Scott: this salt ring of "N"s will keep the devilish NYT journalists from quoting my bigoted arguments
(https://archive.is/P8060)
posted on January 25, 2023 05:12 PM by
u/unknownvar-rotmg
86
u/Kingshorsey80 pointsat 1674669513.000000
I’m used to scientific racism showing up in the comments but I was a
bit taken aback by all the “But Scott, homosexuality IS a mental
disorder” comments. I guess I expected his readership to be more
selective in its bigotry.
It was an eye-opening comment section for me; the misogyny wasn't subtle this time either. I wonder if I was missing this before, or if it's just gotten much more reactionary recently?
Both, to some extent, probably. A big percentage of his commenters have always been horrific, but as time goes on, the ones who AREN'T horrific have mostly drifted away.
None of these people understand evolution at all. In reality the [Modern Synthesis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_synthesis_(20th_century)) is really complicated with math and everything - you would expect Rational Egotists to love it. But no, pulling stuff out of their ass is better somehow.
Kind of funny that for a bunch of self proclaimed radical free thinkers their thoughts have converged very rapidly to middle of the road conservative bigotry
This is also just a dumb series of things to say. Like, there is no
apolitical/socially neutral definition of mental illness because what is
or is not diseased is defined by teleology - the way something should be
based on a sense of purpose. Like, we think that socioopathy is bad
because we don’t like people murdering other people, so it is a mental
disorder in our system, where other differences of personality or brain
wiring or whatever you want to describe it as are fine because they
don’t produce outcomes we don’t want. That means there is no objective
definition of disease!
But admitting that would mean admitting that the Postmodernists were
right and no good Rationalist will do that.
There's an alternative version of this essay where the thesis is more directly that illness is a social construct applied to natural variations in condition. I'm pretty sure Foucalt probably wrote it somewhere.
This is the thing that makes Scott fascinating to me, because one of his old essays about categories was my first exposure to the concept and is still stuck in my head as an illustrative example of it, and when I actually learned the phrase "X is a social construct" it immediately clicked because I recognized it from there. Like, how do you get so close to the point and then suddenly take a hard-right turn into race realism and the rest of it.
IDK wtf is going on in this sub, but the pivot from fucktatds struggling with reality but in a morally ok and shrtbs kind of way to "race realism" is the same "pivot" that you I and every other nonMAGA has reached:
the journey to intelligence is not a race or even a marathon, but a constant visit to the gym, 247365.
Get smart stay smart.
> But admitting that would mean admitting that the Postmodernists were right
That and/or actually dealing with intersubjectivity, which they don't seem great at either.
God, there’s so much white replacement-adjacent “population decline”
discussion in the comments. People just tattling on themselves, couldn’t
be better.
It’s so weird: he knows that what he’s writing can (at the
very least) be interpreted in a bad way (if not is just plain bad). A
normal person would realize this and think either “Maybe I should
rewrite this in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a fascist” or
“Hey, what I just wrote sounds like what a fascist would say. Maybe I
need to rethink my argument”. But not Scott! “Let’s just put N’s
everywhere, that’ll fix it”
It's as if his thought process is:
"A perfectly logical, rational, unbiased person would not take offense at this or think it makes me sound like a fascist. But those are the only people whose opinions I care about, so I don't have to care if I sound like a fascist to everybody else. Nevertheless, even if I don't respect or care about those opinions of illogical, irrational, biased people, they can make my life hard, so I will make the smallest, pettiest gesture possible towards telling them to fuck off, while making it absolutely clear that I don't care about their opinions."
I’m gay (well, bisexual but have dated/slept with a number of men) and liked the post. There are important philosophical issues at play here, and I think there is a central shortcoming to his thesis, but this is a perfectly thoughtful and non-homophobic take, IMO.
Mr. Alexander is worrying about his words taken out of context and
misrepresented, but this entire essay is based on taking someone else’s
words out of context and misrepresenting them:
DSM alternatives say this all the time. “The DSM pathologized
homosexuality! That means it reflects our biases and stereotypes! Let’s
replace it with our purely biological, apolitical taxonomy of mental
disorders!”
The article he’s quoting doesn’t indicate that the taxonomy in
question is “purely biological” and pretty clearly implies that it does
account for effects when classifying what is and isn’t a mental
disorder. The quote that SA uses doesn’t even imply that the HiTOP is
based purely on underlying causes and not effects, but his entire essay
assumes that it does. Once you consider effects, there’s a pretty clear
difference between homosexuality and pedophilia: one inherently makes
you more likely to molest kids and the other doesn’t.
The article reads like exactly what it is -- someone profoundly ignorant and arrogant walking into a discussion that they're not at all equipped for and acting like they have something to add.
There's nothing original here. It's the equivalent of someone walking into a discussion of climate change and saying, "No, you don't want to be carbon neutral, you'd have to stop breathing!" No grasp of either the discussion or relevant facts.
