I LOVE DANGER ZONE

Today, in our ongoing series:

Closed Source Software, Not Even Once

I wanted to illustrate a point using Microsoft's Copilot thing, so I asked it:

Which it responded to with:

Then I asked it:

To which it responded:

Uh... What now?

Okay so that's a dry well, let's experiment:

I'll spare you the images, but Copilot responded to all of the following prompts:

But,

So, any two of Sonic the Hedgehog, poppies, and "in the style of cluade monet" will generate a picture, but trying to do all three at once somehow trips the internal censor.

I would really like to know what on earth could possibly be causing that behavior.

If any technical people have any ideas how to figure that out, I'd be really interested in hearing about them, or just other people who have been cursed with windows trying the same experiment and seeing if you also trip the censor.

@menheraboypussy "Also, it also could depend how far apart the terms are conceptually. Sonic and Poppies can be bunched into one (sonic runs through fields) and Poppies and monet can be similar (Monet was impressionist) but sonic and Monet are far apart conceptually (monet didn't draw sonic. There maybe no or very little mention of monet in sonic media). So while the three concepts thing might be the problem, maybe their closeness also affects it. Maybe try "sonic,poppies and eggman""

Hmm, this does suggest further experimentation, what if I ask for a prompt from a different artist? Can Copilot generate an "image of sonic the hedgehog and poppies in the style of Pablo Picasso"?

Yes!

Well, no, in the sense that that's not the least bit like Picasso but yes in the sense of "does the prompt return an image".

What if we add a fourth term?

Okay, now we're getting somewhere! Any fourth element seems to get us back to returning an image. So let's try,

Okay, just adding in "and" seems to get past it, although, wait a minute, I also forgot something else, reader, did you see it? That time I just wrote "Sonic" instead of "Sonic the Hedgehog" maybe that is the problem.

Let's check the original prompt again:

Okay, this time let's copy and paste that prompt and then modify it- Damn it, I got distracted and hit enter before I changed the prompt:

Wait, what the hell?

Okay, time to repeat the same prompt multiple times.

In this session I have now used the above prompt, unaltered, ten times and gotten the following results:

My current best guess at what is going on:

Generally speaking, when you ask Copilot for an image it returns four results for the prompt. However, when I asked it "Can you generate an image of sonic the hedgehog and poppies in the style of pablo picasso" it only returned a single image.

Trying that prompt again several times has yielded similar behavior; after using that prompt several times it returns a variable number of images between one and three.

What I believe is happening is that when you ask copilot for an image, it has DALL-E produce four images. These images are then passed along to some kind of censoring program that scans them for objectionable or explicit imagery.

The censoring program then deletes any images that it thinks of as objectionable, then passes the remaining images on to the user.

If all four of the images are seen as having objectionable material, it returns the error message.

The above is all speculation on my part.

What is definitely the case though is that the error message being returned is not giving correct information to the user.

70%(ish) of the time the prompt I was using returns images, but the error message suggests, first that the prompt itself was the problem, and second that the only way to rectify the error is to use another prompt.

The error message does not give the user the correct information that the same prompt may return images if used again, perhaps because there is no way to know how often useable images will be returned. A 70% hit rate is worth trying the prompt again; a 0.0000001% hit rate isn't.

Actually, if you ask it for something that is definitely against the Terms of Service you get this:

The previous error message is an image file displayed in the place where the image outputs are usually displayed, while this is a chat response from Copilot itself, so something different is happening in the two cases.

My guess is that Copilot first scans the prompt itself and simply doesn't pass it along if it feels like the prompt is against TOS; if it thinks the prompt is okay, it passes it to DALL-E but still scans the incoming images to make sure that the results of an accepted prompt still don't generate unexpected behavior.

"art" here is defined in the broadest of terms. they are vocal and grating about their opposite opinion. imagine the worst possible options. if you are against "marriage," then this is defined as living with a partner.

heads up! you are getting into exhausting arguments all the time, although about "art", not politics. they hate what you like and loudly trumpet their interests.

Opposite politics to me would be something I imagine as genuinely monstrous, like, "Jim Crow was good and should be restored." which is a line I don't think I would cross, and I can't imagine any taste bad enough to be more of a turnoff than aggressive racism.

In terms of like... Politics that I find really annoying but not actively evil ("Actually Biden and Trump are the same so I'm not voting") that's trickier.

It depends how aggressively obnoxious their taste is, I think. Also how much they decide to openly deride my taste. I think I'd just barely rather have someone who knocks my politics whenever they come up than someone who knocks my taste whenever it comes up.

@poipoipoi-2016 posted this, and I have thoughts that are entirely unrelated to the context it was originally reposted in.

First, I don't like the way it assumes that capability is a sort of set metric, that some workers are just good enough to do O-Ring work and some aren't, because process design and environmental factors will also play a role.

In an uncontroversial environmental design example, I think it's quite likely that even good workers make more mistakes at the end of a 100 hour work week then they do at the end of a 40 hour work week.

So who decided on those 100 hour work weeks?

Second, process design; there's an apocryphal story I heard about nurses plugging IV tubes into the wrong ports, no matter how thoroughly they were trained, until somebody gets the smart idea to redesign the shape of the ports so that you can't plug them in wrong anymore.

I also have a real life example from my brother, who works in safety. His employer was a crucial industry that had to stay open during the pandemic, and so HR came up with a very complicated worker's comp scheme for people who had COVID symptoms and needed to stay home. Part of the policy is that people who stayed home got paid 60% of their salary.

My brother told them, "Hey, a lot of the people covered by this policy are working paycheck to paycheck, and if you tell them that they have to take a 40% pay cut every time they sneeze, they are going to come in to work anyway and pretend to be healthy"

From what he's told me, HR's response was essentially that tweet where the 911 operator says, "He can't kill you, that's illegal!"

So I know a lot of you know math, and I've been thinking a lot about the psychology of certain choices, in particular choices where you have two paths:

I'm curious how people think about situations like that mathematically.

I feel like there's a point at which the moderate cost of path A gets high enough that, when presented with the choice, most people will choose path B, even though the expected cost of constantly choosing path B works out to be much higher.

Another thing that's wild to me about this piece is that it's treating "skill" as entirely a property of the worker rather than the environment. The example used is the Pakistani factory video where workers wear flip-flops and put their hands in machinery, and it's very strange to me to blame the workers themselves for this. The assumption seems to be that every worker in this factory is an idiot who doesn't value their toes.

Surely people get hurt because of the flip-flops, and surely the workers would rather not get hurt. So the factory must not be giving the workers protective shoes, or maybe they're giving them shoes but docking their pay for the time it takes to put them on and take them off, or something like that. Similarly, the workers are probably putting their hands in the machinery because it's how they've been trained to do the job. I would guess that they're not allowed to turn the machinery off for safety or quality control because that would mean producing items less quickly.

All of those explanations are much more plausible than the bad safety and quality being the workers' fault, and none of them are unsolvable, nor are they inherent to the workers. They are caused by the workers' environment, and they could be solved by better safety standards and stricter labor laws--but the factory's business model probably relies on being cheap, so those things don't happen, and the workers suffer for it.

I've heard some stories about workers who really, really lacked some pretty basic elements of common sense.

But what I think when I see a shop where people are carrying around heavy pieces of metal in flip flops is,

"Why isn't the shop foreman running up and yelling at them to get the hell off the floor until they get the proper boots?"

I can basically guarantee that's what happens in the better run Japanese shop.

Some people are ineducable, possibly, but why has middle management decided not to enforce safety policy? Why did upper management hire middle managers who can't do o-ring work either?

If the owner isn't going to eat the cost of safety himself, he is not going to care about safety. If a company is stupid and don't realize that it will eat the cost of a fuckup, it's not going to care about the risk of a fuckup.

Those Pakistanis aren't going to get workers comp or settlements if they are injured on the job, so why would the shop owner gaf about the risk of injuries? The Japanese workers have workers comp, will get payouts if maimed or killed, and have the local equivalent to OSHA waiting to force safety compliance on the company.

I think I've mentioned the first security company I worked for was really bad. Someone died on the job at one of their sites for a major contract while I was there. The company did not give a single shit that a man was dead. They did care that it was very expensive to have a workplace death though, so we got some safety equipment and rules to use it that weren't enforced though, to better defend against the settlement if someone died again.

In a case that's probably better known, a worker died on Black Friday at Walmart when a stampede occurred. This was both expensive and very bad PR for Walmart, so the next year for Black Friday, Walmart paid a lot of money for crowd control experts and crowed control barriers and set up new policies to avoid that type of PR and liability disaster repeating.

Since sociological/psychological research is mostly fraudulent and, to the extent that it's not, is falsified post-facto by selective publication and reporting, commiting to making social policy on the basis of "science" just means submitting to the arbitrary preferences of the class of professionals who conduct and report on this research. If you think they'll always be on your side, then great. But when the day comes that this class of people happens not to take your side on something, you'll be sorry that you grounded your politics in a false scientism rather than on a set of interests and principles not subject to this kind of arbitrary manipulation.

I was thinking about this because...

So I listen to the politics podcast put out by The New Statesman, which is a left-leaning newspaper in the UK. They are very mainstream left. And today they were talking about a new report on the medical evidence for various trans-related interventions, and they were wringing their hands about how terrible it is that children were being subjected to these treatments that didn't have the proper evidence behind them. At first they were mostly talking about puberty blockers, but by the end they were with a straight face declaring that it was inappropriate for a teacher to use a student's preferred pronouns, because that is "social transition" which is a "medical question" and the evidence isn't in to support it.

