reality of actualizing that over a territory the size of a kingdom/country is almost impossible.
Is that a sufficient explanation why they haven’t been completely wiped out? Check my facts on this, but I think about 1:3000 people is born not male or female.
...or it could just be that extremely complex systems like gender unavoidably go haywire during fetal development or a mutation hits, and this results in a normal background rate of around 1:3000?
Yes, that seems reasonable. There are four biologically possible scenarios I can think of to explain the numbers:
It’s developmental noise.
Mutations that cause hermaphroditism arise at a certain rate and are eliminated by natural (or artificial) selection at a certain rate; this is mutation-selection balance.
Multiple genes at different loci are required to produce a hermaphrodite (this is epistasis); natural selection doesn’t act against these genes since it is rare for them to be found in the same invididual, and they may produce some benefit when apart.
Hermaphrodites have reasonable fitness and are held at an equilibrium frequency in the population.
Four seems far and away the least likely; I’d be suspicious of an equilibrium that’s so low, not only in our species but all our mammalian relatives. Perhaps there are answers in the literature; I don’t have the time.
Fair enough,
Well, let me start by saying there are 3 waves of feminism. The first wave is vaguely classified as pre 1960s feminism, and is largely wrong. The ideas that were listed above all come from that era and even for that era are considered radical positions.
This is the idea of 2nd-wave feminism. That gender is socially constructed, but sex is a biological fact. Presently this idea has been disproven. Among 3rd wave feminists (which is the most advanced form of the discipline) it is accepted that BOTH gender AND sex are socially constructed. How could that be you might be wondering? Well, biologically the human species is capable of producing 5 sexes: Male, Female, Hermaphrodite, Mermaphrodite, and Fermaphrodite. Hermaphrodites have both male and female genitalia that are capable of sexual reproduction. Fermaphrodites have functioning male genital, but the female genitalia are not capable of sexual reproduction. Mermaphrodite is the opposite. Each has of these sexes is anatomically different. You may be thinking “well how come I never hear about 5 sexes?” Well because for thousands of years in western, as well as many cultures, hermaphrodites, mermaphrodites, and fermaphrodites have been eugenically diminished. Up until the 1990s American and European doctors would tell parents their child was born with a deficiency and perform an “urgent surgery” to make them either more male or more female. These operations were potentially lethal; many places still perform such operations, only now instead saying they are mandatory, doctors socially pressure parents into opting for them. Using such methods as telling parents “think about the life your child would lead,” don’t you want them to be normal?” There is nothing biologically threatening about being born a hermaphrodites, merm, or ferm. The only dangerous thing about it is the social stigmas it burdens a person with. Anyway, the point is that a perception of what is normal (the male-female dichotomy) has resulted in the intentional out breeding of more sexes, thus making sex a social construction. If you would like to read more about this, or third wave feminism in general, I would suggest starting with Judith Butler. She is pretty much the matriarch of modern feminist thought. Her writing is highly influenced by Derrida. It has a post-modern air to it that at times is pretentious, but beneath that her ideas are really brilliant.
That is a lot to respond to. Yes, I’m mostly second-wave feminist. But I don’t think that commits me to ignoring things like how feminism is a different issue for blacks and whites, or accepting any idiocy from Mary Daly. Nor does it require me to support doctors who pressure parents into unnecessary “sex correction” surgery.
I accept that science is socially constructed. That doesn’t commit me to believing that there are no physical facts. I suspect that the five categories you listed will turn out to be misleading simplifications, and the truth will turn out to be closer to a continuum (cf. Kinsey). More generally, I think it is useful to distinguish between social constructions that are strongly tied to the physical world (sex) and social constructions that have low or no ties to the physical facts (gender roles).
More broadly, I think that the suffering caused by the social constructions of gender are much greater than the suffering caused by social constructions of sex. Further, I think improving the construction of gender will have the effect of improving the experience of people who have problems from the social construction of sex. For example, once gender role construction is improved, I think that people who desire sex-change surgeries will have a better life, even if nothing about the social construction of sex changes.
Finally, I like post-modernism—to the extent it is grounded in fact. Foucault is interesting because he was an excellent historian. By contrast, I once read a feminist paper on mutually assured destruction that was profoundly misguided. It attacked speakers at a conference on MAD for failing to explicitly note that megadeathes were a bad thing (as if everyone there didn’t know that and assume it implicitly in the conversation). Can’t find it online, or I’d give the cite.
Sure. Accepting feminism is a different issue for black women and white women is the major distinction between first and second wave feminists. I don’t think there is anything wrong if you have a stronger affinity to 2nd wave rather than 3rd. I mean, personally, I do think 3rd wave feminism is a more sophisticated level of analysis, but just as quantum mechanics does not necessarily make classical mechanics obsolete , I don’t think aligning yourself with the second wave is particularly detrimental. I do think aligning with the first-wave is detrimental, which is where a lot discussed above decreasing the population of men come from.
I don’t know if I would agree that the suffering caused by social constructions of gender is more damaging than that caused by social constructions of sex, let me think about it. I tend to think gender originates only after a construction of sex is created. For example, the NuGuo people in china accept hermaphrodites. Since they except them the develop gender roles for hermaphrodites.
Foucault is interesting.
I’d like to try to convince you that gender construction causes more harm than sex construction. Basically, gender construction affects everyone that doesn’t fit well within ordinary gender expectations: nerdish boys who don’t do sports, girls who are discouraged from various careers or women prevented from advancing, women suffering from body image issues. (I’m omitting more contentious examples and historical problems for which substantial progress has been made). Even if you think that these harms are much smaller than the harms from sex construction, there are overwhelmingly more people who suffer from them. This justified a focus on those issues over sex issues.