I expected a Bostrom-style “Someone else would say .
But not me”. I was surprised to find Siskind trying to prevent arguments
he is genuinely making from being quoted out of “context” (presumably,
presented without a meandering string of anecdotes on either side).
According to my priors, the best way to do this is not to make better
arguments, but to thumb your nose and complain about the fringes on the
courtroom flag.
This adding of Ns is the equivalent of the incels putting in
Minecraft at the end of all their rants. It doesn’t make the reader
think, oh you don’t believe this. It just makes the reader think, oh you
are aware of how terrible you sound trying to equate homosexuality and
pedophilia.
I don’t know the NYT style book, but I’m pretty sure they could just
remove the Ns and add an editor’s note with a link to the source. Or
leave them in with a [sic] and a little sneering explanation of what he
was trying to do. Journalists are used to their subjects being mad about
it.
Man, these fucking guys are just like the archetypal example of a guy
with a hammer smashing something and then going “NAIL” really loud.
Since homosexuality pretty clearly is a mental disorder (in addition
to the obvious evolutionary mismatch, there’s a very high rate of
comorbidity with other mental disorders), the problem here seems
straightforward.
Oh does it? It does seem like a mental disorder because it has other
mental disorders? Man, could there be any reason a homosexual might be
under increased mental strain besides mental disorders?
I think the thing that pisses me off about these guys the most is
their steadfast desire to make the same mistake over and over
about cofounding variables.
Like, the genetic argument for homosexuality dates at least as far as
fucking Dawkins and the Selfish Gene; how the fuck does Scott not know
that?
The thing I don't understand is what this is supposed to get us. Maybe homosexuality is genetic. Maybe it is social. Maybe it is some interaction of the two. What is that supposed to practically mean for how I interact with gay people, or what policies I support? It seems to me that the answer is nothing. Gay people are happier if they are allowed to have the same rights as straight people, and there's no discernable downside. Whether we define homosexuality as "genetic" or "a mental disorder" or "an evolutionary misfire" has no impact on that, so the "rational" thing to do would seem to be to ignore the question in favor of more practical ones.
If you’re constantly terrified of having your writing taken “out of
context” in a way that’ll make you sound bad, maybe you’re just bad at
writing?
I totally get that this is a risk for deceptively edited “man on the
street” rage bait videos, because people aren’t super precise when
speaking extemporaneously. But this is long form writing, something that
you can stop and reconsider before posting. If your written and edited
words make you look dumb or bigoted without a pile of caveats next to
it, either you suck at writing, or you are in fact dumb or bigoted.
there are so many examples he could’ve used to make this argument that would’ve served his point much better without relying on ideologically motivated rhetoric. thinking something like orthorexia, which doesn’t have to be a negative thing if someone is staying healthy / doesn’t have a problem with the amnt of time they spend maintaining their rules, or using it as a baseline to overcome another, more negatively impactful eating disorder. but of course, he went with the most divisive option he possibly could’ve instead. that would indicate to me that this is a man who doesn’t suck at writing because he knows his audience pretty well, but isn’t interested in pulling in new audience members probably because he’s only looking for people who already agree with the version of the argument made this specific way. so yeah basically they are bigots
If you constantly *say* that you're constantly terrified of having your writing taken "out of context", then maybe you're indulging in public martyrbation to make yourself look like a victim and foster the self-righteousness of your followers by encouraging them to play at being oppressed by the (((global elite media))).
Considering that Scott himself rarely seems concerned about “what
[is] up” when he cites things that might otherwise fall apart under
critical examination, I’m not sure why he expects other people to care
all that much. I tend to just see [sic] and leave it at that.
He’s still trying to rules-lawyer journalism without knowing anything
about it, damn. You’d think he’d learn after a while.
The defense he and others before him like Harris and Peterson have of
“if you think I’ve said something dumb or offensive you’ve taken me out
of context and need to reread my entire work and accept my entire
worldview as inherently reasonable before forming an opinion” is really
something when you consider how outrageously lazy they are when trying
to understand theory from people they don’t like. Steelmanning principle
goes out the window very quickly the moment it’s time to take potshots
at the left.
Both [homosexuality and pedophilia] are ‘sexual targeting errors’
Nobody has a strong evidence-based theory of either condition
Isn’t there a leading theory that the biological basis of
homosexuality is that it is actually evolutionary advantageous for
populations to have some portion of non-reproducing individuals to act
as extra caretakers/child-rearers, that pass on their genes not by
reproducing themselves but by increasing the evolutionary success of
their brothers or sisters (who by definition share ~50 percent of their
DNA) by helping to more effectively i.e. rear their children? Doesn’t
this in fact align with the explanation/fact that homosexuality is only
weakly genetically linked (something he admits in the post itself)?