Anyway I don't think I need to spell out any further what I think of that, or what the regional variations in scientific consensus demonstrate about what is going on here. Basically "science" is being allowed to massively overextend itself into issuing diktat about questions of values, norms, principles, language usage, gender relations, and a million other things that are properly to be contested honestly in the realm of public opinion. "Listen[ing] to the science" on these questions is no better than mindlessly deferring to Church doctrine. It robs you of your sovereign right as an individual to organize your own social world and to participate in the collective organization of the social world of the political community.

I am sympathetic to this take but I think it's bad in this case for several reasons.

And more broadly, while I am passionate about doing science better and removing human and institutional bias, the reason I am passionate about that is because good science is essential to society, and it's dangerously counterproductive to start coming out with "science is a doctrine of faith" arguments that echo fundamentalist religious dogma trotted out by evangelicals arguing that dinosaurs are a hoax or whatever.

The last thing that would help the cause of advancing healthcare desegregation for trans people is less attention to the facts of the situation and an embracing of feelings-based woo. We are right about who we are, but the reason we are right is because we are actually factually correct about this, not because of adherence to an unproveable ideology or some consensus reality of public discussion. The idea that the latter is where the truth of trans identities lie denies the reality that we are in fact our genders.

Right so I understand that since ultimately the left is headed towards a pro-trans position across the board, and the US is more economically powerful than the UK, and various other contingent facts, the pro-trans side will probably be able to prevail in this particular scuffle over knowledge production. What I'm saying is that leaning on the backing of the professional class that produces these consensuses is a Faustian pact because they have their own independent interests that won't always align with yours. And that this kind of pseudo-empirical paper-slinging is not the appropriate way for social questions to be settled in general anyway. Just make the values claim directly! The underlying normative issue here isn't truth-apt anyway!

you most certainly cannot do that. if your values aren't supported by math, you have no basis for claiming that those values are worth anything in the first place. if you think the experts are wrong, the correct response is to examine their reasoning, look for holes in it, and present a more robust alternative. plenty of people have succeeded in doing this!

i don't think there's anyone out there who can meaningfully claim their values are supported by math, except in the trivial sense that you can do some math to a whole bunch of assumptions you smuggled in from elsewhere and get a number you like. which everyone can.

making the claim is easy. once you've done that, others can assess your reasoning to see how well it holds up. but if you want to make a meaningful claim that good will come from doing a thing, you do need to take that step of establishing what that good thing is and how you can expect it to result from it, so your claim has a basis that can be examined rather than just "because I said so"

I mean, sure, but that's not math. that's the entire complex process of debating your policy opinions with other people, a process that might well involve maths but is just a lot less straightforward and objective.

What othin (and not-terezi-pyrope) were both getting at is that given a claim such as "access to hormones improves trans people's lives", there is actual statistics you can do to prove it.

What we're opposing is calling it "not science". It IS science. It's math! It's literally statistics! You are using math (statistics) to verify your claim. Whether or not that claim is worth basing policy off of, sure, that part is politics, but the actual truthfulness of the claim is something you can verify.

the real problem going on deep down is that OP doesnt think science gives true answers, they just see science as a tool of power to impose truths. if the day of tomorrow a bunch of good proper, replicable, unimpeachable studies demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt as a well proven fact that transitioning was actually *harmful* for people they would still support transition. is not about truth, is about having political power, an inherently fascistic way of thinking, in my opinion

This response really bothers me because, okay, imagine saying "Suppose studies proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that playing little league was actually harmful for people..."

What would that mean? Substitute "drinking alcohol"; substitute "driving a car"; substitute "taking chemotherapy"; keep susbstituting.

Many things we do (Arguably everything) are demonstrably "harmful" in some way, or at the very least carry a risk of harm.

What conclusions should we draw from this? Is there a way to use science to demonstrate what conclusions we should draw from this?

i think this idea that we have no way of truly knowing what is "harmful" because everything can be harmful from a certain perspective is an arbitrary request for rigor. we know drunk driving causes more car accidents that produce bodily injury, there is no need to wring our hands and wonder wether this really counts as harm.

and we know transitioning generally reduces levels of depression and suicidality, which i think everyone can reasonably say are bad things we want reduced.

is true tha ultimatly "what is good and what is bad" is not an answer that can be solved by math and science, you cant extract an ought from an is. but the point i and most other people on this thread are trying to make is that once you have an ought, once you have a moral compass, using science to determine the best way to reach that north is necessary. to discard "science" (at least social sciences) all together as a tool to help you reach that north is foolish

The trans debate doesn't have an underlying "ought", particularly on the anti- side. There's pretty much no ability to think through what it might mean if, for example, trans healthcare had intrinsic drawbacks and benefits to recipients; the debate is entirely about things like whether or not trans healthcare is "harmful" with the implications of what it would mean for trans healthcare to be "harmful" left implicit and understood to be inarguable and obvious.

If we could demonstrate that trans healthcare is "harmful" we would obviously have no choice but to ban it, just like we have no choice but to ban chemotherapy and alcohol consumption. (I chose to include things that are demonstrably harmful for a reason, not to pretend that we can't know what is or is not harmful)

ok, obviously we can talk about tradeoffs here, chemotherapy causes all sorts of complications and sideffects and deleterious effects, but also it increases your chances of beating cancer so obviously on the net is more helpful than harmful. likewise with transitioning, it increases risks of social ostracism, bone density, heart conditions, testicular and breast cancer, blood clots, etc, but also it massively decreases depression, suicidality, plus a bunch of other things. so we can also say that on the net is more helpful than harmful. again it seems silly to be like "well everything can be considered harmful so we sholdnt ban things based on the fact that they could be considered harmful" is a silly objection. yes, a bad faith actor can disengeniously claim that something is harmful, but that doesnt make the act of determining harm and trying to reduce it by quantifiably determining its causes and pointless excercise

That's not even kind of my objection, and I kind of thought that was clear.

Drinking alcohol can cause demonstrable harms which can be measured fairly accurately: Therefore, our policy for alcohol ought to be...

?

That sentence can be finished in multiple ways even when the harms caused by the consumption of alcohol are known to a very accurate degree.

In terms of the pro/con position, does the fact that people enjoy drinking weigh in on the pro side or is it a meaningless irrelevancy that should be ignored?

I come at this from my memory of the gay marriage debate in the US, which was widely held to hinge on the answer to an empirical question:

Are people born gay?

If they are, it was said, gay marriage makes a lot of sense. If not, well, obviously conversion therapy is ethical.

I thought this was self-evident nonsense at the time, and still do.

I also come at this from a perspective of, some hypotheticals are just so obviously not the case that it's kind of meaningless to consider them. "What if science discovered that methamphetamines have no addictive properties and no negative health side effects?"

Well, science isn't going to discover that, so perhaps we shouldn't worry about that.

Look, maybe I'm steel-manning OP, but they were talking about a liberal paper wringing their hands about how letting kids (Still hate lumping all minors together by the way) change their names or ask for preferred pronouns is dangerous when we don't have evidence of the effects.

This is a sign (Like the born this way debate) that something has gone completely off the rails. What evidence are we waiting for? *What* harms might or might not be demonstrated that would answer the question of whether we should let children change their names? What about letting kids use nicknames, have we done any science to determine the potential harms?

My point is not that these questions are unanswerable or not amenable to scientific study; my point is that scientific study of an essentially narrow point with narrow implications is used as a synecdoche for the whole issue.

And you can't dodge this by telling me that actually, whether gay people are born this way really is an empirical question.

And in terms of trans issues in general, people are not asking well-posed questions. We don't know what "evidence" we are seeking because that's not the point, rather, the chain is, "If I can point to a gap in evidence, it's okay to ban things related to trans people"

While you can go on this tangent I think its not too relevant to the actual political debates of the day. While fringe people exist ofc very few people are proposing banning transition interventions, people are debating transition interventions for children. The exact things you name like alcohol are actually banned for children, society routinely allows adults to do harmful things but applies way stricter measures for children or at least puts that decision in the hands of the parents and not the child.

Which you can disagree with, sure, i am making no object level claim on any of this. But if you actually analogize your position its like 'whose to say how we should handle harm? Maybe we should let the 14 year olds drink'. Which again you can believe but its kind of smuggling in a radical take and pretending its the normal take. Society thinks 'do kids enjoy drinking?' is in fact irrelevant.

It would be very weird to argue, at this date, "The jury is still out on childhood drinking, so we should ban it until more evidence comes in."

I'm... uh... not actually convinced that "very few people" are talking about banning transition.

Here's what I am saying:

Conflating a 17 year old using new pronouns with giving an eight year old puberty blockers is simply going to confuse the issue. (Or, for that matter, a 20 year old having one glass of wine at dinner is probably less harmful than a 21 year old getting blackout drunk).

Am I speaking Greek here? "Who's to say how we should handle harm" is not my point.

My point is in order to know how to "handle potential harms" you'd have to know what those harms are, and what you're evaluating them against.

If you are going around positing that puberty blockers and pronouns cause the same type of harm and should therefore be blocked for the same reasons (And I've literally never seen an anti-childhood-transition activist who wasn't overtly against pronouns and name changes), this is evidence that your definition of "harm" is extremely vague and calibrated to get a certain result.

Waiting for and trusting the evidence will not solve that problem, because absence of evidence is not the issue here.

Another factor is, do we think the jury is still out on pronouns? What's the absolute worst case scenario we could discover about the harms of preferred pronouns, and how does it compare to the worst case of, say, letting kids take shop classes? What evidence are we waiting for?

There isn't scientific debate, because a scientific debate would require well-posed questions.

Instead, it has become vitally important to pretend that a debate about values is a debate about an empirical question, very similar to the way that we all collectively decided to pretend that the gay rights debate was a scientific debate about the evidence for whether homosexuality was inborn.