Also, there is value in highlighting which social constructions are based on physical facts of some kind and those that are not. I think gender falls entirely in that later—if it turns out that something I’d been calling gender had a physical basis, I would acknowledge error in my classification.
Finally, I think that fixing gender constructs would be beneficial to transgendered and other sex-construct sufferers. For example, the social rules about men using women’s restrooms (and vice versa) are gendered, not sex constructed. But if we removed those social rules, transgender men using the “wrong” restroom would also suffer much less stigma (ideally, no stigma at all). Although this isn’t a point about relative harms, I think it is useful in deciding the tactics of advocacy.
Sorry for the late response, I have been really busy with work.
The variety of gender constructions in our society is the result of a societal objective to perserve a strict dichtomy of sex. Therefore while I would agree that more people are directly assualted with gender constructions, I would add that it is in protection of cultural beliefs about the construction of sex that a wide range of gender constructions are created and implemented. Or in other words, Gender constructions are the means by which constructions of sex are legitimized. Without importance on the later, the former would diminish into obscurity.
To illustrate this I would ask you to think about constructions of age in American society. As of late, there is not nearly as strict a dichotomy between “old” and “young” in American society as there is between “male” and “female.” Of course there is still a clearly defined dichotomy (one set by law). But America does not have a multitude of age related norms and customs that would equal the concept of gender for sex. We are not trained to strictly categorize the way old or young people dress. Perhaps 30 years ago there were many hobbies and professions that were normatively bracketed to either old or young (A young person might be ridiculed for drinking prune juice? An old person might be looked down on for being too adamant about video games). However, I feel current American society has become even more accepting of occupational and recreational deviations from these normative age construction. It is generally acceptable for a man in his 40s to like video games, and while a child may be labeled “weird” for drinking prune juice, they are by no means subject to persecution because of it.
I don’t think we have significant theoretical disagreement. I endorse the view that one of the social functions of gender constructions is to act as a firebreak for attempts to changes to sex constructions. That is, a strategy for improving the public’s opinions of sex reassignment surgery (both consensual and non-consensual) that doesn’t address boy-in-the-girl’s-bathroom or marriage equality issues is doomed to failure.
I’m making an assertion about tactics—that gender constructions are the low hanging fruit to target. I expect them to be easier to change because they are not as entangled with the biological facts (and history suggests that they are slightly easier to change). More broadly, I don’t think that the only purpose of gender constructions is to preserve sex constructions. For example, the guy-as-jock meme is independent of any modern biological facts about men, as far as I can tell.
No worries, mon :)
I think our disagreement is primarily a methodological one. You are aiming at the low hanging fruit, but I feel like if we don’t dig up the roots of the problem similar fruit will eventually grow again. I want a new tree.
I want a new tree, too. I think uprooting the current tree doesn’t guarantee that a better tree will grow in its place. In fact, I worry that the backlash from uprooting the tree will help plant the seeds for a worse tree.
Yeah that is a valid worry. I concede my point. The potential impact from uprooting the tree combined with the multitude of potential unknowns make strategic clipping of the fruit seem the better option. I never imagined that I would find an argument for moderate change in such a progress oriented community.
Yeah, this community’s meaning of progress doesn’t align well with a politically active feminist’s meaning of progress. For the most part, the majority of members of this community hope for scientific advances that make our questions moot. That’s not a totally unreasonable hope, in the abstract: many advances in female empowerment follow from the invention of The Pill—a reliable method for separating sex from procreation. Once that separation occurred, it became much more obvious how disconnected from physical fact many gender constructs really were.
That said, I think that the LessWrong community as a whole underestimates the impact of constructed social meaning. Part of that is unexamined traditionalism and part of it is the community’s well settled aversion to discussing practical social engineering.
I am not completely against change. I just think progress ceases to be progress if it accelerates to the point where humans are unable to acclimate to it.
I don’t think I understand.
A new technology is useful if it is serves a specific purpose for human manipulation of territory. The more unknown the technology the more dangerous it is to human survival, and thus can no longer be seen as progressive. Furthermore the introduction of new technology reshapes the social topography of a territory. If erosion/alteration of social topography happens at too fast a rate it becomes impossible to navigate based off the experiences of others. Just as if all the currents and depths of a channel suddenly changed the built up knowledge of generations of fishers would become irrelevant.
Whether technological/scientific advancement is progress or just impact depends on these two factors
1.) The degree of unknowns involved with the technology 2.) The extent to which social topography is eroded/altered.
If we look at cell phones and other types of information-technologies they have completely reconstructed the social topography of the world, and they continue to develop at an astonishing rate. As to the degree of unknowns, cell phones have already been completely integrated into everyday life, despite their relatively short lifespan. What happens when a person lives 70 years with a cellphone in their pocket, or an i-pad? We have no idea because they have not been around long enough to have any cases. There is still a huge degree of unknowns with these new technologies, yet we are already completely dependent on them.
I am not saying that this is not progress, it is not possible to say at this point; but I will say that we are walking a fine line between true progress and unrestrained impact.
Here is a genuine disagreement between us.
I don’t think increasing our ability to control the world is an inherently good or bad thing (somewhat like how concepts like equality don’t have a particular political affiliation). The Spaniards did terrible things to the natives of the New World, but the proximate cause of their behavior was their extreme aversion to Otherness (like Orientalism, but worse). Spain’s technological superiority made their oppressive behavior possible, but it is insufficient to explain what happened.
To your specific point about cell phones, the data is pretty clear they are fairly safe. We have a good understanding of what radiation of various kinds can and can’t do. And social topography has nothing to do with this risk.