Doesn’t being a psychiatrist require getting a medical degree? Don’t
medical schools teach the gene-centered theory of evolution? What am I
missing here? If he’s aware of the gene-centered theory of evolution,
and he’s ‘just speculating,’ why is homosexuality as an ‘instinct
targeting error’ more convincing of an idea such that he cares to put it
forward in place of, say, ‘Gay Uncle’ theory as it were? Is it solely
because without the comparison between homosexuality and pedophilia as
having a similar biological basis, his argument falls apart?
Also, who cares? Why is the genetic basis for homosexuality a critical thing for random public “intellectuals” to hash over? Is there anything useful that comes out of these posts, or is it just thinly disguised bigotry?
The proper response to “what is the evolutionary basis for you being like that” is “fuck off”.
I mean, I think he would be actually making a ~~good~~ acceptable point if he hadn't used such a clumsy and probably inapplicable example with which to prove it. I find it hard to fault the basic premise that we don't want a purely biological basis of classification for mental disorders, because it would label as disorders some things that we don't want to stigmatize as such, solely on the basis that they are biologically similar/functionally the same as other things we decidedly do want to label as disorder/stigmatize.
I think the bigger issue I have with his post is that I'm not sure I've really seen a lot of people arguing for a purely biological classification of mental disorders in the first place. It's a pretty common phenomenon online to take an easily-deconstructable, relatively dumb belief, that indeed exists but is only held by an incredibly small fraction of people, and then prove how smart one is by spending a lot of time and words deconstructing exactly why that belief is dumb -- when, in reality, you haven't really done anything of particular worth because almost no-one actually holds that relatively dumb belief in the first place, and its easy for most people to see why (Scott is a particularly repeat offender of this, in my opinion).
In other words, in general, most of the people I see discussing mental illness regardless of political affiliation are okay with the current general consensus, that is, mental illness can be suitably defined by the relatively vague/imprecise "a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning," and that's okay. Scott has proven that one potential alternative definition would be worse, but I'm not sure who exactly is out there that needs convincing.
> when, in reality, you haven't really done anything of particular worth because almost no-one actually holds that relatively dumb belief in the first place, and its easy for most people to see why (Scott is a particularly repeat offender of this, in my opinion).
Man if only there were some clever phrase we could use to mean only engaging with the best, most realistic version of an argument someone might make. Surely that would encourage people to adopt more intellectual honesty!
Lmao. Completely forgot about strawman for a second. However I think this is very slightly different than the typical strawman case. Instead of intentionally creating a strawman to beat down, its more like searching a field of 1000 steelmen for the one strawmen that exists among them, and then picking that one up, taking it home, and then beating it up. And then posting about how good of a fighter you are on your blog.
A useful and concise expression for an actually bad argumentative move coined by SSC. Will wonders never cease?
(More seriously: I'd honestly be unsurprised if he tried to popularise it. He's good at taking a good idea, applying it wrongly, then just not trying to apply it at all. So it's on brand.)
> I think the bigger issue I have with his post is that I'm not sure I've really seen a lot of people arguing for a purely biological classification of mental disorders in the first place
This is a “know your rationalists” kinda moment.
As much as they squeal about “of course I’m not saying that all life outcomes are determined by [IQ which is determined by] biology”, they routinely argue as if this is true. For a variety of reasons, they are highly predisposed to look for simple, genetically based, explanations for pretty much everything.
So for Scott to argue assuming that a significant portion of his audience does think all mental illness is biological is both par for the course and another moment of the rationalists telling on themselves.
> an easily-deconstructable, relatively dumb belief, that indeed exists but is only held by an incredibly small fraction of people
In Scott's defense: you just described the rationalist community! So I appreciated this post in the same spirit that I appreciated the anti-libertarian, anti-neoreactionary, and anti-manosphere FAQs: it's important to speak to the rationalists in language that they'll understand.
Yeah I was partially convinced of the worth of the post by another commenter who pointed out something similar. I was under the assumption that basically nobody was calling for a biological classification of mental disorders, but it's entirely possibly that rationalists themselves might make up the majority of people calling for such a thing, and that some of them are quite vocal in this. I have no idea if so, considering the amount of attention I pay to that sphere (little). But if there are many calling for such a classification, and Scott's post was made with them in mind, then maybe there's plenty of value in it.
I think some of the context is Scott's dialogue with Bryan Caplan, where Bryan Caplan [insists, based on libertarian economic theories, that mental illness isn't real](https://www.econlib.org/scott-alexander-on-mental-illness-a-belated-reply/). (It's basically an old-school [anti-psychiatry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry) view dressed up in revealed preference theory and suchlike.) One of Scott's most compelling arguments against this view is that schizophrenia (for example) appears very much like other diseases of the body, in having a theorized neurobiological basis and treatments (5-HT2A agonists) whose mechanism is a neurobiological intervention. So I suspect that Scott's interlocutors here are people who start from Caplan's view and then retreat a bit: some mental disorders are truly objective and therefore psychiatry should only deal with those.