I'm going to cop to being a little inconsistent on my thoughts here, but essentially my interpretation of OP would be, "Debates about evidence are often used as proxies for debates about value, and if you accept the underlying value you might get into big trouble if the scientific debate doesn't go your way."

Again, this is what I thought the risk of arguing over "born this way" was. The right says, "If we can prove that gay people aren't born that way, it would show that conversion therapy and legal discrimination against homosexual people is totally valid."

Then the left response, "Well, science is going to show that gay people ARE born that way, so that means you'll eventually have to admit that gay marriage should be legal"

This is nonsense, the whole chain of logic is total gibberish, even though "Are gay people born that way" can be reformulated into a well-posed question which is in principle answerable through science.

And one objection at the time was, "What if you take this bargain, and then find out that gay people AREN'T born that way?"

It turns out that people were essentially only pretending to argue about that, do that risk sort of depended on a false assumption that we were, in fact, interested in science.

For the issue of transition of children, we're seeing the same dynamic; opponents of childhood transition almost universally condemn non-medical, personal interventions, such as wardrobe changes, name changes and pronoun changes; they are also almost universally willing to allow puberty blockers to be used in all other cases aside from transition.

And like... the jury is not out on this. There is *zero* chance that changing your pronouns causes dangerous brain swelling or osteoporosis. We already have far more than enough evidence to show that social transition cannot cause certain harms that other medical intervention might.

So we are already at the point, with name changes and pronouns, where we have to argue about things on the level of values; but we resolutely resist actually formulating our values, preferring instead to pretend to argue about evidence, to pretend that there is some missing piece of evidence that will conclusively, objectively determine for us whether or not pronoun and name changes should be allowed or forbidden.

PS - Born this way is sneaking back into this; the dominant right-wing position in the US is that a few people are really trans, but most people only think they are and should be discouraged in their confusion. But "Some people are confused about gender" does not, and cannot, lead to "Therefore they should be forced to be cis" unless you are smuggling value arguments in.

Since sociological/psychological research is mostly fraudulent and, to the extent that it's not, is falsified post-facto by selective publication and reporting, commiting to making social policy on the basis of "science" just means submitting to the arbitrary preferences of the class of professionals who conduct and report on this research. If you think they'll always be on your side, then great. But when the day comes that this class of people happens not to take your side on something, you'll be sorry that you grounded your politics in a false scientism rather than on a set of interests and principles not subject to this kind of arbitrary manipulation.

I was thinking about this because...

So I listen to the politics podcast put out by The New Statesman, which is a left-leaning newspaper in the UK. They are very mainstream left. And today they were talking about a new report on the medical evidence for various trans-related interventions, and they were wringing their hands about how terrible it is that children were being subjected to these treatments that didn't have the proper evidence behind them. At first they were mostly talking about puberty blockers, but by the end they were with a straight face declaring that it was inappropriate for a teacher to use a student's preferred pronouns, because that is "social transition" which is a "medical question" and the evidence isn't in to support it.

Anyway I don't think I need to spell out any further what I think of that, or what the regional variations in scientific consensus demonstrate about what is going on here. Basically "science" is being allowed to massively overextend itself into issuing diktat about questions of values, norms, principles, language usage, gender relations, and a million other things that are properly to be contested honestly in the realm of public opinion. "Listen[ing] to the science" on these questions is no better than mindlessly deferring to Church doctrine. It robs you of your sovereign right as an individual to organize your own social world and to participate in the collective organization of the social world of the political community.

I am sympathetic to this take but I think it's bad in this case for several reasons.

And more broadly, while I am passionate about doing science better and removing human and institutional bias, the reason I am passionate about that is because good science is essential to society, and it's dangerously counterproductive to start coming out with "science is a doctrine of faith" arguments that echo fundamentalist religious dogma trotted out by evangelicals arguing that dinosaurs are a hoax or whatever.

The last thing that would help the cause of advancing healthcare desegregation for trans people is less attention to the facts of the situation and an embracing of feelings-based woo. We are right about who we are, but the reason we are right is because we are actually factually correct about this, not because of adherence to an unproveable ideology or some consensus reality of public discussion. The idea that the latter is where the truth of trans identities lie denies the reality that we are in fact our genders.

Right so I understand that since ultimately the left is headed towards a pro-trans position across the board, and the US is more economically powerful than the UK, and various other contingent facts, the pro-trans side will probably be able to prevail in this particular scuffle over knowledge production. What I'm saying is that leaning on the backing of the professional class that produces these consensuses is a Faustian pact because they have their own independent interests that won't always align with yours. And that this kind of pseudo-empirical paper-slinging is not the appropriate way for social questions to be settled in general anyway. Just make the values claim directly! The underlying normative issue here isn't truth-apt anyway!

you most certainly cannot do that. if your values aren't supported by math, you have no basis for claiming that those values are worth anything in the first place. if you think the experts are wrong, the correct response is to examine their reasoning, look for holes in it, and present a more robust alternative. plenty of people have succeeded in doing this!

i don't think there's anyone out there who can meaningfully claim their values are supported by math, except in the trivial sense that you can do some math to a whole bunch of assumptions you smuggled in from elsewhere and get a number you like. which everyone can.

making the claim is easy. once you've done that, others can assess your reasoning to see how well it holds up. but if you want to make a meaningful claim that good will come from doing a thing, you do need to take that step of establishing what that good thing is and how you can expect it to result from it, so your claim has a basis that can be examined rather than just "because I said so"

I mean, sure, but that's not math. that's the entire complex process of debating your policy opinions with other people, a process that might well involve maths but is just a lot less straightforward and objective.

What othin (and not-terezi-pyrope) were both getting at is that given a claim such as "access to hormones improves trans people's lives", there is actual statistics you can do to prove it.

What we're opposing is calling it "not science". It IS science. It's math! It's literally statistics! You are using math (statistics) to verify your claim. Whether or not that claim is worth basing policy off of, sure, that part is politics, but the actual truthfulness of the claim is something you can verify.

the real problem going on deep down is that OP doesnt think science gives true answers, they just see science as a tool of power to impose truths. if the day of tomorrow a bunch of good proper, replicable, unimpeachable studies demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt as a well proven fact that transitioning was actually *harmful* for people they would still support transition. is not about truth, is about having political power, an inherently fascistic way of thinking, in my opinion

This response really bothers me because, okay, imagine saying "Suppose studies proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that playing little league was actually harmful for people..."

What would that mean? Substitute "drinking alcohol"; substitute "driving a car"; substitute "taking chemotherapy"; keep susbstituting.

Many things we do (Arguably everything) are demonstrably "harmful" in some way, or at the very least carry a risk of harm.

What conclusions should we draw from this? Is there a way to use science to demonstrate what conclusions we should draw from this?

i think this idea that we have no way of truly knowing what is "harmful" because everything can be harmful from a certain perspective is an arbitrary request for rigor. we know drunk driving causes more car accidents that produce bodily injury, there is no need to wring our hands and wonder wether this really counts as harm.

and we know transitioning generally reduces levels of depression and suicidality, which i think everyone can reasonably say are bad things we want reduced.

is true tha ultimatly "what is good and what is bad" is not an answer that can be solved by math and science, you cant extract an ought from an is. but the point i and most other people on this thread are trying to make is that once you have an ought, once you have a moral compass, using science to determine the best way to reach that north is necessary. to discard "science" (at least social sciences) all together as a tool to help you reach that north is foolish

The trans debate doesn't have an underlying "ought", particularly on the anti- side. There's pretty much no ability to think through what it might mean if, for example, trans healthcare had intrinsic drawbacks and benefits to recipients; the debate is entirely about things like whether or not trans healthcare is "harmful" with the implications of what it would mean for trans healthcare to be "harmful" left implicit and understood to be inarguable and obvious.

If we could demonstrate that trans healthcare is "harmful" we would obviously have no choice but to ban it, just like we have no choice but to ban chemotherapy and alcohol consumption. (I chose to include things that are demonstrably harmful for a reason, not to pretend that we can't know what is or is not harmful)

ok, obviously we can talk about tradeoffs here, chemotherapy causes all sorts of complications and sideffects and deleterious effects, but also it increases your chances of beating cancer so obviously on the net is more helpful than harmful. likewise with transitioning, it increases risks of social ostracism, bone density, heart conditions, testicular and breast cancer, blood clots, etc, but also it massively decreases depression, suicidality, plus a bunch of other things. so we can also say that on the net is more helpful than harmful. again it seems silly to be like "well everything can be considered harmful so we sholdnt ban things based on the fact that they could be considered harmful" is a silly objection. yes, a bad faith actor can disengeniously claim that something is harmful, but that doesnt make the act of determining harm and trying to reduce it by quantifiably determining its causes and pointless excercise

That's not even kind of my objection, and I kind of thought that was clear.

Drinking alcohol can cause demonstrable harms which can be measured fairly accurately: Therefore, our policy for alcohol ought to be...

?

That sentence can be finished in multiple ways even when the harms caused by the consumption of alcohol are known to a very accurate degree.

In terms of the pro/con position, does the fact that people enjoy drinking weigh in on the pro side or is it a meaningless irrelevancy that should be ignored?

I come at this from my memory of the gay marriage debate in the US, which was widely held to hinge on the answer to an empirical question:

Are people born gay?

If they are, it was said, gay marriage makes a lot of sense. If not, well, obviously conversion therapy is ethical.

I thought this was self-evident nonsense at the time, and still do.

I also come at this from a perspective of, some hypotheticals are just so obviously not the case that it's kind of meaningless to consider them. "What if science discovered that methamphetamines have no addictive properties and no negative health side effects?"

