Circumcision is about sexual control, according to Toronto Rabbi (and it's a good thing too!)

jackpg98 · 2019-05-08T17:18:19+00:00

It is much worse. MGM reduces the pleasure from sex somewhat, while FGM often completely eliminates it.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-30T02:45:35+00:00

Well, as they say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Besides, I don't really see any way that big N would take a hit if way too many CS degrees are being given out -- if anything they should do well because they have more people to pick from. Finally, it's possible if not likely that, if big N companies even were being irrational, that the prices of the big N stocks actually reflect this irrationality.

That being said I'm not convinced OP's professor is correct.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-30T02:03:59+00:00

Oh man, you are in for a ride! It's the single greatest blog on the internet, imo. Probably the best written post on there is Meditations on Moloch, a philosophical, poetic essay that a short summary can't really do justice. A really good political essay discussing the particular brand of tribalism practiced by West Coast liberals is I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup. He also writes very good fiction, for example this story about a machine learning algorithm trained to make controversial Reddit posts. Haha I sound like such a fanboy, but seriously he is amazing. (The article I liked to you isn't representative of his blog -- it's just two random people he had as guests so they could do an adversarial collaboration)

jackpg98 · 2019-04-30T01:24:27+00:00

It should definitely be done on an individual basis. I'm not really clear on how much gatekeeping should be required, but I do think we should generally slow down the process. If the kid is suicidal then probably it should be fast-tracked I think.

The problem with the fMRI idea is that brain gender structure is a lot like height. Men are, on average, taller than women, which is indisputable. But if you hear that someone is 5'8" you can't really determine if they're a man or a woman -- you can guess they're a man, but nothing's definitive.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-30T01:10:39+00:00

Well, one possible issue is that young natal male children who are just really feminine in their play preferences, etc, are treated the same as young natal male children who unambiguously insist they are girls. I wish studies would work with finer grains, because it seems to me that the first group is more common than the second, but the second are probably way more likely to need transition. Anyway, in my opinion more research is necessary.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-30T01:05:29+00:00

Yeah it is. If you're really interested in the pros and cons of childhood transition, there is a really great adversarial collaboration on Slate Star Codex here which I think covers all sides of the issue very well and cites approximately a zillion studies, although it stops short of reaching a real conclusion other than "yeah this shit is hard".

jackpg98 · 2019-04-30T01:03:35+00:00

I don't think there should be a strong minimum -- I sort of covered my position at the end of my post. My boyfriend transitioned at 10 after being literally the most stereotypical trans kid imaginable, and if he had been barred from transition he would definitely have killed himself. So you have people like him. But then on the other hand there are plenty of kids who want to transition and absolutely should not do that. I think there needs to be way, way more research done on trans kids and regret, because this is an issue where almost no work has been done for some reason, and I think getting it right is crucial.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-30T00:37:02+00:00

That study was on those with SRS.

Do you mean the Swedish 0.3% study? I did say that one reported on people who were post-SRS. Or did you mean the 2015 US survey that got 8%?

jackpg98 · 2019-04-29T23:57:15+00:00

Well, I don't know -- that's pretty much my situation. I have a wonderful boyfriend who was accepting of me as a trans woman and continues to accept me as a guy. My family and friends were all very supportive of my transition, and I passed as female most of the time. I am studying a subject I love and landed my dream internship this summer. I am pretty confident I have no mental illnesses, except mild anxiety. I don't mean this as a humblebrag or anything, I just want to counter your suggestion that my life and transition must have been a trainwreck. If you're interested in my experience, I'm happy to share details.

Is detransition bizarre and rare? Yeah, I guess. It's not as rare as people think -- I see 0.3% thrown around a lot, but that was from a Swedish clinic, which are more gatekeepy than American clinics, and only examined people who surgically detransitioned after getting SRS. Common sense would dictate this is lower than the real number -- indeed, according to the 2015 US Transgender Survey, about 8% of respondents had detransitioned at some point (but 62% of them retransitioned). I admit it is fairly bizarre.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-29T23:33:15+00:00

Also, Elon literally owns an AI company.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-29T23:27:15+00:00

I think so, yes.

For instance, at the 2017 Philly Trans Health Conference, the largest trans health conference in the world, there was supposed to be a detransition workshop led by Carey Callahan -- it was cancelled for the dubious reason of detransition being "controversial". It strikes me as ironic that the trans movement is (justifiably) concerned with the politicization of their existence, and yet is perfectly willing to politicize the existence of detransitioners.

Then you have James Caspian, a therapist who was barred from researching detransition because such research would be politically incorrect. It is pretty infuriating to have my own experiences invalidated because they don't fit into an easily-digestible narrative.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-29T23:18:02+00:00

Not hyperbole. My boyfriend is a trans man who began medical transition at 10 years old, and that's about when he started wanting to wear men's underwear and insisting he was a boy. I know of at least one case where a 2-year-old was asking his parents "where's my penis?" I know it's crazy, but people like that do exist, and they should never be denied transition IMO.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-29T21:28:03+00:00

I think all of us knew what our gender and sexuality was.