And then of course there's the run-of-the-mill people who think anything "political" is bad, that mainstream psychiatry and psychology are captured by Marxist SJWs, etc.
this dudes life stands in stark contrast to the evolutionary basis of his genetics. just like everyone else.
but it doesnt matter. writing like this exists to attract other reactionaries and for no other purpose.
I don't know but in The Moral Animal by Evolutionary Psychiatrist Robert Wright he says there is no convincing explanation for why gay people exist. He says any trait a gay person has could have hypothetically evolved as a trait of a straight person. He also argues gay people are not super duper devoted aunts and uncles like that theory insists.
But this topic is pretty gross. Evolution doesn't have intents so it can't produce "targeting errors". That's anthropomorphic bullshit.
Evolution isn't trying to do things anymore than gravity is. It's just a natural process. It's not trying to get you to make babies anymore than gravity is trying to make you fall off a cliff.
But obviously you can't have the fun of posing as an intellectual by saying "science doesn't know why gay people exist" and leave it at that.
Right I can't stand when people make this mistake. If anything the whole point of how evolution works is that behaviors and adaptations have ranges of utility and many dimensions and layers of functionality -- that's the whole reason evolution can "tinker" and make new things or adapt to new situations. Human sex isn't "just" for procreative PIV hetero intercourse any more than an animal's mouth is "just" for eating and thus vocalizations or defensive biting are "mistargeted mouth movements." That doesn't even touch on whether a given behavior is actually an inextricable byproduct of something else.
In his duck example the duck imprinting on humans "by mistake" is probably what helps it get domesticated and bred by humans in the billions. That's a smashing success as far as evolution is concerned!
I again am not asserting that Gay Uncle theory is certainly or even probably true, but rather that its no less plausible or confirmed by evidence than Scott's own 'targeting-errors' theory. Yet Scott's argument is verbatim "homosexuality and pedophilia are **probably** pretty similar in a biological sense" based on nothing except the fact that his 'targeting-errors' theory seems more plausible to him intuitively than any other, including gay uncle theory. There is no particular reason for him to be quite so sure of this other than the inordinate trust he places in his own intuition.
> confused structural point.
It's actually perfectly salient of a point to make to ask rhetorically why one specious explanation for something seems more plausible to a person than another seemingly equally specious explanation.
>It just isn’t helpful at all to try to bring in competing biological explanations which have their own problems
Actually, it is. I get that you personally like the idea of 'sexual-instinct-misfire' hypothesis being true and don't like the idea of 'homosexuality-evolutionarily-advantageous' hypothesis being true, but that actually has no bearing on what we know or can or should say about how likely either one of them is to be the actual explanation, which is why its worth bringing one of them up if the other is mentioned. The reality is that we have little evidence either way, Scott admits as much, and then nevertheless puts forward his own explanation as 'probable.' If you don't think that gives insight as to some of his maladaptive thought patterns, patterns that could also lead to things like acceptance of HBD, then I don't know what to tell you.
Yep. Development is complicated, "misfires" are inevitable, and "[everything is a byproduct of something else](https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/06/13/evolution-and-homosexuality/)". Moreover, it's not established how much of a fitness *cost* there might have been to homosexuality in practice; it is possible to make a baby even if one would prefer to be boffing a different person.
An explanation like "turning on the 'attracted to men' gene complex in women is evolutionarily beneficial, even if it sometimes also turns on in men" seems entirely plausible to me. My issue with the whole thing is A) neither I nor Scott have any evidence on that, so why write an article about it and B) I don't see any reason why "people are gay for this biological reason instead of that one" or even "people are gay for no reason at all" would have anything to do with how we should treat gay people. You don't treat someone who lost their legs in a car accident differently from someone who was born without functioning legs just because one is "biological" and the other isn't.
I think the point is that there are a bunch of just so stories about the evolution of homosexuality, none of which is dominant, but some of which are about it being evolutionary advantageous. Siskind treating it as a biological misfire is just wrong and biased.
Also there is a tendency in HBD people to do treat it as a biological misfire. See for example the germ theory of homosexuality. This has roots in social darwinist morals. A lot of HBD racists have the tendency to equate morally good with evolutionary advantageous so since they are homophobic, homosexuality can't possibly have been an adaptation, it must have been deleterious!
I don't even think "biological misfire" and "evolutionarily advantageous" are mutually exclusive. If you imagine some (grossly simplified) "likes women" gene, that gene is evolutionarily advantageous in men. You could imagine some broader mutation that cranked up the power of that gene, at the cost of sometimes turning it on in women, and that mutation would be positive at a population level even if it resulted in some people who didn't reproduce.
Is that correct? Who knows! But more to the point, who gives a shit? I don't understand what practical question about how to interact with gay people is better answered by having an empirically accurate understanding of the phenomena that cause people to be gay. Just don't be homophobic, it's not that hard.
yeah, I am talking about the ultimate evolutionary causes here. they are mutually exclusive in the ultimate cause sense.