Well, science isn't going to discover that, so perhaps we shouldn't worry about that.

Look, maybe I'm steel-manning OP, but they were talking about a liberal paper wringing their hands about how letting kids (Still hate lumping all minors together by the way) change their names or ask for preferred pronouns is dangerous when we don't have evidence of the effects.

This is a sign (Like the born this way debate) that something has gone completely off the rails. What evidence are we waiting for? *What* harms might or might not be demonstrated that would answer the question of whether we should let children change their names? What about letting kids use nicknames, have we done any science to determine the potential harms?

My point is not that these questions are unanswerable or not amenable to scientific study; my point is that scientific study of an essentially narrow point with narrow implications is used as a synecdoche for the whole issue.

And you can't dodge this by telling me that actually, whether gay people are born this way really is an empirical question.

And in terms of trans issues in general, people are not asking well-posed questions. We don't know what "evidence" we are seeking because that's not the point, rather, the chain is, "If I can point to a gap in evidence, it's okay to ban things related to trans people"

While you can go on this tangent I think its not too relevant to the actual political debates of the day. While fringe people exist ofc very few people are proposing banning transition interventions, people are debating transition interventions for children. The exact things you name like alcohol are actually banned for children, society routinely allows adults to do harmful things but applies way stricter measures for children or at least puts that decision in the hands of the parents and not the child.

Which you can disagree with, sure, i am making no object level claim on any of this. But if you actually analogize your position its like 'whose to say how we should handle harm? Maybe we should let the 14 year olds drink'. Which again you can believe but its kind of smuggling in a radical take and pretending its the normal take. Society thinks 'do kids enjoy drinking?' is in fact irrelevant.

It would be very weird to argue, at this date, "The jury is still out on childhood drinking, so we should ban it until more evidence comes in."

I'm... uh... not actually convinced that "very few people" are talking about banning transition.

Here's what I am saying:

Conflating a 17 year old using new pronouns with giving an eight year old puberty blockers is simply going to confuse the issue. (Or, for that matter, a 20 year old having one glass of wine at dinner is probably less harmful than a 21 year old getting blackout drunk).

Am I speaking Greek here? "Who's to say how we should handle harm" is not my point.

My point is in order to know how to "handle potential harms" you'd have to know what those harms are, and what you're evaluating them against.

If you are going around positing that puberty blockers and pronouns cause the same type of harm and should therefore be blocked for the same reasons (And I've literally never seen an anti-childhood-transition activist who wasn't overtly against pronouns and name changes), this is evidence that your definition of "harm" is extremely vague and calibrated to get a certain result.

Waiting for and trusting the evidence will not solve that problem, because absence of evidence is not the issue here.

Another factor is, do we think the jury is still out on pronouns? What's the absolute worst case scenario we could discover about the harms of preferred pronouns, and how does it compare to the worst case of, say, letting kids take shop classes? What evidence are we waiting for?

There isn't scientific debate, because a scientific debate would require well-posed questions.

Instead, it has become vitally important to pretend that a debate about values is a debate about an empirical question, very similar to the way that we all collectively decided to pretend that the gay rights debate was a scientific debate about the evidence for whether homosexuality was inborn.

Since sociological/psychological research is mostly fraudulent and, to the extent that it's not, is falsified post-facto by selective publication and reporting, commiting to making social policy on the basis of "science" just means submitting to the arbitrary preferences of the class of professionals who conduct and report on this research. If you think they'll always be on your side, then great. But when the day comes that this class of people happens not to take your side on something, you'll be sorry that you grounded your politics in a false scientism rather than on a set of interests and principles not subject to this kind of arbitrary manipulation.

I was thinking about this because...

So I listen to the politics podcast put out by The New Statesman, which is a left-leaning newspaper in the UK. They are very mainstream left. And today they were talking about a new report on the medical evidence for various trans-related interventions, and they were wringing their hands about how terrible it is that children were being subjected to these treatments that didn't have the proper evidence behind them. At first they were mostly talking about puberty blockers, but by the end they were with a straight face declaring that it was inappropriate for a teacher to use a student's preferred pronouns, because that is "social transition" which is a "medical question" and the evidence isn't in to support it.

Anyway I don't think I need to spell out any further what I think of that, or what the regional variations in scientific consensus demonstrate about what is going on here. Basically "science" is being allowed to massively overextend itself into issuing diktat about questions of values, norms, principles, language usage, gender relations, and a million other things that are properly to be contested honestly in the realm of public opinion. "Listen[ing] to the science" on these questions is no better than mindlessly deferring to Church doctrine. It robs you of your sovereign right as an individual to organize your own social world and to participate in the collective organization of the social world of the political community.

I am sympathetic to this take but I think it's bad in this case for several reasons.

And more broadly, while I am passionate about doing science better and removing human and institutional bias, the reason I am passionate about that is because good science is essential to society, and it's dangerously counterproductive to start coming out with "science is a doctrine of faith" arguments that echo fundamentalist religious dogma trotted out by evangelicals arguing that dinosaurs are a hoax or whatever.

The last thing that would help the cause of advancing healthcare desegregation for trans people is less attention to the facts of the situation and an embracing of feelings-based woo. We are right about who we are, but the reason we are right is because we are actually factually correct about this, not because of adherence to an unproveable ideology or some consensus reality of public discussion. The idea that the latter is where the truth of trans identities lie denies the reality that we are in fact our genders.

Right so I understand that since ultimately the left is headed towards a pro-trans position across the board, and the US is more economically powerful than the UK, and various other contingent facts, the pro-trans side will probably be able to prevail in this particular scuffle over knowledge production. What I'm saying is that leaning on the backing of the professional class that produces these consensuses is a Faustian pact because they have their own independent interests that won't always align with yours. And that this kind of pseudo-empirical paper-slinging is not the appropriate way for social questions to be settled in general anyway. Just make the values claim directly! The underlying normative issue here isn't truth-apt anyway!

you most certainly cannot do that. if your values aren't supported by math, you have no basis for claiming that those values are worth anything in the first place. if you think the experts are wrong, the correct response is to examine their reasoning, look for holes in it, and present a more robust alternative. plenty of people have succeeded in doing this!

i don't think there's anyone out there who can meaningfully claim their values are supported by math, except in the trivial sense that you can do some math to a whole bunch of assumptions you smuggled in from elsewhere and get a number you like. which everyone can.

making the claim is easy. once you've done that, others can assess your reasoning to see how well it holds up. but if you want to make a meaningful claim that good will come from doing a thing, you do need to take that step of establishing what that good thing is and how you can expect it to result from it, so your claim has a basis that can be examined rather than just "because I said so"

I mean, sure, but that's not math. that's the entire complex process of debating your policy opinions with other people, a process that might well involve maths but is just a lot less straightforward and objective.

What othin (and not-terezi-pyrope) were both getting at is that given a claim such as "access to hormones improves trans people's lives", there is actual statistics you can do to prove it.

What we're opposing is calling it "not science". It IS science. It's math! It's literally statistics! You are using math (statistics) to verify your claim. Whether or not that claim is worth basing policy off of, sure, that part is politics, but the actual truthfulness of the claim is something you can verify.

the real problem going on deep down is that OP doesnt think science gives true answers, they just see science as a tool of power to impose truths. if the day of tomorrow a bunch of good proper, replicable, unimpeachable studies demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt as a well proven fact that transitioning was actually *harmful* for people they would still support transition. is not about truth, is about having political power, an inherently fascistic way of thinking, in my opinion

This response really bothers me because, okay, imagine saying "Suppose studies proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that playing little league was actually harmful for people..."

What would that mean? Substitute "drinking alcohol"; substitute "driving a car"; substitute "taking chemotherapy"; keep susbstituting.

Many things we do (Arguably everything) are demonstrably "harmful" in some way, or at the very least carry a risk of harm.

What conclusions should we draw from this? Is there a way to use science to demonstrate what conclusions we should draw from this?

i think this idea that we have no way of truly knowing what is "harmful" because everything can be harmful from a certain perspective is an arbitrary request for rigor. we know drunk driving causes more car accidents that produce bodily injury, there is no need to wring our hands and wonder wether this really counts as harm.

and we know transitioning generally reduces levels of depression and suicidality, which i think everyone can reasonably say are bad things we want reduced.

is true tha ultimatly "what is good and what is bad" is not an answer that can be solved by math and science, you cant extract an ought from an is. but the point i and most other people on this thread are trying to make is that once you have an ought, once you have a moral compass, using science to determine the best way to reach that north is necessary. to discard "science" (at least social sciences) all together as a tool to help you reach that north is foolish

The trans debate doesn't have an underlying "ought", particularly on the anti- side. There's pretty much no ability to think through what it might mean if, for example, trans healthcare had intrinsic drawbacks and benefits to recipients; the debate is entirely about things like whether or not trans healthcare is "harmful" with the implications of what it would mean for trans healthcare to be "harmful" left implicit and understood to be inarguable and obvious.

If we could demonstrate that trans healthcare is "harmful" we would obviously have no choice but to ban it, just like we have no choice but to ban chemotherapy and alcohol consumption. (I chose to include things that are demonstrably harmful for a reason, not to pretend that we can't know what is or is not harmful)

ok, obviously we can talk about tradeoffs here, chemotherapy causes all sorts of complications and sideffects and deleterious effects, but also it increases your chances of beating cancer so obviously on the net is more helpful than harmful. likewise with transitioning, it increases risks of social ostracism, bone density, heart conditions, testicular and breast cancer, blood clots, etc, but also it massively decreases depression, suicidality, plus a bunch of other things. so we can also say that on the net is more helpful than harmful. again it seems silly to be like "well everything can be considered harmful so we sholdnt ban things based on the fact that they could be considered harmful" is a silly objection. yes, a bad faith actor can disengeniously claim that something is harmful, but that doesnt make the act of determining harm and trying to reduce it by quantifiably determining its causes and pointless excercise

That's not even kind of my objection, and I kind of thought that was clear.