I don’t think he means the biological effects of radiation, but the psychological/sociological effects of always being available for conversation. (Being unable to talk to me for one freakin’ day would bother the living crap out of my mother, for example. I’m not sure that’s a healthy thing.)
I didn’t thumbs down you, just saying.
I agree that our ability to control the world is not inherently good or bad. What I am saying is that the rate at which we use this ability can be beneficial or harmful. In my mind it is analogous to a person running through a forest to win a race. There is no path, but they have a pretty good idea of the general direction they want to go. The faster the run the quicker they close the distance between themselves and their objective, but at the same time, if they run too fast they risk stumbling into a pitfall, shooting off a sudden drop, tripping, building up too much momentum on a downhill run. All these things are potentially dangerous. The cellphones causing cancer was the wrong point to focus on. But it cannot be denied that cell phones in general have changed the structure of society at an alarming pace. Again, I am not saying this is inherently good or bad. It could be that our barreling through the forest brings us to our destination in the least possible time. I guess I am just a somewhat pessimistic person. I think rather than getting there faster, it would be better to minimize any chance of tragedy.
I think these two sentences are in quite a bit of tension. The speed at which we get better at controlling the world can best be judged by whether we should be trying to control the world at all.
I deny. Cell phones have changed the structure of society at a very high pace. Alarming? That’s a value judgment that needs a fair amount of justification. Even assuming that it isn’t possible to live “how things used to be” because of widespread expectations of cell phone usage (and I’m not sure this is true), why is this worse?
I don’t think there is a tension. It is kind of like I do not not think coffee is inherently good or bad. It is the rate of use that defines it as good or bad to me. Drinking 10 cups of day (a very high rate of use) I find to be bad for you; whereas if you have a cup of coffee a day (a slower rate of use) it is good for you. I think the same principle is true for technology. Developing too fast without regard for the societal impact or potential dangers of what you are creating is negative in my opinion.
I don’t really understand this sentence could you explain it more. What I get from reading it is: “if it does not seem feasible it should be abandoned?”
Mobile phones have changed social interaction, how people think (through texting), the structure of business and economics, they have become a status symbol, do I need to keep going?
Coffee isn’t such a good analogy. That’s got a certain finite set of effects on a well-known neurotransmitter system, and while not all of the secondary or more subtle effects are known we can take a pretty good stab at describing what levels are likely to be harmful given a certain set of parameters. Social change and technology don’t have a well-defined set of effects at all: they’re not definitive terms, they’re descriptive terms encompassing any deltas in our culture or technical capabilities respectively.
Speaking of technology as if it’s a thing with agency is obviously improper; I doubt we’d disagree on that point. But I’d actually go farther than that and say that speaking of technology as a well-defined force (and thus something with a direction that we can talk about precisely, or can or should be retarded or encouraged as a whole) isn’t much better. It may or may not be reasonable to accept a precautionary principle with regard to particular technologies; there’s a decent consensus here that we should adopt one for AGI, for example. But lumping all technology into a single category for that purpose is terribly overgeneral at best, and very likely actively destructive when you consider opportunity costs.
When I talk about technology, what I am really talking about is a rate of technological innovation. Technological innovation is inevitably going to change the dynamics of a society in some way. The slower that change, the more predictable and manageable it is. If that change continues to accelerate, eventually it will reach a point where it moves beyond the limitations of existing tracking technology. At that point, it becomes purely a force. That force could result in positive impacts, but it could also result in negative ones, however, To determine or manage whether it is positive or negative is impossible for us since it moves beyond our capacity to track. Do you disagree with this idea?
This is essentially a restatement of the accelerating change model of a technological singularity. I suspect that most of that model’s weak predictions kicked in several decades ago: aside from some very coarse-grained models along the lines of Moore’s Law, I don’t think we’ve been capable of making accurate predictions about the decade-scale future since at least the 1970s and arguably well before. If we can expect technological change to continue to accelerate (a proposition dependent on the drivers of technological change, and which I consider likely but not certain), we can expect effective planning horizons in contexts dependent on tech in general to shrink proportionally. (The accelerating change model also offers some stronger predictions, but I’m skeptical of most of them for various reasons, mainly having to do with the misleading definitivism I allude to in the grandparent.)
Very well; the next obvious question is should this worry me? To which I’d answer yes, a little, but not as much as the status quo should. With the arguable exception of weapons, the first-order effects of any new technology are generally positive. It’s second-order effects that worry people; in historical perspective, though, the second-order downsides of typical innovations don’t appear to have outweighed their first-order benefits. (They’re often more famous, but that’s just availability bias.) I don’t see any obvious reason why this would change under a regime of accelerating innovation; shrinking planning horizons are arguably worrisome given that they provide incentive to ignore long-term downsides, but there are ways around this. If I’m right, broad regulation aimed at slowing overall innovation rates is bound to prevent more beneficial changes than harmful; it’s also game-theoretically unstable, as faster-innovating regions gain an advantage over slower-innovating ones.
And the status quo? Well, as environmentalists are fond of pointing out, industrial society is inherently unsustainable. Unfortunately, the solutions they tend to propose are unlikely to be workable in the long run for the same game-theoretic reasons I outline above. Transformative technologies usually don’t have that problem.
I was not familiar with the theory of technological singularity, but from reading your link I feel that there is a big difference between it and what I am saying. Namely that it states, “Technological change follows smooth curves, typically exponential. Therefore we can predict with fair precision when new technologies will arrive...” whereas I am saying that such prediction is impossible beyond a certain point. I would agree with you that we have already pasted that point (perhaps in the 70s).