> But more to the point, who gives a shit? I don't understand what practical question about how to interact with gay people is better answered by having an empirically accurate understanding of the phenomena that cause people to be gay.
I don't think anyone here disagrees with that. whether being gay is genetic or not, adaptive or not, a byproduct or not, makes no difference in how we treat people on a personal level.
the initial point was to call siskind out on cherry picking the known science of this to make his analogy. which is whatever since his analogy is shit irrespective of that
I meant the second part in reference to Siskind deciding to talk about it, not anyone here. There's a dishonesty to what he's doing where he makes a technical argument (suggesting that maybe it's correct to call homosexuality a mental illness), and tries to use the idea that "it's just a technical argument" to deflect from criticism that calls him homophobic, but the technical argument doesn't actually *mean* or *imply* anything in technical terms, it's just providing a way to allow homophobes to feel justified in insulting gay people.
oh ya I agree with you. it's a really shitty and homophobic analogy, on top of which he has to cherry-pick the science to make that analogy in the first place
> I don’t think this is really true, because I think it puts undeserved weight on the credibility of other hypotheses. And I think that if you don’t put that undeserved weight on their credibility, then Siskind can be treated as just saying an asshole thing.
Wow, wrong! It's quite amazing how repeatedly you fail to understand the point I'm making here.
Based on the evidence we have, I think it should be obvious that the best decision one can make about what to believe regarding the basis of homosexuality is that *we don't have enough evidence to make 'probably' statements about what is probably the basis of homosexuality.*
IF one is to do this, though, as siskind does -- make a 'probably' statement about what 'probably' explains homosexuality -- then one needs to either have
one. a level of evidence sufficient to support that claim
or
two. a reason as to why that specific claim, which lacks evidence, is any more reasonable than the other existing claims, that also lack evidence. (this is not lending these other statements credibility! it is acknowledging that all claims involved lack evidence/credibility!)
>either you spin the credibility of other biologically reductive explanations for homosexuality positively, or the argument attacking the structure of Siskind’s argument is null.
This is an amazing level of false dichotomy! How can you not see the third option, which is, you accept that there is zero credibility to any of the just-so stories that explain homosexuality, and then ask why any one in particular is being chosen as 'probably' true instead of its fellow, equally dubious just-so stories!! if the default assumption is that they are all probably *not* true until proven otherwise, because they are all so equally incredible, then we can say that any position taken other than that deserves examination!! doing this does not lend any of them credibility!!!
> I further think that it’s a bad idea to spin the other also reductive explanations for homosexuality positivity, give them undue credibility
Oh yeah I agree with that.
My initial comment was gonna be about the gay uncle hypothesis not being well supported but you covered that.
I say in my original comment
>If he's aware of the gene-centered theory of evolution, and he's 'just speculating,' why is homosexuality as an 'instinct targeting error' more convincing of an idea such that he cares to put it forward in place of, say, 'Gay Uncle' theory as it were? Is it solely because without the comparison between homosexuality and pedophilia as having a similar biological basis, his argument falls apart?
My point thus isn't that Gay Uncle hypothesis is certainly correct, more that he strangely disregards its plausibility in favor of his own equally unsupported just-so explanation of homosexuality, just because his own equally unsupported explanation happens to support his main argument.
He could also, but doesn't, structure his argument as, 'imagine for a moment, the possible future scenario where it is discovered that homosexuality has the same basic biological cause as pedophilia,' which to me would seem just as strong an argument for his main point, but without being bundled with any of the unfounded confidence/fears of being taken out of context as comes with the argumentative tack he actually chose, which was to say, 'homosexuality and pedophilia are *probably similar in a biological sense.' And again this is solely on the basis of his own just-so explanation seeming intuitively stronger to him than, say, gay uncle theory, which seems pretty irresponsible to me. Similar to the "HBD is probably true" from the infamous email.
>Well no, he doesn’t disregard its plausibility, he just literally doesn’t mention it. The reason he doesn’t mention it could easily be that he doesn’t take it very seriously.
Which means that, in spite of not literally, explicitly spelling out that he disregards its plausibility in the body of his argument, he certainly does in fact implicitly disregard its plausibility (assuming he knows in the first place that it exists as a theory). If he is aware of it as a theory, and does not think it worthy of mention in his discussion of a topic wherein he asserts 'what is **probably** the cause of homosexuality,' or if, just in general, we assume that he 'doesn't take it seriously,' we can deduce that means he disregards its plausibility. I'm not sure how not taking something seriously could not necessarily entail disregarding its plausibility.
And he has every right to disregard any particular unsupported biological explanation for homosexuality. (Gay Uncle theory specifically aside, considering it itself gets deep into the just-so explanations for *why* a gene that causes an organism to not reproduce would persist, there is plenty of evidence for some kind of at least partial genetic basis of homosexuality. He again even mentions that there is indeed at least a weak correlation in the article.)