Drinking alcohol can cause demonstrable harms which can be measured fairly accurately: Therefore, our policy for alcohol ought to be...

?

That sentence can be finished in multiple ways even when the harms caused by the consumption of alcohol are known to a very accurate degree.

In terms of the pro/con position, does the fact that people enjoy drinking weigh in on the pro side or is it a meaningless irrelevancy that should be ignored?

I come at this from my memory of the gay marriage debate in the US, which was widely held to hinge on the answer to an empirical question:

Are people born gay?

If they are, it was said, gay marriage makes a lot of sense. If not, well, obviously conversion therapy is ethical.

I thought this was self-evident nonsense at the time, and still do.

I also come at this from a perspective of, some hypotheticals are just so obviously not the case that it's kind of meaningless to consider them. "What if science discovered that methamphetamines have no addictive properties and no negative health side effects?"

Well, science isn't going to discover that, so perhaps we shouldn't worry about that.

Look, maybe I'm steel-manning OP, but they were talking about a liberal paper wringing their hands about how letting kids (Still hate lumping all minors together by the way) change their names or ask for preferred pronouns is dangerous when we don't have evidence of the effects.

This is a sign (Like the born this way debate) that something has gone completely off the rails. What evidence are we waiting for? *What* harms might or might not be demonstrated that would answer the question of whether we should let children change their names? What about letting kids use nicknames, have we done any science to determine the potential harms?

My point is not that these questions are unanswerable or not amenable to scientific study; my point is that scientific study of an essentially narrow point with narrow implications is used as a synecdoche for the whole issue.

And you can't dodge this by telling me that actually, whether gay people are born this way really is an empirical question.

And in terms of trans issues in general, people are not asking well-posed questions. We don't know what "evidence" we are seeking because that's not the point, rather, the chain is, "If I can point to a gap in evidence, it's okay to ban things related to trans people"

Of course, to argue with myself (Or also kind of just restate myself) the gay marriage debate demonstrates that the production of scientific consensus is completely irrelevant to these issues. It's hardly been a decade and nobody could give two shits about whether anybody was born that way or not. Arguing that empirical question was always entirely beside the point.

Since sociological/psychological research is mostly fraudulent and, to the extent that it's not, is falsified post-facto by selective publication and reporting, commiting to making social policy on the basis of "science" just means submitting to the arbitrary preferences of the class of professionals who conduct and report on this research. If you think they'll always be on your side, then great. But when the day comes that this class of people happens not to take your side on something, you'll be sorry that you grounded your politics in a false scientism rather than on a set of interests and principles not subject to this kind of arbitrary manipulation.

I was thinking about this because...

So I listen to the politics podcast put out by The New Statesman, which is a left-leaning newspaper in the UK. They are very mainstream left. And today they were talking about a new report on the medical evidence for various trans-related interventions, and they were wringing their hands about how terrible it is that children were being subjected to these treatments that didn't have the proper evidence behind them. At first they were mostly talking about puberty blockers, but by the end they were with a straight face declaring that it was inappropriate for a teacher to use a student's preferred pronouns, because that is "social transition" which is a "medical question" and the evidence isn't in to support it.

Anyway I don't think I need to spell out any further what I think of that, or what the regional variations in scientific consensus demonstrate about what is going on here. Basically "science" is being allowed to massively overextend itself into issuing diktat about questions of values, norms, principles, language usage, gender relations, and a million other things that are properly to be contested honestly in the realm of public opinion. "Listen[ing] to the science" on these questions is no better than mindlessly deferring to Church doctrine. It robs you of your sovereign right as an individual to organize your own social world and to participate in the collective organization of the social world of the political community.

I am sympathetic to this take but I think it's bad in this case for several reasons.

And more broadly, while I am passionate about doing science better and removing human and institutional bias, the reason I am passionate about that is because good science is essential to society, and it's dangerously counterproductive to start coming out with "science is a doctrine of faith" arguments that echo fundamentalist religious dogma trotted out by evangelicals arguing that dinosaurs are a hoax or whatever.

The last thing that would help the cause of advancing healthcare desegregation for trans people is less attention to the facts of the situation and an embracing of feelings-based woo. We are right about who we are, but the reason we are right is because we are actually factually correct about this, not because of adherence to an unproveable ideology or some consensus reality of public discussion. The idea that the latter is where the truth of trans identities lie denies the reality that we are in fact our genders.

Right so I understand that since ultimately the left is headed towards a pro-trans position across the board, and the US is more economically powerful than the UK, and various other contingent facts, the pro-trans side will probably be able to prevail in this particular scuffle over knowledge production. What I'm saying is that leaning on the backing of the professional class that produces these consensuses is a Faustian pact because they have their own independent interests that won't always align with yours. And that this kind of pseudo-empirical paper-slinging is not the appropriate way for social questions to be settled in general anyway. Just make the values claim directly! The underlying normative issue here isn't truth-apt anyway!

you most certainly cannot do that. if your values aren't supported by math, you have no basis for claiming that those values are worth anything in the first place. if you think the experts are wrong, the correct response is to examine their reasoning, look for holes in it, and present a more robust alternative. plenty of people have succeeded in doing this!

i don't think there's anyone out there who can meaningfully claim their values are supported by math, except in the trivial sense that you can do some math to a whole bunch of assumptions you smuggled in from elsewhere and get a number you like. which everyone can.

making the claim is easy. once you've done that, others can assess your reasoning to see how well it holds up. but if you want to make a meaningful claim that good will come from doing a thing, you do need to take that step of establishing what that good thing is and how you can expect it to result from it, so your claim has a basis that can be examined rather than just "because I said so"

I mean, sure, but that's not math. that's the entire complex process of debating your policy opinions with other people, a process that might well involve maths but is just a lot less straightforward and objective.

What othin (and not-terezi-pyrope) were both getting at is that given a claim such as "access to hormones improves trans people's lives", there is actual statistics you can do to prove it.

What we're opposing is calling it "not science". It IS science. It's math! It's literally statistics! You are using math (statistics) to verify your claim. Whether or not that claim is worth basing policy off of, sure, that part is politics, but the actual truthfulness of the claim is something you can verify.

the real problem going on deep down is that OP doesnt think science gives true answers, they just see science as a tool of power to impose truths. if the day of tomorrow a bunch of good proper, replicable, unimpeachable studies demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt as a well proven fact that transitioning was actually *harmful* for people they would still support transition. is not about truth, is about having political power, an inherently fascistic way of thinking, in my opinion

This response really bothers me because, okay, imagine saying "Suppose studies proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that playing little league was actually harmful for people..."

What would that mean? Substitute "drinking alcohol"; substitute "driving a car"; substitute "taking chemotherapy"; keep susbstituting.

Many things we do (Arguably everything) are demonstrably "harmful" in some way, or at the very least carry a risk of harm.

What conclusions should we draw from this? Is there a way to use science to demonstrate what conclusions we should draw from this?

i think this idea that we have no way of truly knowing what is "harmful" because everything can be harmful from a certain perspective is an arbitrary request for rigor. we know drunk driving causes more car accidents that produce bodily injury, there is no need to wring our hands and wonder wether this really counts as harm.

and we know transitioning generally reduces levels of depression and suicidality, which i think everyone can reasonably say are bad things we want reduced.

is true tha ultimatly "what is good and what is bad" is not an answer that can be solved by math and science, you cant extract an ought from an is. but the point i and most other people on this thread are trying to make is that once you have an ought, once you have a moral compass, using science to determine the best way to reach that north is necessary. to discard "science" (at least social sciences) all together as a tool to help you reach that north is foolish

The trans debate doesn't have an underlying "ought", particularly on the anti- side. There's pretty much no ability to think through what it might mean if, for example, trans healthcare had intrinsic drawbacks and benefits to recipients; the debate is entirely about things like whether or not trans healthcare is "harmful" with the implications of what it would mean for trans healthcare to be "harmful" left implicit and understood to be inarguable and obvious.

If we could demonstrate that trans healthcare is "harmful" we would obviously have no choice but to ban it, just like we have no choice but to ban chemotherapy and alcohol consumption. (I chose to include things that are demonstrably harmful for a reason, not to pretend that we can't know what is or is not harmful)

ok, obviously we can talk about tradeoffs here, chemotherapy causes all sorts of complications and sideffects and deleterious effects, but also it increases your chances of beating cancer so obviously on the net is more helpful than harmful. likewise with transitioning, it increases risks of social ostracism, bone density, heart conditions, testicular and breast cancer, blood clots, etc, but also it massively decreases depression, suicidality, plus a bunch of other things. so we can also say that on the net is more helpful than harmful. again it seems silly to be like "well everything can be considered harmful so we sholdnt ban things based on the fact that they could be considered harmful" is a silly objection. yes, a bad faith actor can disengeniously claim that something is harmful, but that doesnt make the act of determining harm and trying to reduce it by quantifiably determining its causes and pointless excercise

That's not even kind of my objection, and I kind of thought that was clear.

Drinking alcohol can cause demonstrable harms which can be measured fairly accurately: Therefore, our policy for alcohol ought to be...

?

That sentence can be finished in multiple ways even when the harms caused by the consumption of alcohol are known to a very accurate degree.

In terms of the pro/con position, does the fact that people enjoy drinking weigh in on the pro side or is it a meaningless irrelevancy that should be ignored?