This I disagree with. If you continue reading my discussion with TimS you will see that I suggest (well Jean Baudrillard suggests) a shift in technological production from purely economic and function based production, to symbolic and sign based production. There are technologies where the first-order effects are generally positive, but I would argue that there are many novel technological innovations that provides no new functional benefit. At best, they work to superimpose symbolic or semiotic value upon existing functional properties; at worst, they create dysfunctional tools that are masked with illusionary social benefits. I agree that these second order effects as you call them are slower acting, but that is not an argument to ignore them, especially since, as you say, they have been building up since the 70s.
I agree that the status quo is a problem, but I do not see it as more of a problem than the subtle amassment of second order technological problems. I think both are serious dangers to our society that need to be addressed as soon as possible. The former is an open wound, the latter is a tumor. Treating the wound is necessary, but if one does not deal with the later as early as possible it will grow beyond the point of remedy.
Really nice post. I apologize about my analogy. Truthfully I picked it not for its accuracy, but its ability to make my point. After recently reading Eliezer’s essay about sneaking connotations I am afraid it is a bad habit I have. I completely agree it is a bad analogy.
As to your second point. It is a really interesting question that honestly I have never thought about. If you don’t mind I would like a little more time to think about it. I agree with it is improper to speak of technology as a thing with agency, but I am not sure if I agree that speaking of technology as a well-defined force is just as bad.
My point is that the factors that are relevant to deciding how fast to research new technology are the same factors that are relevant in deciding whether to use technology at all.
The word I was disputing in your prior post was alarming. Cell phones have caused and are causing massive social change.
What do you see as the primary factors determining how fast to research new technology? Ideally technology would be driven by necessity or efficiency, but that is an idea. In my opinion the driving factor for new technologies is profit. For example, my uncle installs home entertainment systems for the rich. He tells me that he gets sent dozens of new types of wire, new routers, new systems for free that some engineer is hoping to make it big off of. The development of new mediums of audio/video, drugs, TVs, honestly I feel like in most fields there is a constant push for innovation for the sake of entrepreneurship alone, and I don’t think that is relevant to the actual use of the technology.
P.S When I say technology I am using it as a extremely broad term for any tool used to manipulate the physical world.
I’m not saying you are wrong (although I don’t agree with the normative implications), but what is the difference between efficiency and profit?
Efficiency has to do with the use of the tool being created. An efficient ax is sharp and will not break easily. Profit has to do with the producer maximizing their intake and minimizing their costs.
A more efficient tool maximizes intake (by working faster) and minimizes cost (by being replaced less frequently). I respectfully suggest that efficiency and profitability point to the same thing in concept-space.
I am willing to accept the idea that the efficiency of a tool can be categorized as a type of profit. Still, there needs to be a distinction between maximizing the tool’s capacity for profit and maximizing the profit from producing the tool.
Profit-1: Maximizing intake (by working faster and more precisely) and Minimizing cost (by being replaced less frequently)
Profit-2: Maximizing intake (by selling the most product) and Minimizing cost (by being made in a cheaper fashion)
Profit-1 and Profit-2 are not always mutually beneficial. From the producer’s perspective the greater the tool’s capacity for profit the quicker they will deplete their markets. If I make an refrigerator that has a shelf life of a century. That means I am probably only going to sell 1 refrigerator per family (possibly 2), per century. I could either have to continuously expand my markets (which is both risky and costly), or make my product with a short shelf life, or in other words, needing more frequent replacement.
Another fairly common situation is where the most profitable model of a tool already dominates a market. Let’s say cereal is a tool for the sake of augmenting human nutrition. There are only so many ways to reconstruct corn. Instead of abandoning the market, the market is reconstructed to serve the needs of producers. A famous sociologist Jean Baudrillard talks about this process as the development of a symbolic mode of production as opposed to a traditional mode. In a system of symbolic exchange an object has four potential values: functional value, economic value, symbolic value, and sign value. The later two distort the former two. Functional value relates to the use of a tool and its ability to do it. Economic value relates to the need of that use in a territory which affects how desired the object is. Symbolic value and sign value relate to what objects represent in a social system. In my example of cereal, there are fruit loops and fruit hoops. Fruit hoops are basically fruit loops. But they are cheaper. They do not have a little prize, they come in a box not a bag, and they do not have Toucan Sam. You would think everyone would buy Fruit hoops since they serve exactly the same function for a much cheaper cost. However, this is not the case. People want the box, they want Toucan Sam. It is the same when you buy designer vs. knock off clothes.
My point is that in the production of new tools, the producer is not just trying to secure a functional efficiency; they are trying to create a symbolic value. Sometimes what is symbolized is the degree of functional efficiency, but often times it is not. There are hundreds of new technologies developed yearly that create new needs, new functions (many trivial) for the sake of securing symbolic value.
Baudrillard argues that the result is a symbolic mode of production is not one where demand drives supply; but where new demands are created by producers to meet their supplies.
There’s a story that Ford learned that there was one part of the Model T that wore out much later than the rest of the car—I think it was the bumpers. That is, there were perfectly good bumpers sitting on otherwise useless Model Ts in the dump. Ford’s response? He decreased the quality (and cost) of the bumper so that it wore out when the rest of the car did.
You seem to think this was wrong of Ford, because he was maximizing his wealth without passing along any benefit to society as a whole. I suggest that you will be more analytically clear if you separate the terminology about wealth-maximizing from the terminology about normatively appropriate behavior. Profit is not generally understood to mean “bad wealth maximizing” in the general community, and you do yourself no favors in persuading others by trying to smuggle in a normative connotation into a descriptive term.