However, if he's going to disregard all currently existing theories (that conveniently, if true, would serve as counterpoints to his larger argument) on the basis of being insufficiently supported by evidence, why should he have enough confidence in his own intuitive hypothesis's explanation of homosexuality to state that "homosexuality and pedophilia are **probably** pretty similar in a biological sense" when that has exactly as much evidence supporting it as the theories he's disregarded? A responsible writer who prefaces an article by stating that there aren't a lot of fully-evidence-supported theories one way or another would not immediately go on to assert that the explanation is "probably" this or that a few sentences later. Who knows if non-heterosexuality is a sexual-instinct-targeting misfire, or genetically advantageous to populations and thus selected for, or some combination of these things ('non-monocausal') or some other thing? He LITERALLY states that the jury is still out, and then decides to put forward his own intuitive explanation as 'probable' simply because he has inordinate trust in his own intuition!
>although you seem to take biology to be your special subject
It is a coincidence that two of my main posts on this sub so far have been related to biology. Thanks for the unsolicited, incorrect and patronizing psychoanalysis though. Should I take it psychology is your "special subject" considering how much you claim to know about me?
> your biological arguments are not particularly well thought-through or sound.
Duly noted. Interesting, considering I actually make very few arguments-from-biology, and rather ask questions about the relevant science partially to make a rhetorical point about something other than the science itself, and partially because I hope someone will actually answer the questions I want to know answers to.
>your comments, especially longer ones, are actually very difficult to parse.
Duly noted.
>You give the impression of somebody who writes in a stream-of-consciousness that isn’t very amenable to being articulate or adroit as to the matter in hand.
Duly noted.
>You put the Gay Uncle hypothesis front and centre of your claims,I want to disabuse you of the notion that that’s where it should be,
Duly noted.
>If Siskind, as you implicitly still believe, should consider Gay Uncle, then we should as well. I do not think that’s a good option here.
He should consider gay uncle hypothesis only insofar as he thinks he knows what the "probable" explanation for homosexuality is. I for example make no such claim about what is the "probable" explanation for homosexuality, meaning I need not consider the worth of Gay Uncle hypothesis. My assertion is on the contrary only that no-one should claim to know what the "probable" explanation for homosexuality is, considering the current dearth of evidence one way or another. This has been my point this entire time, but maybe I've just been too hard to parse 🤷♀️
>especially coming from somebody who certainly risks overstating their facility with the relevant science.
Nowhere do I positively state my facility with the relevant science in the first place, so this seems somewhat hard to have done. My first comment is literally asking a series of questions regarding what the position of the relevant science is. The eventual rhetorical point I make with those questions, setting aside the fact that they were not solely asked rhetorically, is that no one should be as sure as siskind seems to be regarding what, exactly, the evolutionary origins or teleolgy of being gay actually is. This misunderstanding is probably also the result of you finding my comments hard to parse, but I'm not confident that is true for other readers.
>(and I personally think you try, and fail, to analyse down the specific implications of his loose wording awfully far)
Duly noted. By which, of course, I have meant to mean, completely disregarded.
>What I’m trying to gently impress on you is that
What I'll gently try and impress upon you is that saying "im trying to gently impress upon you something" is a terrible way to impress anything upon anyone, period. In general the amount to which you speak patronizingly toward me does not seem to be appropriate given your grasp of the relevant areas, either, or your grasp of what my internal thoughts are, etc. (how surprised I was to learn that I both took biology as my special subject, AND was claiming to know a great deal about it, too!), as if something like "writing more parse-ably than you" is what is relevant as to whether or not someone should ever speak to someone else as patronizingly as you do.
This is not a very uncommon way of phrasing things as far as I'm aware. If a reader can read all of the questions without having a specific answer for any of them, then the rhetorical point has been made. If a reader does in fact have an answer for any of them, for example, an answer to "isn't gay uncle theory a leading theory to explain the biological basis for homosexuality?" (apparently, much of it the specific just-so explanation has been discredited, but the potential for homosexuality to be evolutionarily advantageous remains) then I will have learned something.
Wow, and guess what, the questions I ask function as both. They are questions I legitimately have, that IF no one has pointed explanatory answers for, prove a rhetorical point. Thanks again for patronizing me, though, by explaining to me what 'rhetoric' and a 'question are.
>You’re trying to do two contradictory things at once with language.
This is wrong, but that's okay. I'm not particularly interested in continuing hearing criticism from you regarding the way you think I should go about structuring comments intended for discussion at this point. In the past I have been successful variously making rhetorical points and/or having my questions answered this way. Aside from you as a sole outlier I have not encountered criticism. Until such a strategy for engaging online more broadly fails I will continue to use it.