I come at this from my memory of the gay marriage debate in the US, which was widely held to hinge on the answer to an empirical question:

Are people born gay?

If they are, it was said, gay marriage makes a lot of sense. If not, well, obviously conversion therapy is ethical.

I thought this was self-evident nonsense at the time, and still do.

I also come at this from a perspective of, some hypotheticals are just so obviously not the case that it's kind of meaningless to consider them. "What if science discovered that methamphetamines have no addictive properties and no negative health side effects?"

Well, science isn't going to discover that, so perhaps we shouldn't worry about that.

Look, maybe I'm steel-manning OP, but they were talking about a liberal paper wringing their hands about how letting kids (Still hate lumping all minors together by the way) change their names or ask for preferred pronouns is dangerous when we don't have evidence of the effects.

This is a sign (Like the born this way debate) that something has gone completely off the rails. What evidence are we waiting for? *What* harms might or might not be demonstrated that would answer the question of whether we should let children change their names? What about letting kids use nicknames, have we done any science to determine the potential harms?

My point is not that these questions are unanswerable or not amenable to scientific study; my point is that scientific study of an essentially narrow point with narrow implications is used as a synecdoche for the whole issue.

And you can't dodge this by telling me that actually, whether gay people are born this way really is an empirical question.

And in terms of trans issues in general, people are not asking well-posed questions. We don't know what "evidence" we are seeking because that's not the point, rather, the chain is, "If I can point to a gap in evidence, it's okay to ban things related to trans people"

Since sociological/psychological research is mostly fraudulent and, to the extent that it's not, is falsified post-facto by selective publication and reporting, commiting to making social policy on the basis of "science" just means submitting to the arbitrary preferences of the class of professionals who conduct and report on this research. If you think they'll always be on your side, then great. But when the day comes that this class of people happens not to take your side on something, you'll be sorry that you grounded your politics in a false scientism rather than on a set of interests and principles not subject to this kind of arbitrary manipulation.

I was thinking about this because...

So I listen to the politics podcast put out by The New Statesman, which is a left-leaning newspaper in the UK. They are very mainstream left. And today they were talking about a new report on the medical evidence for various trans-related interventions, and they were wringing their hands about how terrible it is that children were being subjected to these treatments that didn't have the proper evidence behind them. At first they were mostly talking about puberty blockers, but by the end they were with a straight face declaring that it was inappropriate for a teacher to use a student's preferred pronouns, because that is "social transition" which is a "medical question" and the evidence isn't in to support it.

Anyway I don't think I need to spell out any further what I think of that, or what the regional variations in scientific consensus demonstrate about what is going on here. Basically "science" is being allowed to massively overextend itself into issuing diktat about questions of values, norms, principles, language usage, gender relations, and a million other things that are properly to be contested honestly in the realm of public opinion. "Listen[ing] to the science" on these questions is no better than mindlessly deferring to Church doctrine. It robs you of your sovereign right as an individual to organize your own social world and to participate in the collective organization of the social world of the political community.

I am sympathetic to this take but I think it's bad in this case for several reasons.

And more broadly, while I am passionate about doing science better and removing human and institutional bias, the reason I am passionate about that is because good science is essential to society, and it's dangerously counterproductive to start coming out with "science is a doctrine of faith" arguments that echo fundamentalist religious dogma trotted out by evangelicals arguing that dinosaurs are a hoax or whatever.

The last thing that would help the cause of advancing healthcare desegregation for trans people is less attention to the facts of the situation and an embracing of feelings-based woo. We are right about who we are, but the reason we are right is because we are actually factually correct about this, not because of adherence to an unproveable ideology or some consensus reality of public discussion. The idea that the latter is where the truth of trans identities lie denies the reality that we are in fact our genders.

Right so I understand that since ultimately the left is headed towards a pro-trans position across the board, and the US is more economically powerful than the UK, and various other contingent facts, the pro-trans side will probably be able to prevail in this particular scuffle over knowledge production. What I'm saying is that leaning on the backing of the professional class that produces these consensuses is a Faustian pact because they have their own independent interests that won't always align with yours. And that this kind of pseudo-empirical paper-slinging is not the appropriate way for social questions to be settled in general anyway. Just make the values claim directly! The underlying normative issue here isn't truth-apt anyway!

you most certainly cannot do that. if your values aren't supported by math, you have no basis for claiming that those values are worth anything in the first place. if you think the experts are wrong, the correct response is to examine their reasoning, look for holes in it, and present a more robust alternative. plenty of people have succeeded in doing this!

i don't think there's anyone out there who can meaningfully claim their values are supported by math, except in the trivial sense that you can do some math to a whole bunch of assumptions you smuggled in from elsewhere and get a number you like. which everyone can.

making the claim is easy. once you've done that, others can assess your reasoning to see how well it holds up. but if you want to make a meaningful claim that good will come from doing a thing, you do need to take that step of establishing what that good thing is and how you can expect it to result from it, so your claim has a basis that can be examined rather than just "because I said so"

I mean, sure, but that's not math. that's the entire complex process of debating your policy opinions with other people, a process that might well involve maths but is just a lot less straightforward and objective.

What othin (and not-terezi-pyrope) were both getting at is that given a claim such as "access to hormones improves trans people's lives", there is actual statistics you can do to prove it.

What we're opposing is calling it "not science". It IS science. It's math! It's literally statistics! You are using math (statistics) to verify your claim. Whether or not that claim is worth basing policy off of, sure, that part is politics, but the actual truthfulness of the claim is something you can verify.

the real problem going on deep down is that OP doesnt think science gives true answers, they just see science as a tool of power to impose truths. if the day of tomorrow a bunch of good proper, replicable, unimpeachable studies demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt as a well proven fact that transitioning was actually *harmful* for people they would still support transition. is not about truth, is about having political power, an inherently fascistic way of thinking, in my opinion

This response really bothers me because, okay, imagine saying "Suppose studies proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that playing little league was actually harmful for people..."

What would that mean? Substitute "drinking alcohol"; substitute "driving a car"; substitute "taking chemotherapy"; keep susbstituting.

Many things we do (Arguably everything) are demonstrably "harmful" in some way, or at the very least carry a risk of harm.

What conclusions should we draw from this? Is there a way to use science to demonstrate what conclusions we should draw from this?

i think this idea that we have no way of truly knowing what is "harmful" because everything can be harmful from a certain perspective is an arbitrary request for rigor. we know drunk driving causes more car accidents that produce bodily injury, there is no need to wring our hands and wonder wether this really counts as harm.

and we know transitioning generally reduces levels of depression and suicidality, which i think everyone can reasonably say are bad things we want reduced.

is true tha ultimatly "what is good and what is bad" is not an answer that can be solved by math and science, you cant extract an ought from an is. but the point i and most other people on this thread are trying to make is that once you have an ought, once you have a moral compass, using science to determine the best way to reach that north is necessary. to discard "science" (at least social sciences) all together as a tool to help you reach that north is foolish

The trans debate doesn't have an underlying "ought", particularly on the anti- side. There's pretty much no ability to think through what it might mean if, for example, trans healthcare had intrinsic drawbacks and benefits to recipients; the debate is entirely about things like whether or not trans healthcare is "harmful" with the implications of what it would mean for trans healthcare to be "harmful" left implicit and understood to be inarguable and obvious.

If we could demonstrate that trans healthcare is "harmful" we would obviously have no choice but to ban it, just like we have no choice but to ban chemotherapy and alcohol consumption. (I chose to include things that are demonstrably harmful for a reason, not to pretend that we can't know what is or is not harmful)

Since sociological/psychological research is mostly fraudulent and, to the extent that it's not, is falsified post-facto by selective publication and reporting, commiting to making social policy on the basis of "science" just means submitting to the arbitrary preferences of the class of professionals who conduct and report on this research. If you think they'll always be on your side, then great. But when the day comes that this class of people happens not to take your side on something, you'll be sorry that you grounded your politics in a false scientism rather than on a set of interests and principles not subject to this kind of arbitrary manipulation.

I was thinking about this because...

So I listen to the politics podcast put out by The New Statesman, which is a left-leaning newspaper in the UK. They are very mainstream left. And today they were talking about a new report on the medical evidence for various trans-related interventions, and they were wringing their hands about how terrible it is that children were being subjected to these treatments that didn't have the proper evidence behind them. At first they were mostly talking about puberty blockers, but by the end they were with a straight face declaring that it was inappropriate for a teacher to use a student's preferred pronouns, because that is "social transition" which is a "medical question" and the evidence isn't in to support it.

Anyway I don't think I need to spell out any further what I think of that, or what the regional variations in scientific consensus demonstrate about what is going on here. Basically "science" is being allowed to massively overextend itself into issuing diktat about questions of values, norms, principles, language usage, gender relations, and a million other things that are properly to be contested honestly in the realm of public opinion. "Listen[ing] to the science" on these questions is no better than mindlessly deferring to Church doctrine. It robs you of your sovereign right as an individual to organize your own social world and to participate in the collective organization of the social world of the political community.

Part of what's left me so cynical about discourse (re: this and the recent posts about Claudine Gay's shoddy research habits) is that starting about a decade ago, and only somewhat recently meeting any resistance, lots of liberals and leftists spontaneously decided that yes, you can just change vernacular definitions of words for political gain, you can just badger and shame any inconvenient studies or statistics away, you can just stock every field requiring domain knowledge with political fellow-travelers and use 'trust the experts!' as a heuristic for both accuracy and political purity.