I don’t think I am smuggling anything. I clearly tried to explain what I meant. Also, In the grander scheme of things for was wrong for wanting to maximize individual profit without thinking of group profit. Ford began making cars that were designed to breakdown faster so they could sell more. Because of this, by the turn of the century Ford was not as trusted by consumers as Japanese or European models. Now Ford is desperately trying to reestablish a basis of trust with a larger consumer demographic. Instead of profit-1 and profit-2 perhaps it would be simpler to say that there is individual profit and group profit; and that without a balance between the two the stability of both an individual and a society is threatened. I don’t see this as a personal bias, do you?
What’s more, I think your example side steps my original point. Do you not agree that individual profit is a driving force for a large portion of technological development; one that does not necessarily result in a profit of increasing efficiency? With all due respect, it seems to me that you, and perhaps this community in general, share a normative connotation that all technological development is universally beneficial, in the sense that it increases efficiency and decreases cost. I am not arguing that there is no technological development that is beneficial; but not all technological develop meets the ideal. There is
Technological development-1: That increases efficiency and decreases cost. Technological development-2: That does not increase efficiency and might increase or decrease cost. Technological development-3: That decrease efficiency and increases group cost. What evidence do you have to deny the existence of the third category of technological development?
I’m not sure that TD2 is a coherent category. If efficiency does not change, how can equilibrium price change?
TD3 could happen, but often won’t (absent a monopolistic situation) because the entity that could cause the change wouldn’t gain more from the change than society as a whole would lose. As I said, monopolist situations, such as industry coordination, might make this change more likely, but modern legal regimes frown on violations of anti-trust laws.
More generally, I don’t know how to calculate “group profit” except as the sum of every person’s “individual profit.”
Adding a social or signified value to an existing tool can affect the demand for that tool and other tools of its type, even though there is no new functional innovation. I guess technically you could call that increasing or decreasing its marketable efficiency, but I feel that it is important to acknowledge that this can happen completely divorced from any type of functional improvement.
I find this statement to contradict the reality of markets. Take the medical industry. There are constantly dozens of new pills, prescriptions, and other types of drugs vying for FDA approval so that they may begin mass production for sale. Lots of these products turn out to be harmful to individuals in one way or another, even ones that slip through approval. I would say to your point that there are very few examples of TD3 where the damage is immediately visible, on a large scale, and publically promoted. Situations like these are often shutdown fairly fast. However, there are tons of TD3s that are not quite as visible and have more long term effects. For example, Right now there is a new energy product that is a pure caffeine spray attempting to prove that it is no more dangerous than coffee. In a flat comparison between the two they come out to be almost equivalent in terms of caffeine dosage. Because of this, the caffeine sprays will probably be approved, just like 5 hour energy drinks were. The effect on an individual is the same, but I would argue the relational effect is very different. Coffee is a slower more social stimulant. Whether it is where you buy it, where you make it, or who you drink it with, it fosters social relationships that I argue both moderate and benefit the user, curbing in some way the development of negative habits. Whereas the implementation of 5 hour energy drinks and caffeine sprays are faster and psychologically tied to paradigms of medical implementation rather than sociality. Burst sprays and quick gulps are common methods of medical implementation. Medical use, traditionally, is culturally private as opposed to social. I doubt there is any research on this at the moment, but I would imagine that because the later use faster, less social methods of implementation, they promote more negative side effects than coffee in its users (just a hypothesis).
As to monopolies, I honestly don’t think monopolies have anything to do with what I am talking about. I see the system of checks and balances placed on TD3s is inherently flawed due to the degree of individualism coveted by our society. The system assesses damage much like you assess profit, individually, rather than relationally. There are many things that are individually neutral or beneficial, which are relationally harmful.
The problem with measuring group profit by individual profit is 1.) Defining what constitutes profit. 2.) The emergent qualities of systems.
By emergent qualities, what I mean is that often times the sum worth of the system cannot be defined by the parts. For example, human bodies can be segregated into individual organs, but to calculate the overall benefit of the body by net benefit to each organ is not realistic; just as if you were to further segregate the body into cells, it would be unrealistic to calculate the health of the body by the health of every individual cell. Some parts of the body, some cells, are designed to b degenerate quicker, some are designed to be more expendable. It is idealistic to remove the possibility that a species, let alone a primarily social species such as humans, would not function in a similar manner. In my opinion, the historical atrocities of the 20th century have left western academics so disgusted with the perversions of hierarchy that the overwhelming desire to avoid past mistakes causes most of the system to shun this idea through connotations alone. In truth I am afraid by even voicing this idea I have severely stigmatized myself in this community. I hope that is not the case.
If you were to ask me how to generate group profit, I would suggest that what is needed is
1.) An algorithm that measures homeostasis between social harmony and dissonance. 2.) A Bayesian approach to determining a desired ratio between social dissonance and harmony.
P.S sorry for being so longwinded, couldn’t figure out a shorter way to say all that.
Your organ analogy is very illuminating. I agree that net benefits to particular organs is a funky way of trying to assess the benefit to the body as a whole (although it is probably possible). But note how you analogize individual people to organs of the body. Organs need other organs in a way that might not be true of human beings.
More generally, treating that kind of interdependence as inherent to human experience is almost totally inconsistent with micro-economic concepts like Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Concepts like profit and efficiency are heavily embedded in the individualistic model. In short, I think you should avoid using them to try to explain non-individualistic concepts. I would have understood your point much more easily if you had come out and said, “I don’t believe individualistic rational-actor analysis (aka economics) is maximizing what should be maximized.”