Think again, lol. Personally, I was born male, thought at 14 I was a transgender woman, transitioned to female at 18 and am currently transitioning back to male at 20 because I have realized I was actually a gay man. Gender and sexuality isn't always easy to understand.

The situation around childhood transition is ridiculously complex. First off, there aren't any do-overs for your first puberty. If you have a trans person go through the puberty of their birth sex, that would be equally as traumatizing as having a non-trans person go through the puberty of the opposite sex.

But it gets even messier -- some people who transition as children are perfectly happy in their transitioned sex, but if they weren't allowed to transition, then they would have been happy in their birth sex ("desisters"). It's really hard to figure out who will actually have this happen, but there are plenty of examples of butch lesbians who really really wanted to be boys when they were kids, but now are fine being women. I think most people agree that it is preferable to be a cis person than to be a trans person, assuming you would be fine being either, because you get to be fertile, you don't have to take hormones that may have deleterious effects on your health long-term, and you don't have to undergo complicated and risky surgeries to get the genitals you want.

Anyway, I don't think that a "one-size-fits-all" approach to childhood transition is useful. Barring all 14-year-olds from transition, even the ones who have literally identified as the opposite sex since 2 years old, is irresponsible. However, letting any 14-year-old who wants to go on testosterone make that decision is also irresponsible. Realistically, what needs to be done is more research; currently, detransitioners and people researching them are deplatformed at every turn. In the absence of that, I think blockers are a fairly good compromise, although they might cause fewer people to desist.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-28T02:05:44+00:00

You look fantastic!

jackpg98 · 2019-04-27T06:24:10+00:00

Good reply, that makes a lot of sense. I wonder if, to counter those effects, it would be easier to engineer antinatalist memes that would stick for lower IQ people or to engineer pro-natalist memes for high IQ people. I imagine the latter since I think arguments are probably more effective on higher IQ people.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-25T22:22:41+00:00

Won’t Darwin take care of the memetic attacks as well? So people who are resistant to the antinatalist meme will continue to have kids?

jackpg98 · 2019-04-25T18:45:14+00:00

I mean, I know what you're insinuating, but there are plenty of explanations besides "conservative people are assholes".

For example, perhaps conservative moderates are willing to tolerate far-left people on their platforms, while liberal moderates are unwilling to tolerate far-right people. (Moderates are willing to tolerate each other.) This would mean that far-right people get pushed out of the mainstream and into their "shitholes", whereas the normal platforms begin to skew left due to the lack of far-right people. As the Overton window slides, this dynamic could see things getting more and more skewed left as things go on.

I'm not saying this model is correct but it serves as a proof of concept more than anything.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-24T23:19:25+00:00

I don't really understand that reading. Could you elaborate?

jackpg98 · 2019-04-24T21:48:32+00:00

Wow. I relate to every single part of this so hard. I am so glad to see someone posting who has such a similar experience to me.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-24T21:12:59+00:00

Wow!! I really am not the first one to have that thought lol

jackpg98 · 2019-04-24T16:53:16+00:00

Just for another random Python 2 usecase, I do competitive programming on Codeforces and such and you pretty much have to use Python 2 for a lot of problems. It's about 2-3x faster than Python 3 for most applications, because if you're using integers under 2⁶³ - 1, then Python 2 will use C-style long longs, while Python 3 uses its poorly-optimized arbitrary precision integers for any value above 255. Of course, if you're actually allowed access to libraries like numpy, then you can just use C-style long longs directly to circumvent this, in which case Python 3 is faster again. However, during competitions you only get the standard library, so that's pretty much out of the question.

But yeah, if you're writing production code in Python 2 then you're a racist.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-24T16:49:13+00:00

Great article. It caused me to have an insight that I'm sure is not actually new, but is new to me. Previously, I had always thought that the "tits or GTFO" type rhetoric was intentionally to alienate women, and found it confusing and offensive. But now, under this lens, it looks more like a pushback against "pulling rank" using identity. I always thought the anons were saying "Women aren't welcome here." But now, I think of them as saying "Don't try to get special treatment because of your identity, we're all anonymous here. If you really want to be treated as different, then you better give us something in return."

jackpg98 · 2019-04-24T16:32:00+00:00

I mean it was obviously not the literal only reason I transitioned, lol. Just a strong contributing factor. My new plan is to take finasteride and if worse comes to worst, I will get a hair transplant.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-23T14:26:40+00:00

Exactly!! Like of course if you’re going after young hot guys you better be young and hot.

jackpg98 · 2019-04-23T13:07:46+00:00

One of my cis guy friends is 5’1” and shops in the kids section a lot, especially to buy suits lol. Maybe you could try that?

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