Now the problems with that approach are coming home to roost, and the people who predicted those problems, the ones who were called nazis and fascists and shit for saying the goal of, say, sociology should not be to make left-wing sociology undergrads feel good about themselves, or that 'trust the experts' only works when the experts are sympathetic to you and yours, are being given...not remotely enough credit. The mood seems to be "Oh, haha we sure were stupid for a while there huh? Well, I'm sure there's nothing to learn from this long-term. The underlying principle that political concepts are not attempts to understand the world objectively, but mind-control serums of sorts where the noblest goal is jacking everyone up with your serum at the expense of all others, because otherwise, well, otherwise I've completely wasted my life."

And I'm at the point of "You know what, if all you want from academia and media and culture is reassurances of your own inherent specialness and goodness, have fun with that. Just leave me the fuck alone."

The attachment to this timeline (A big problem that started about a decade ago and now the chickens are coming home to roost) really fascinates me because you know the Sokal hoax happened in 1996, right?

Since sociological/psychological research is mostly fraudulent and, to the extent that it's not, is falsified post-facto by selective publication and reporting, commiting to making social policy on the basis of "science" just means submitting to the arbitrary preferences of the class of professionals who conduct and report on this research. If you think they'll always be on your side, then great. But when the day comes that this class of people happens not to take your side on something, you'll be sorry that you grounded your politics in a false scientism rather than on a set of interests and principles not subject to this kind of arbitrary manipulation.

I was thinking about this because...

So I listen to the politics podcast put out by The New Statesman, which is a left-leaning newspaper in the UK. They are very mainstream left. And today they were talking about a new report on the medical evidence for various trans-related interventions, and they were wringing their hands about how terrible it is that children were being subjected to these treatments that didn't have the proper evidence behind them. At first they were mostly talking about puberty blockers, but by the end they were with a straight face declaring that it was inappropriate for a teacher to use a student's preferred pronouns, because that is "social transition" which is a "medical question" and the evidence isn't in to support it.

Anyway I don't think I need to spell out any further what I think of that, or what the regional variations in scientific consensus demonstrate about what is going on here. Basically "science" is being allowed to massively overextend itself into issuing diktat about questions of values, norms, principles, language usage, gender relations, and a million other things that are properly to be contested honestly in the realm of public opinion. "Listen[ing] to the science" on these questions is no better than mindlessly deferring to Church doctrine. It robs you of your sovereign right as an individual to organize your own social world and to participate in the collective organization of the social world of the political community.

I am sympathetic to this take but I think it's bad in this case for several reasons.

And more broadly, while I am passionate about doing science better and removing human and institutional bias, the reason I am passionate about that is because good science is essential to society, and it's dangerously counterproductive to start coming out with "science is a doctrine of faith" arguments that echo fundamentalist religious dogma trotted out by evangelicals arguing that dinosaurs are a hoax or whatever.

The last thing that would help the cause of advancing healthcare desegregation for trans people is less attention to the facts of the situation and an embracing of feelings-based woo. We are right about who we are, but the reason we are right is because we are actually factually correct about this, not because of adherence to an unproveable ideology or some consensus reality of public discussion. The idea that the latter is where the truth of trans identities lie denies the reality that we are in fact our genders.

Right so I understand that since ultimately the left is headed towards a pro-trans position across the board, and the US is more economically powerful than the UK, and various other contingent facts, the pro-trans side will probably be able to prevail in this particular scuffle over knowledge production. What I'm saying is that leaning on the backing of the professional class that produces these consensuses is a Faustian pact because they have their own independent interests that won't always align with yours. And that this kind of pseudo-empirical paper-slinging is not the appropriate way for social questions to be settled in general anyway. Just make the values claim directly! The underlying normative issue here isn't truth-apt anyway!

you most certainly cannot do that. if your values aren't supported by math, you have no basis for claiming that those values are worth anything in the first place. if you think the experts are wrong, the correct response is to examine their reasoning, look for holes in it, and present a more robust alternative. plenty of people have succeeded in doing this!

i don't think there's anyone out there who can meaningfully claim their values are supported by math, except in the trivial sense that you can do some math to a whole bunch of assumptions you smuggled in from elsewhere and get a number you like. which everyone can.

making the claim is easy. once you've done that, others can assess your reasoning to see how well it holds up. but if you want to make a meaningful claim that good will come from doing a thing, you do need to take that step of establishing what that good thing is and how you can expect it to result from it, so your claim has a basis that can be examined rather than just "because I said so"

I mean, sure, but that's not math. that's the entire complex process of debating your policy opinions with other people, a process that might well involve maths but is just a lot less straightforward and objective.

What othin (and not-terezi-pyrope) were both getting at is that given a claim such as "access to hormones improves trans people's lives", there is actual statistics you can do to prove it.

What we're opposing is calling it "not science". It IS science. It's math! It's literally statistics! You are using math (statistics) to verify your claim. Whether or not that claim is worth basing policy off of, sure, that part is politics, but the actual truthfulness of the claim is something you can verify.

the real problem going on deep down is that OP doesnt think science gives true answers, they just see science as a tool of power to impose truths. if the day of tomorrow a bunch of good proper, replicable, unimpeachable studies demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt as a well proven fact that transitioning was actually *harmful* for people they would still support transition. is not about truth, is about having political power, an inherently fascistic way of thinking, in my opinion

This response really bothers me because, okay, imagine saying "Suppose studies proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that playing little league was actually harmful for people..."

What would that mean? Substitute "drinking alcohol"; substitute "driving a car"; substitute "taking chemotherapy"; keep susbstituting.

Many things we do (Arguably everything) are demonstrably "harmful" in some way, or at the very least carry a risk of harm.

What conclusions should we draw from this? Is there a way to use science to demonstrate what conclusions we should draw from this?

While I really hate the narrative of "tech bros" because of how it conflates shitty CEOs with non-shitty base-level programmers, and how it conflates Dunning-Kruger-y early adopters with people who Know Their Shit about computers...

...On the AI art issue, I will say, there is probably a legit a culture clash between people who primarily specialize in programming and people who primarily specialize in art.

Because, like, while in the experience of modern working illustrators a free commons has ended up representing a Hobbseyan experience of "a war of all against all" that's a constant threat to making a living, in software from what I can tell it's kinda been the reverse.

IE, freedom of access to shared code/information has kinda been seen as A Vital Thing wrt people's abilities to do their job at a core level. So, naturally, there's going to be some very different reactions to the morality of scraped data online.

And, it's probably the same reason that a lot of the creative commons movement came from the free software movement.

And while I agree a lot with the core principles of these movements, it's also probably unfortunately why they so often come off as tone-deaf and haven't really made that proper breakthrough wrt fighting against copyright bloat.

It also really doesn't help that, in terms of treatment by capital, for most of our lives programmers have been Mother's Special Little Boy whereas artists (especially online independent artists post '08 crash) have been treated as The Ratboy We Keep In The Basement And Throw Scraps To.

So, it make sense the latter would have resentment wrt the former...

This is, to put it bluntly, short-sighted. "Professional Artist living a high-class lifestyle" has been a rare, rare job for most of human history. Very few people were ever able to support themselves as Artists, because there have always been more wannabe artists than there is demand for full-time artists.

The modern era is very much a golden era for the number of people who get to make a living doing art all day. Both because for almost all of human history your were lucky to not be a peasant farmer, but even past the second industrial revolution it's only recently that there's enough spare wealth for so many people to be Graphic Designers or Painters or what have you. 2008 was not a big shift in this except in how everyone, everywhere got fucked by it.

And beyond that: While it does suck that you like to make art and programmers like to make software but only the latter get to also make big bucks for it, there are a lot of people who would like to be paid more to do what they love, or who gave up doing what they love to make more money.

I am fully approving of everyone getting enough support that they can take the time to make their own Magnum Opus. But whatever your flavor of politics, a society has a limited number of full-time artists it can support. Not everyone can be an artist free to make what they want, and whether under a socialist or capitalist system someone is gonna have to instead work cleaning the bathrooms, (even if they are also guaranteed time off to pursue art).

And either you let those positions be chosen by patronage, or you make it some judgement by merit, where Tex Avery gets resources to make cartoons full-time and someone else has to run the power plant.

And, while I will not pretend the differences in pay Software Engineers get is just and unquestionable, the reason they get so many more positions is that there's just more demand for software than there is art, relative to the number of people who want to be software engineers and artists, and even under your preferred brand of communism you're going to run into the problem that the marginal extra professional artist is not as needed as another Cook or Trucker or Miner or whatever, and that's going to either look a lot like Capital Giving Artists scraps, or like only a special few getting to be artists and Gatekeeping the rest.

Okay, but like...

I'm trying to be nicer but *all* of the above strikes me as so besides the point that I don't even know where to begin. I'm going to do it stream of consciousness.

There's no "free commons" with regard to art and there hasn't been within the lifetime of anybody currently living, let's maybe start there.

I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean, exactly... The constantly increasing ease of mechanical reproduction has created a thriving set of grey and black markets for both the illicit distribution of total copies and the use of "IP" through "fan works".

This has lead to the shameful phenomenon of people who write fanfiction or draw fanart ranting about the dangers of plagiarizing the ideas of other people.

The last sentence of that first post, which characterizes artistic antipathy towards AI as driven by Nietzchean ressentiment is closer to the mark.

Here's the bad news:

Tech politics is heavily driven by ressentiment towards artists expressed in nearly exactly the same terms.

It's more difficult for me to explain what I find annoying about "Well, someone has to run the power plant".

Okay... stepping back towards that first post again, Capital treating programmers "better" then artists here means...

Uh... what does it mean?

It seems to mean something like "the median programmer earns more than the median artist" and in fact I'm not sure you could possibly add anything else.