As an aside, I would be careful using the word “emergent” in this community. There is a historical usage of that word that was highly confused and misleading, and one of the foundation sequences attacks that precise type of confused thinking. In brief, saying “Human life arises out of the interactions of the organs via emergence” is no better than saying “Human life arises out of the interactions of the organs via magic”. I don’t think you are making that mistake when you use emergence, but the word is a trigger in this community. More on this general idea here, with some follow-up here. The whole first sequence is very interesting, if you have the time to invest.
I don’t believe in the individualistic rational-actor period. I agree that traditional economics is heavily embedded in the individualistic model, but there are plenty of branches of economics as field that reject this assumption.
Thanks for telling me. I must admit I have recently been a fan of emergentism as a theory within academics, but the critique you provide of it is interesting. I will be sure to read those articles.
Huh? I remember an Italian female senator making a big fuss when a male-to-female transsexual senator (who hadn’t undergone SRS yet at that time, IIRC) used the women’s toilet in the senate.
Lots of gendered rules differentiate based on sex. Once upon a time, there was the rule “No women lawyers.” I think it’s pretty clear that there is no physical basis for this rule.
Or consider the Old Testament rules on cleanliness and menstruation. Cleanliness didn’t mean anything in relation to decreased frequency of disease—it was a requirement of social isolation of women from men at certain times of the month. Although menstruation is a physical thing, I would assert that these rules were gender constructs, not sex constructs.
Likewise, I assert that the rules about which gender can use which bathroom are gender constructs that use sex to differentiate. If the male and female genders were constructed differently, the Italian senator you mentioned wouldn’t have felt justified in making the complaint she made.
Sorry, but why are you telling us all this? Yeah, feminism is pretty interesting (at least it interests me) but why are you giving a lecture on it? It would seem that most people interested in a spontaneous intro to feminism have already received it, and are currently picking nits with the five-sex model of intersexed people or post-third-wave developments.
(...plus, c’m’on, second-wavers totally sucked at telling gender from sex. Just ask Bindel or Daly about trans women.)
That may have been familiar to you, but some of it was new to me.
I apologize if I offended you. You stated something you believed to be true that I knew to not be true. I thought you would want to know that you were wrong since I assumed the goals of this cite is to become “less wrong.” I did not mean to lecture; I just thought a more detailed explanation was what you wanted rather than just a jargon packed sentence or two. Jargon is used because it condenses a huge amount of ideas and intellectual data into a few words. I did not realize that it would be offensive to explain it in this way. Honestly I thought I was responding to you not the general body, and I was really excited to share this idea with you because I find it fascinating. Like you said I am new, I will try to adjust quickly to the norms here.
Nah, we agree on the facts. You just posted a reminder that the thing I said had happened wasn’t happening anymore. Maybe you mean TimS, not me? That’s still not really wrong—Tim said “sex is the biological bits, gender is the construct around the social bits” and you said “sex is more like the construct around the biological bits”.
Correcting people is still a good idea in general.
Ah sorry I did mix you two up.
Correct, except the construct is not only built around the biological bits, the construct transforms the biological bits. We actively weed out sexes that are not male or female, and in doing this over time we breed humans to meet our desired dichotomy.
Yep, sorta like gender roles affect gender, so if you wear dresses you can’t be a Real Man, etc.
The second part doesn’t follow from the first. We give intersex babies unnecessary surgeries, but these surgeries try not to cause sterility (correct me if I’m wrong), we don’t discourage fertile intersex people comfortable in the gender they were raised as from having children, we don’t selectively destroy gametes and embryos likely to result in intersex children, and we certainly don’t chide binary-sexed people from having children likely to be intersex. (We do sterilise trans people, though.)
No you are correct. My response would be that an inefficient cleansing is still a cleansing. At this time we do not stop intersex people from procreating. We do highly stigmatize in society and we do traumatize them by denying their existence as natural and forcing/pressuring them to undergo extreme operations. Isn’t this a more PC way of intentionally limiting their reproduction?
Imagine if you were playing a game where you had to obtain 100 signatures to win and before that game I told everyone else in the room that you were a child molester, and if they gave you their signature that meant they wanted a child molester to win. It would make it significantly harder for you to win right? This situation is analogous for the intersex person’s situation in a society that views anything existing outside the traditional dichotomy as unnatural. They are stigmatized. It becomes significantly harder to find a job, mate, to feel self-worth, build confidence, trust, all the things humans need to successfully establish themselves and their genes in society. Sure, there is a lower tier of society bracketed off for them. They can work in the carnivals, whorehouse, etc, but they are in some sense blocked from “normal” society.
It would be interesting to look at suicide and marriage rates among hermaphrodites in Europe and America. Which would you guess is higher?
Aren’t most intersex individuals infertile to begin with? It also seems valuable to point out that the sterilization of trans people is generally at their request.
My experience with intersex individuals is limited to one, but he deeply wishes he had had the ‘unnecessary surgery’ when he was young instead of after years and years of infections.
Lots are, lots aren’t, I have no idea where to get reliable stats.
Much of the time, but “you must be permanently sterile to change your legal sex” is a completely unnecessary law. I’ve known someone who isn’t getting a vaginoplasty just in case uterus grafts become possible in her lifetime and the op would compromise that. Trans men don’t usually get bottom surgery, so sterility is impermanent (just get off T when you want kids); many do get hysterectomies, but only get their ovaries removed because of legal requirement. And there’s no reason not to freeze gametes.
Well yeah, that’s one reason we shouldn’t give kids surgeries just to make their junk look normal—so that we can actually believe doctors when they say it would improve their health.
A comparative analysis of Mammalia shows this to be extremely doubtful, unless you think that only humans have these extra sexes. In all mammals the vast bulk of individuals can be cleanly assigned to male or female without ambiguity, and no such intentional elimination was required. [Note “outbreeding” means something else.]