>Yes, your comments are incredibly difficult to parse. No, I don’t believe that you only intend to make the very small claim you retreat to. Yes, I do think other readers are not trying very hard to parse your comments and are simply upvoting them without giving them much thought.
Duly noted.
> Yes, I do think other readers are not trying very hard to parse your comments and are simply upvoting them without giving them much thought.
Wow, how insulting to the other users of this sub, for no apparent reason.
> No, I don’t think you actually read what I was saying either.
I actually read quite fully everything you said. I just didn't agree with most of it.
>I actually read quite fully everything you said. I just didn't agree with most of it.
> >Well why don’t just come out and say you fucking disagree (what do you disagree with?).
This comment was in the chain where earlier you wrote your bit about your style criticisms of my writing. By disagree here I specifically mean to say I disagree with/ intend to disregard your style criticisms expressed in the previous comment of yours in the chain, if not as true, then as particularly relevant (hard to parse, etc.)
As for the other parts of your argument that I disagree with, I feel like I've addressed all parts of it elsewhere to the extent that is sufficient. You are in other places now just re-stating what you've already said as if it should make any difference to me hearing the same things again. I'm not sure how else to phrase what I believe in any way other than I already have, so I will no longer keep doing so beyond this:
You don't think that there is currently any worthwhile standard of evidence regarding 'theories that explain the basis of homosexuality' required to declare 'this theory is what probably causes homosexuality' beyond that which seems currently intuitively right to whoever is making the declaration. I do. You think that holding people/siskind to this standard will cause the discussion as a whole to be dangerously centered around hinging on a specific level of scientific rigor. I do not. You think that he did not actually genuinely mean 'this is what probably causes homosexuality' when he wrote as much. I do. You don't think that the level of confidence with which siskind casually pretends to know what is likely the basis/origin of homosexuality is dangerous. I do. You do not think that this is part of a larger trend where rationalist-identifying people do this much more often than they should. I do. I don't know what more there is to say, as all this has been said already -- I don't feel as if I haven't been saying these things already in the rest of the thread. Maybe you are struggling to grasp this because I am a particularly hard-to-parse writer. I have never received similar criticism from other people who I have previously conversed with, though, so I will operate under the assumption that you are an outlier.
> No, I don’t believe that you only intend to make the very small claim you retreat to.
Interesting, considering I was. Maybe you are at risk of overstating your facility with a relevant area, here
Both are “sexual targeting errors”: from an evolutionary point of
view, our genes get passed down through couplings with sexually mature
opposite-sex partners, and our instincts probably evolved to promote
this. But instincts are hard - ducks sometimes decide humans are their
mother and imprint on them - so sexual targeting errors are pretty
common. I’m just speculating here - nobody has a strong evidence-based
theory of either condition - but I think my speculations fit the small
amount of evidence there is (for example, both are only weakly linked to
genetics, suggesting they involve unconscious learning in some way).
Which is just a hedged version of the perverted faculty argument that
homophobes have repeated for centuries, has no Ns.
Is he stupid or does he think we are? It is a bigger breach of
journalistic ethics to quote someone in a way that distorts the meaning
of what was said than to edit out extraneous bits of gibberish, are we
not supposed to recognize that his fucking Zalgo bullshit is
performative?
The “targeting error” stuff isn’t new; I think it’s always been the
stated justification for conflating queerness and predatoriness, or
something close to it at least
edit: There’s a reasonable point here that everything is political
and we can’t escape that (particularly at our current levels of
understanding of the brain), but of course he has to have all his
weirdness and unnecessary examples.
I’m used to scientific racism showing up in the comments but I was a bit taken aback by all the “But Scott, homosexuality IS a mental disorder” comments. I guess I expected his readership to be more selective in its bigotry.
This is also just a dumb series of things to say. Like, there is no apolitical/socially neutral definition of mental illness because what is or is not diseased is defined by teleology - the way something should be based on a sense of purpose. Like, we think that socioopathy is bad because we don’t like people murdering other people, so it is a mental disorder in our system, where other differences of personality or brain wiring or whatever you want to describe it as are fine because they don’t produce outcomes we don’t want. That means there is no objective definition of disease!
But admitting that would mean admitting that the Postmodernists were right and no good Rationalist will do that.
God, there’s so much white replacement-adjacent “population decline” discussion in the comments. People just tattling on themselves, couldn’t be better.
It’s so weird: he knows that what he’s writing can (at the very least) be interpreted in a bad way (if not is just plain bad). A normal person would realize this and think either “Maybe I should rewrite this in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a fascist” or “Hey, what I just wrote sounds like what a fascist would say. Maybe I need to rethink my argument”. But not Scott! “Let’s just put N’s everywhere, that’ll fix it”
I N am N a N disgraceful N and N repugnant N sophist N with N a N persecution N complex N
At least Siskind is using Ns instead of the whole word?
