she/her

  • 0 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle
rss
  • The rise of fascism globally isn’t an intelligence test. People are trapped in information silos. No matter how smart a person is, if all they have is propaganda it’s rational to assume they are going to believe the propaganda. We need to get true information into these information silos to help these people.

    1. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

    This one definition covers all humans so it’s not particularly useful.

    Also, this implies treating life as a zero-sum game is at least a correct strategy if not outright claiming it to be the preferred strategy. Part of trying to solve our problems involves overcoming this impulse and avoiding pointless tit-for-tat cycles which often land people in the situation your argument’s definition states as problematic. Namely, in game theory terms, two people cheating in a prisoner’s dilemma in order to gain and thus ensuring mutual loss.

    I bring all that up because this just happened in the last election where pro-Palestinian activists and Democrat supporters of Kamala Harris could not get on the same page despite sharing the same goals.

    1. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

    We are consciousness running on meat sacks in a physics based universe. It only takes one person acting on self-destructive ideas and false information to be a danger to themselves and others. edit: typos







  • Political neuroscience is an interesting field. I remember hearing about similar studies years ago on podcasts. A quick google revealed the field has had numerous studies done in the last year alone.

    I don’t feel that this section inherently contradicts what I am trying to say and perhaps is intended to be supporting evidence. The fact that the differences between conservatives and liberals can be measured means that the disagreements stem from a real place. However, the article mentions that this does not mean agreement is impossible. It means that the two groups need to be approached differently with the same information.

    Andrea Kuszewski, a researcher who has written about political neuroscience, would rather put a positive spin on what it could mean for politics. She says this kind of knowledge could help open up communication, or at least ease hostility between the country’s two major political parties.

    “Each side is going to have to recognize that not everyone thinks like them, processes information like them, or values the same types of things,” she wrote last week. “With the state our country is in right now, I don’t think we have any choice but to cowboy up and do whatever needs to be done in order to reach some common ground.”

    Do you mind elaborating on the intention of sharing the quoted section of the linked article? I don’t want to assume and I want to engage with what you mean.











  • Gender dysphoria is a real condition people experience. It was not “made up”. It is not culturally specific in the way that the article claims.

    What is gender dysphoria?

    Also there is a scientific basis for transgender people. Here is one such study.

    Gene variants provide insight into brain, body incongruence in transgender

    Here is an article on the scientific basis for transgender people.

    How Does Science Explain Transgenderism?

    What is different between our culture in the West and other societies is that, in the US at least, we stigmatize people who identify with a gender that is different than the one they were assigned at birth. This is stigmatization is what is made up. The gender dysphoria this causes is very real. The reason people in cultures that lack this stigmatization do not experience gender dysphoria is that they are free to explore their gender the way they see fit.

    The article, Trans is something we made up, is a constant stream of gas lighting, claiming gender dysphoria is driven by a cultural diagnosis, and a causal disregard for science, ignoring the evidence that explains the scientific basis for transgender people. Trans people in the West aren’t experiencing gender dysphoria because someone told them that’s how they should feel. That’s what any human person feels when they are denied their gender, whether that person is cis or trans. It’s just that, in the West, it is common practice to deny trans people their gender.

    Here is an example of a case where a cis person was forced to be the opposite sex. They ended up experiencing gender dysphoria, and a bunch of other crazy situations as well. Gender dysphoria is real and not somehow subconsciously culturally conformed to by trans people. The reason it is not universal is that the stigmatization of trans people is not universal. On a related note though, from what I’ve read on the internet, stigmatization of lgbtq+ people, including trans people, is quite wide spread. It seems pretty universal to me, I’ve read about instances of discrimination in the US, the UK, Africa, the Middle East, India, and China but I suppose there are probably lucky exceptions everywhere.

    John Money Gender Experiment: Reimer Twins

    Medical treatments for trans people have been shown to be safe and effective. They are not forced on anyone. The people who seek these treatments are doing so as a way to affirm their gender. That is no different than what any culture that accepts gender non-conforming, which includes trans people, allows those people to do. The only thing that is different is we now have medicine and technology to help trans people.

    Anyone who wants to make a culture of acceptance for gender non-conforming people should allow those people to make their own health care decisions.


  • I have had plenty of conversations with people irl. Most of the them with people who are to the right of me on the political spectrum. What I found in the conversations that were fruitful, was that our disagreement on larger issues, such as economics or personal freedoms, tended to stem from disagreements on smaller issues. To paraphrase my friend, “We are using the same words, but they all mean different things.” It seems to me that there are some elementary differences between progressives and conservatives that change how we rationalize the larger issues. That’s how the two groups can, based on the same information, come to two different conclusions.

    That being said though, I think Fox News and other conservative news channels have created information silos. Not everyone who is conservative has necessarily had access to the same body of facts and evidence that progressives have. I think a good portion of people who are stuck in those silos would change their views if they had a more balanced news diet.


  • I used to think that as well. Now I think that modern conservatism is founded on a rejection of modernity. Conservatives do not want to be a break to make sure progress is slow but steady. They want to turn the car around and drive the other way. People who are willing to try new things aren’t above pointing out something was a mistake. Progressives can try a new idea and then reject it based on new evidence. Progressives do no need a mechanism that is constantly trying to wrench the steering wheel out of their hands and turn the car around in an endless exercise of driving in circles.

    What a mix of progressive and conservative people actually leads to is an absolute deadlock in government. Conservatives are not simply hesitant to try new things. They would rather die than see the world change. And they would rather blame their problems on immigrants, people of color, lgbtq+ people, anyone other than their political views that are derailing our economy and the planet’s environment.

    We can have disagreements on policy and implementations. Two sides to an argument can allow a person to walk down the middle. But that’s not what we have currently with progressives and conservatives. There is plenty of room for discussion on how to go about solving a problem like climate change. But that isn’t the kind of discussion we are having with conservatives. Conservatives are fundamentally opposed to the idea that there are existential problems that need to be solved. And the only problems that they do see are other people.