You have to look at quite distantly related species before hermaphrodites show up at interesting frequencies. Certainly some fish can be hermaphrodite.
I don’t think only humans have these extra sexes. Could you direct me to the comparative analysis of Mammalian reproductive systems that discusses hermaphrodites in other species? I am sure most gonochronistic animals have cases of hermaphrodites or other genetic mutations.
You are right, outbreeding is not what I meant. That is why I split the word up, hoping to convey my point. Intentional elimination is a good way to say it. If Hermaphrodites were not so stigmatized they would not be abandoned/killed/maimed as children; if they were not on average abandoned/killed/maimed as children then there would be a decent size population of hermaphrodites able to develop a stable social station; if there were a stable hermaphrodite community their genes would spread; if there genes spread their would be more hermaphrodites. I think the intentional elimination of hermaphrodites has made a huge impact on the demographic of humanity, do you disagree?
Also I don’t think you can use the fact other gonochronistic mammals have not developed more sexes as a reason why humans would not.
What I meant was that we can think about other mammals ourselves, and note that no other mammal species has hermaphrodites at significant frequencies. I had no specific research in mind.
This depends both on a genetic cause, and also on hermaphrodites having equal fitness to males and females.
Yes, I disagree, for the reasons I’ve stated. Other mammals have had no “intentional elimination”, yet hermaphrodites remain at very low levels. So “intentional elimination” isn’t the reason for the very low levels.
Of course I can; humans aren’t particularly special, at least not in relevant ways.
Humans are incredibly special. Humans are the only single species mammal. In that sense given the diversity of human ethnicities, humans are the most specialized-unspecialized species in the world (specialized in the sense that the species allows for the vast degrees of ethnic traits to be completely compatible with any human; unspecialized in the sense that we remain neutral enough to adapt to almost any environment and have not biologically chained ourselves to a particular habitat). Humans are the only species that we know of that creates a shared reality of perception (meaning that if I point at something, you know not to look at my finger but look for what I am pointing too; we are able to see our goals, victories, and aspirations as shared with a larger social entity). Humans are the only creature with a cultural paradox (A cultural paradox is where what is prescribed by their tribe often times is detrimental to their survival, but to go against the tribe is equally if not more detrimental.).
Biological classification is useful for organizational purposes, but the categories created are often times severely lacking. In this case, I think humans are so different from most other mammals that it is not useful to use them as an insight into human nature/ the development of the human species.
None of the things you mention are likely to affect the sex determination system.
The only what?
Well I guess this is another flaw of classification. Species is defined as “Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups” (Futuyma, 1998). The reproductive isolation can be genetic, or it can be simply geographical or habitual. There is no criteria that says two distinct species cannot interbreed, even though some species can and others cannot. For example dogs, wolves, and coyotes can all interbreed, but within the Felidae genus there are cat species that cannot interbreed.
What I was saying is that humans are the only living member of the Homo family. Homo sapiens exist as a single species because to some degree their is no limitation on our interbreeding. Sure there are many cultural norms and customs that have discouraged inter-racial, inter-class, inter-ethinicity breeding, but it has not stopped these things. I would argue (along with some evolutionary biologists) that the fact that homo sapiens exist in one giant gene pool is pretty unique among animals given the wide amount of territory that we populate.
So was the claim “Humans are the only single species mammal” simply a claim that humans are the only mammal with their own genus? That’s certainly not true, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Monotypic_mammal_genera
This is probably not relevant to our point, but Futuyma (2005) Evolution p356 defines reproductive isolation as “reduction or prevention of gene flow between populations by genetically determined differences between them”—i.e. it’s not enough that they are geographically separated.
This just seems to be a claim that the population size of our species is quite large. There are other species of mammal with large populations. Again, the relevance of any of this to sex-determination is rather doubtful.
It should be pointed out here that biological genuses, families, orders, and so on do not exist. If you discover a new continent full of organisms not previously known, there is no observation you can make to decide whether two of their species are, or are not, members of the same genus. It would be a wrong question. Every classification above the species level exists solely for the convenience of biologists talking about the organisms they are studying. Even at the species level, where we can talk about interbreeding populations, multiple definitions are possible and edge cases exist (sometimes so large as to make the very idea of a tree of descent moot).
The higher-level classifications may (but do not always) correspond to subtrees of the evolutionary history, but their ranking into genuses, orders, subfamilies, and so on in the 40-odd different levels available in current taxonomical practice is a product of human convenience, nothing more.
So the statement that some genus includes only one species is not a statement of biology. It is a statement about biologists.
Yes, this is true of course.
And whoever mentions cladistics first wins the thread. Ready, set...
Your comment inspired me to post this quote (although I still think calling humans mammals and primates is useful).
I agree that it is pretty useful, but I still like your quote.
It’s not clear to me why you’re presuming social effects are the primary selection pressure pushing against hermaphroditism. I don’t know the genetics / biology / embryology involved, but my prior is that deviation from normalcy decreases the chances of fertility for that individual, and possibly more importantly, their children.
[Although I am not proud of this, reflecting on your question “why you’re presuming social effects are the primary selection pressure,” the conclusion I came to was] Because it is the political position I was indoctrinated into. in undergrad anthropology we covered feminism and the idea of sex as a social construct is pretty much the big idea of third wave feminism. It was such a unique and interesting idea that I accepted it into my own ideology pretty readily. However honestly, the counter-arguement that there there are other genetic factors that are more primary is potentially acceptable.
As to your prior
I would respond that what is normal depends on the in-group of the individual/community defining normalcy. Since people to some degree define their in-group based on the people, symbols, media, and cultures they interact with, I would argue that the process of labeling what is normal is a social construction.
