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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The idea of having a BCI, a device which can read, write and override thoughts is extremely concerning.

    That’s…not what a BCI is, though? It’s just any direct interface between brain and computer. Doing anything with thoughts is not an inherent aspect of the concept—if you look at fiction you’ll see plenty of BCIs that are limited to receiving motor signals directed at them and sending sensory signals. And AFAIK a lot of current research into BCIs is focused on just reading motor signals (for prosthetics and such).


  • To compare it to gender dysphoria though, you’d have to be severely obese, or severely underweight, and believe you are the other one that you physically aren’t. If I weighed 400 lbs but believed I was actually a starving person that’s underweight, for example.

    This… isn’t analogous. Being aware of and unhappy about the mismatch is specifically what makes it a dysphoria.

    The questions were less about me getting your answer but more about pointing out how general the definition you gave was, and probing if your actual intended meaning was that vague. From looking at other comments, though, it looks like you did give someone else a more specific definition of what you meant:

    I’m talking about the kind of uncomfortable that makes people consider surgery as the only alternative to suicide. I would consider that an illness.

    Firstly, I’d like to point out that just HRT is both not surgery and sufficient for many trans individuals.

    But, let’s say someone is extremely overweight, and they’ve been prevented from using regular methods (i.e. dieting and exercise), so their only option is surgery. If prevented from undergoing the surgery, don’t you think that depression and potentially even suicide are possible outcomes. Would this scenario, hypothetical though it may be, not also meet those requirements?

    Now, let me tell you about Lipedema, a condition where large amounts of fat builds up on the legs. Regular diet and exercise methods can help with some symptoms, but cannot stop or reverse the condition. Liposuction (a fat-removal surgery), however, works—although it’s not a permanent fix yet and still can damage the body in the process. It fairly commonly can result in depression.

    In a more general sense, “feeling uncomfortable in one’s own skin” is such a vague descriptor that it plausibly covers basically any nonlethal condition that can negatively affect an individual’s quality of life.


  • Homosexuality is pretty cool biology wise. The markers that predetermine it are predictable in the womb and seem to be an actual evolutionary trait. Which I was really surprised to learn. If something proves transgender stuff is similar, that’d be very interesting.

    The physiological differences between men and women are dictated by the ratios of specific types of hormones during development: estrogens for female traits, androgens for male traits. The handful of genes responsible for these mutate reasonably commonly with fairly neutral effect, but more significant mutations can cause inequal development of male and female physiology. Mutations to the srY gene, a keystone of gender expression, can also cause these sorts of effects.

    Some examples of such effects include:

    • Individuals with XX chromosomes, but male physical features, caused by the srY gene migrating to an X chromosome
    • Swyer Syndrome, where an individual has XY chromosomes, but the srY gene migrated to the X chromosome. This causes them to develop female physical features, but nonfunctional gonads—this means they will not naturally experience puberty, among other issues. (The normal treatment is hormone replacement therapy, because the problem is that their gonads aren’t able to produce the right hormones on their own.)
    • Androgen insensitivity syndrome, wherein male physiology, especially sex organs, only develops partially or not at all.

    Additionally, hormones are spread around by regular, chaotic fluid dynamics, and fetuses don’t grow in a vacuum, but rather inside a sac inside another person who is producing their own hormones. Therefore, it’s rather unlikely all parts of the body will actually receive equal ratios of androgens and estrogens - which can lead to, for instance, the brain developing in a structure and exhibity measurably more like the ‘typical’ female brain structure despite the individual’s physiology being overall male. There have been actual brain scans done of transgender individuals that identify this, AFAIK.


    I don’t understand how not feeling comfortable in your own skin isn’t an illness.

    I’d like to probe this with examples of other things that can be reasonably accurately described as some version of “not feeling comfortable in your own skin” (I’d like to be clear that these are examples for you to assess this idea with—I think there are reasonable arguments for and against these being illnesses. What I’d like to know is if these examples that would reasonably be considered an illness under that definition actually align with what you think an illness is?):

    • Is disliking being overweight an illness? What about being underweight?

    • If you’re born missing a limb, is it an illness if you want a prosthetic?

    • If you don’t like your voice, is wanting to do voice training illness? What about greying hair? Or hair loss?

    From another angle, given the problem is a mismatch between mind and body, is changing the mind (i.e. the person) better than changing the body? Even in terms of simple capabilities, changing the body is much easier and more doable for modern medicine than changing the mind. We’ve been developing antidepressants, for example, for 50 years, and they still can cause depression as a side effect.



    • I mean, it’s also entirely possible to just have a romantic & sexual relationship… without having kids.
    • Isn’t “male” and “female” referring to different sides of one (possibly the only, I’m not super well-researched) axis of gender in that scenario? Like, you can both consider gender a spectrum… and want to be on the other side of/in another place on that spectrum. And I don’t think we have common words for anything more specific than splitting it into thirds (ish?) i.e. female, nonbinary, male (or something).
    • I think this is a case of popular opinion trailing behind reality. As far as I know, at one point cryptocurrency mining had meaningful negative effects on the environment (or would have had them in the future if it didn’t change), but that has since changed.
    • You’re missing another common usage of the term, wherein the individual being gatekept is reading/playing/watching whatever they’re supposed to be fans of but happen to have some side trait that the gatekeeper disagrees with (including such things as “has a different favorite work in the series”)
    • Yes, 100% agreed. If such a test wouldn’t be a really powerful lever for any malicious individual or group to wield against people it would be ideal.
    • I don’t really have any thoughts on this one.
    • That’s not a controversial take, that’s a mundane opinion about your experience of beauty.

  • I fundamentally question the claim that wealth inequality is bad in and of itself. It doesn’t really harm me that there exist individuals with significantly higher standards of living, or that there exist individuals more capable of effecting large-scale change than me.

    Also, it’s not exactly as though any system can somehow remove bad actors and/or human error/foolishness from the equation. But the scenario I described specifically defined them as being beholden to normal rule of law, therefore limiting the effect of maliciousness on their part to what I would consider a reasonable degree

    I’m not sure “they might be foolish” is really that much of a downside either—them allocating resources to long-shot ideas is kinda part of the benefit, and if they throw money at some boondoggle like Elon’s hyperloop… oh well, it’s not like that money up and vanished. It’s not exactly as though paying a bunch of people to consider a foolish idea and build prototypes really meaningfully harmed them or society as a whole.