Mr. Alexander is worrying about his words taken out of context and misrepresented, but this entire essay is based on taking someone else’s words out of context and misrepresenting them:
The article he’s quoting doesn’t indicate that the taxonomy in question is “purely biological” and pretty clearly implies that it does account for effects when classifying what is and isn’t a mental disorder. The quote that SA uses doesn’t even imply that the HiTOP is based purely on underlying causes and not effects, but his entire essay assumes that it does. Once you consider effects, there’s a pretty clear difference between homosexuality and pedophilia: one inherently makes you more likely to molest kids and the other doesn’t.
I expected a Bostrom-style “Someone else would say.
But not me”. I was surprised to find Siskind trying to prevent arguments
he is genuinely making from being quoted out of “context” (presumably,
presented without a meandering string of anecdotes on either side).
According to my priors, the best way to do this is not to make better arguments, but to thumb your nose and complain about the fringes on the courtroom flag.
Resubmitted with an archive link.
This adding of Ns is the equivalent of the incels putting in Minecraft at the end of all their rants. It doesn’t make the reader think, oh you don’t believe this. It just makes the reader think, oh you are aware of how terrible you sound trying to equate homosexuality and pedophilia.
I don’t know the NYT style book, but I’m pretty sure they could just remove the Ns and add an editor’s note with a link to the source. Or leave them in with a [sic] and a little sneering explanation of what he was trying to do. Journalists are used to their subjects being mad about it.
Does he really think it is better to leave it to the journalist to paraphrase? That just adds “that’s not what I said” to “that’s out of context.”
Man, these fucking guys are just like the archetypal example of a guy with a hammer smashing something and then going “NAIL” really loud.
Oh does it? It does seem like a mental disorder because it has other mental disorders? Man, could there be any reason a homosexual might be under increased mental strain besides mental disorders?
I think the thing that pisses me off about these guys the most is their steadfast desire to make the same mistake over and over about cofounding variables.
Like, the genetic argument for homosexuality dates at least as far as fucking Dawkins and the Selfish Gene; how the fuck does Scott not know that?
If you’re constantly terrified of having your writing taken “out of context” in a way that’ll make you sound bad, maybe you’re just bad at writing?
I totally get that this is a risk for deceptively edited “man on the street” rage bait videos, because people aren’t super precise when speaking extemporaneously. But this is long form writing, something that you can stop and reconsider before posting. If your written and edited words make you look dumb or bigoted without a pile of caveats next to it, either you suck at writing, or you are in fact dumb or bigoted.
Considering that Scott himself rarely seems concerned about “what [is] up” when he cites things that might otherwise fall apart under critical examination, I’m not sure why he expects other people to care all that much. I tend to just see [sic] and leave it at that.
He’s still trying to rules-lawyer journalism without knowing anything about it, damn. You’d think he’d learn after a while.
The defense he and others before him like Harris and Peterson have of “if you think I’ve said something dumb or offensive you’ve taken me out of context and need to reread my entire work and accept my entire worldview as inherently reasonable before forming an opinion” is really something when you consider how outrageously lazy they are when trying to understand theory from people they don’t like. Steelmanning principle goes out the window very quickly the moment it’s time to take potshots at the left.
Isn’t there a leading theory that the biological basis of homosexuality is that it is actually evolutionary advantageous for populations to have some portion of non-reproducing individuals to act as extra caretakers/child-rearers, that pass on their genes not by reproducing themselves but by increasing the evolutionary success of their brothers or sisters (who by definition share ~50 percent of their DNA) by helping to more effectively i.e. rear their children? Doesn’t this in fact align with the explanation/fact that homosexuality is only weakly genetically linked (something he admits in the post itself)? Doesn’t being a psychiatrist require getting a medical degree? Don’t medical schools teach the gene-centered theory of evolution? What am I missing here? If he’s aware of the gene-centered theory of evolution, and he’s ‘just speculating,’ why is homosexuality as an ‘instinct targeting error’ more convincing of an idea such that he cares to put it forward in place of, say, ‘Gay Uncle’ theory as it were? Is it solely because without the comparison between homosexuality and pedophilia as having a similar biological basis, his argument falls apart?
. .
(I think it is)
From the comments:
Scott replies:
[Kill Bill sirens, colors switch to high contrast, “TRANSPHOBIA” title card appears]
How will journalists ever decode this cryptogram.
I like how this:
Which is just a hedged version of the perverted faculty argument that homophobes have repeated for centuries, has no Ns.
For a second I assume he was using the n word a whole lot. If you mentally assume he did then the whole thing is appalling just like him!
What is the CC under which he publishes this? If it is NC-BY with derivatives…can we just publish a version without the Ns and attribute it to him?
Clearly [someone] has never read a newspaper…
edit: There’s a reasonable point here that everything is political and we can’t escape that (particularly at our current levels of understanding of the brain), but of course he has to have all his weirdness and unnecessary examples.
This leads me to wonder if journalists aren’t sniffing around him again.