That’s a rather startling thing to say, at least on LessWrong.
As is this.
Leaving aside the particular questions of sex, gender, and normalcy, what do you, and those who have influenced you, judge to be “acceptable” forms of argument? What should, or should not, give you a reason to believe something?
Is it startling to be honest? Perhaps I was not careful enough with my wording, or my tone did not come across correctly, but the statement “Quite honestly it was such a unique and interesting idea that I accepted it into my own ideology pretty readily” was confessional. I said “potentially acceptable” because I feel that the speculation here is not grounded in expertise, and I don’t want to repeat the mistakes of my youth and be just as easily indoctrinated by your flashy idea as the previous one. I really am not too familiar with this community, but personally, I try to be as critical and reflective as possible of the discourse that encompasses my beliefs. It is somewhat embarrassing that I never thought to question the biological fitness of hermaphrodites in general, but the truth is I didn’t. It would be nice to chalk that up to youthful naiveté at the time of indoctrination, but it just as easily could have been a blind spot in my reflections.
Sorry, I had read it as being your current justification for the belief.
No problem, any fault is probably more due to my writing than your thinking.
That definition of “normal” is irrelevant to the biological effects of mutation on fertility.
Here: If the human reproductive system has evolved over millions of years in a condition where the vast majority of the population are one of either two sexes, with particular chromosomes even being present in only one of the sexes, then a mutant that somehow ends up with both sexual organs is almost certainly going to having all sorts of problems fertility-wise. That kind of mutation breaks the assumptions the reproductive systems have evolved under (assumptions such as amounts of testosterone/oestrogen/whatever other hormones in the blood, the physical arrangement of the sex organs, and probably all kinds of other stuff).
Upvoted for honesty and chasing down assumptions.
nshepperd explains well what I meant by “normalcy.”
That distinction gravely understates the amount of physical variation in humans.
Sex does not refer blanketly to physical varation, sex refers to varying reproductive functions. If 5 greatly underestimates the number of unique reproductive systems in the human species, please tell me some of the ones I am missing.
You only listed 3 different sorts of reproductive functions. Two others were only distinguished by non-functional genitalia.
If you were looking for different variation in the sorts of things that are normally clustered with “sex”, then there are a lot more expressions. There are for instance ambiguous genitalia, unusual chromosonal sex, Aphallia, and especially human protandry.
Saying “there are exactly 5 sexes” is roughly as bad as saying “there are exactly 2 sexes”—there is great potential for variation on multiple factors. It’s not even a spectrum, it’s a space.
Sorry if I was too ambiguous with my language. I highlighted the non-functioning genitalia because it is how I remember the distinction; but both ferms and merms have genital structures unique from hermaphrodites in that they are synthesized with quasi male/female structures. The processes of sex, birth, waste defecation, urination, ejaculation and menstruation are all somewhat different.
You are right, I am not an expert on all this stuff and I should not have said “five” in such a definitive way. In general, I have developed the bad habit of writing with too much authority. I apologize for that it is a byproduct of my time debating. I shouldn’t have said “five” in such a definitive way. That said, the point I was trying to make is that the concept of sex is socially constructed, which what you are arguing does not change right?
I was not particularly concerned about that.
But if you want my opinion, no—“2 sexes” isn’t “socially constructed”, it’s just a “false proposition”. We know better, some people haven’t gotten the memo, ::shrug::.
Or to flip that over, we can look at it empirically rather than logically: “male” and “female” seem to be useful clusters. If we’re going to go all clustery on it I’m not sure there’s a better number for k than 2. It’s one of the better one-bit predictors for questions like “Is this person going to show up to the wedding in a dress?”.
But the human position goes beyond simply labeling, it is breeding. For thousands of years we have killed/maimed infants who do not fit the dichotomy manipulating the gene pool towards a social agenda. In the same way we breed race horses and pea plants. I agree that there are biological limitations on the extent of malleability, but I think to say that it is simply a “false proposition” is an understatement. It is condoned eugenics in a very hitler-esque way.
Calling that process “breeding” is quite strange. There aren’t many genetic facts that survive consistent selection against them over thousands of years.
Foucault would call it biopwer if you like that term better, but it is essentially breeding. The reason it is not as effective as a geneticist in their greenhouse is the scale. Even if a government has a policy of “fixing” hermaphrodites, the reality of actualizing that over a territory the size of a kingdom/country is almost impossible.
Is that a sufficient explanation why they haven’t been completely wiped out? Check my facts on this, but I think about 1:3000 people is born not male or female.
...or it could just be that extremely complex systems like gender unavoidably go haywire during fetal development or a mutation hits, and this results in a normal background rate of around 1:3000?
Yes, that seems reasonable. There are four biologically possible scenarios I can think of to explain the numbers:
It’s developmental noise.
Mutations that cause hermaphroditism arise at a certain rate and are eliminated by natural (or artificial) selection at a certain rate; this is mutation-selection balance.
Multiple genes at different loci are required to produce a hermaphrodite (this is epistasis); natural selection doesn’t act against these genes since it is rare for them to be found in the same invididual, and they may produce some benefit when apart.
Hermaphrodites have reasonable fitness and are held at an equilibrium frequency in the population.
Four seems far and away the least likely; I’d be suspicious of an equilibrium that’s so low, not only in our species but all our mammalian relatives. Perhaps there are answers in the literature; I don’t have the time.
The upper bound I’m familiar with is about 1:100 naturally intersexed, though it might be working with a looser definition.
No, I have a horrible memory for numbers. You probably are right.
Somewhere in that sentence is some amount of social construction. That is, people haven’t “gotten the memo” because they don’t want to get the memo.