Employee programmers at Google don't own their code; they are subject to being hired or replaced; their employer has engaged in illegal collusion with other tech companies (Including, and really emphasize this in your head, Pixar) to depress their wages.

Okay, here's a sketch of the problem I have, which probably isn't quite the crux of my objection but maybe it gets us closer.

It has become very difficult to articulate an objection to market shocks.

Well... Okay, no, I need to go back further. For most of history, "professional engineer living a high class lifestyle" has *also* been a rare job.

One of the major unspoken assumptions that animates this discussion is that a failed engineer is not an engineer, but a failing artist is still an artist. There are probably more people who would like to work at Google than is useful for Google to hire, but that's understood by everyone as a non-issue, so much so that I've never seen anybody even bring it up, certainly not to contrast it with the question of whether or not there would be more or fewer programmers in another economic system.

Okay, here's the thing:

High art celebrities like Jeff Koons, Banksy, and Takashi Murakami face, in my opinion, essentially zero threat from AI art and in fact will probably find it a boon.

Meanwhile, mid-level journeyman programmers may, in fact, face significant economic threat from Chat-GPT if it continues to improve at the production of useful code (All anxiety about AI depends on a near-term jump in quality, if there are unexpected obstacles that prevent that jump the whole thing is moot).

I think the biggest source of anxiety in the world right now is that sudden price shocks represent a statement about your value. In order to combat them you'd have to make a case that what you do has value, but the very fact that there is a price shock *at all* makes that case incredibly difficult to make, because price is a value signal.

I guess one of the problems I'm trying to understand is why the economically precarious artist animates our imagination but the economically precarious programmer is an imaginative non-entity.

...Reblogging because you make some interesting points, and I'll add a part of what I mean by programmers being treated "better" than artists that you kinda made me realize.

As far as I can tell, programmers being treated as disposable cogs and their skills being undervalued is thought of by most people as a genuine injustice, whereas for artists it's thought of as normal and something to victim blame them over.

Like, this is perhaps antecdotal, but people with programming or engineering degrees being stuck working food service* is generally thought of as an outrage, a sign of the way society is wildly inefficient at allocating people and their skills.

But a trained artist being stuck in that same position is greeted with "Lol, shoulda got an engineering degree, burger-flipper."

The amount of people animated by the narrative of the struggling artist is actually very small, most normies think they have it coming, hence why there's such disproportionately high outrage from those animated by it, because most people outside of that were never outraged at their impoverishment, even before the AI boom percieved as "the final insult"

At least, that's from what I can see.

But also, you made one really good point I want to highlight:

Like, you did it! You broke down why neoliberalism's marketization of everything has created a world hostile to human life to its' bare essentials!

Now if only we can get artists united with programmers against that, instead of the wall of fear that is towards "tech bros"...

*Which is not a shameful job for the record, and not unskilled either, but those two facts are precisely why we should be getting people who are best at food service to do those jobs; not the people who are best at coding or painting

Bad news for everybody everywhere: Programmers often hold a mirror version of that exact same resentment towards softer subjects.

If I could understand why the current mindset is to imagine an unsuccessful artist and a successful engineer and then to try to decide which one is the bad guy I'd be able to crack open all of pop culture and politics.

Our wagons wheels have fallen right into the perfectly spaced ruts, but bad news, this road doesn't go anywhere. Perhaps by using that amazing piece of STEMlord technology, the lever, we can pull ourselves out and blaze a new trail.

@phaeton-flier

"And, while I will not pretend the differences in pay Software Engineers get is just and unquestionable, the reason they get so many more positions is that there's just more demand for software than there is art, relative to the number of people who want to be software engineers and artists,"

No, this is not quite right. You aren't comparing people who want to be programmers with people who want to be artists; you are comparing people who are programmers with people who want to be artists.

Society can also support only a limited number of engineers; the marginal engineer is not as needed as another cook, truck driver, miner, etc. but somehow this doesn't cash out to "Either capital throws scraps to engineers or a small elite get to be engineers and gate-keep the rest."

I'm actually fairly certain that the supply of people who want to work at, let's say, Google is quite high relative to Google's demand for programmers, but Google doesn't actually have demand for most of them. The number of people who Google actually wants to hire is low compared to Google's hiring demands, so Google engineers command high salaries (Modulo Google's demonstrated collusion with other tech companies to depress wages of course)

Compare: The number of people who want to be Jeff Koons is very high compared to the demand for gargantuan aluminum balloon animals; the number of people who are Jeff Koons is low compared to the demand for gargantuan aluminum balloon animals, so Koons commands incredible sums of money, even compared to most engineers.

So why is your archetypal artist the wannabe and your archetypal programmer the highly-paid engineer? Why not compare the multi-millionaire artist or film star to the guy who washed out of college while trying to get a computer science degree and works at McDonalds?

No, seriously, I am asking, this seems like a crucially important question that I do not know the answer to.

As a number of surly people have pointed out to me, in the market demand for a good is demand for a good at a certain price. Maybe you aren't in the market for a Ferrari now, but what if I offered to sell you a brand new one for ten bucks?

AI art (And programming) is likely to increase the demand for certain images, because the cost of producing those images will go down. People who have no demand for something at a cost of $50 might be happy to buy it at $10.

Unfortunately, if you sell your labor, rather than owning capital, you are in a very bad position to exploit the increase in demand that attends decrease in cost due to high supply.

If you make widgets in a widget factory and the price of widgets goes down, you can arbitrarily increase the number of widgets you make; if you provide man-hours of labor, and the price at which you sell a man-hour of labor goes down, you can't just produce arbitrarily more man-hours to compensate; there is a very low upper limit to the number you can provide.

My point is, what happens when all labor becomes low-skilled labor because AI makes it possible for anybody to make an image, or a computer program, or pilot a plane? Because all labor cashes out to "Tell the AI what it ought to do"?

How is this not seen as a giant fucking looming crisis for the capitalist economic system?

Pointing out that impoverished commie societies are unable to support a large number of artists, or even that society in general is limited in the number of artists it can support relative to fry cooks is pretty much entirely a non-sequitur given the actual dynamics at work and the actual threat.

So I'm a little tired of having people assume things I did not say in this thread; morlock I have great respect for you and it is a smaller assumption you made but it is irritating to have happen, especially the previous reblog by OP which among other things put words in my mouth actually said by their parents about their art career, that I did not say and do not believe.

My original point was in contrast to the final paragraph in OP, which I quoted. I'm not arguing that art doesn't have value or that artists or the poor should starve. I'm arguing against the idea that artists being poor and programmers being well-off is purely due to the whims of capital and little else.

It's silly, because among other things it implies the only thing we need to do to Fix Capitalism is replace the capitalists with nice capitalists. Which is not systemic thinking! These problems run deeper!

To answer your question, the reason programmers get paid more than artists, despite hypothetically equal desire to do either, is that there are less people who can do what's asked by programmers and more demand for them. And the opposite for artists: more people want to be hired to make art than there are jobs for artists. And so one gets paid more because she has a bunch of other companies she can work for if they don't pay her enough. And the other gets scraps because there's 5 other artists willing to do the same job.

Could a megacompany hire 200 graphic designers and sculptors and painters at 6 figures to make art, while offer pennies for a few programmers in the corner? Sure. And it would produce a lot of beautiful, worthy art and get alive by every other company that didn't because they had no programmers, because all of them preferred to work at the place that paid well and they had the option. Horrors of capitalism.

(Why am I comparing the median artist to the median programmer? Because that's apples to apples, who gives a shit how the richest programmer compares to the richest artist?)

Note that none of this me calling the system Just or Good or A Fact Of The World, or saying artists should get real jobs. Just pointing out that its not "the whims of capitalists" that professional artists are poor, it's the result of the incentives in the system.

And while many of those incentives can and should be changed, some parts of it don't disappear! In a just society, a janitor and a miner and a truck driver all have strong protections and respect and the ability to travel and study and laugh. And they all work few enough hours that they can rest and see friends and celebrate and dance and not come home 6 days a week drained of energy barely able to cook a shitty meal and sleep.

But even in a world where all of that is true, where no one is choosing between a boss that screams at them for not smiling enough and getting evicted, I think a lot more people will want to be artists that miners or truck drivers or janitors, because making art is pleasurable and it's a white collar job and involves much less cleaning up vomit.

No time for a long response, but you've misunderstood my objection fundamentally. Why does "Is it good that the worst paid artists who still constitute working artists are paid less than the worst paid programmers who still count themselves as working programmers" seem like the most obvious question in the world to us?

I'm going to assert that the highest paid, most in demand artists are paid significantly more than the highest paid, most in demand programmers.

Why does this fact feel irrelevant to us but the reverse feels like the most important issue in the world?

There are reasons, but it's a weird weird starting point.

So, when it comes to AI art, imagine a working artist who is able to do it as a full-time job, but is not making an especially large amount of money at it. Is this just or unjust?

Regardless of the answer we come to, it has a weird Voight-Kampf vibe to it, and the question feels more and more bizarre the more I ask myself why we're asking it.

I happen to think that even in a communist utopia, more people will want to be engineers and architects than will want to be janitors or truck drivers.

I've known people who have programming skills and are not full time programmers, getting along doing freelance work while waiting tables or living with their parents. That doesn't count though. Why doesn't it count?

That paragraph you're responding to is wrong in numerous ways (Again, the best paid artists command *significantly* more money than the best paid programmers, unless I'm mislead and some programmers do get paid $50 million per project by their employers) but we're all used to speaking in such vague terms that it's incredibly hard to think coherently here.

There is significant demand for art; it's also not really a commodity. The demand for a performance from Robert Downey Jr. is incredibly high and the supply of Roberts Downey Jr is quite low, so...

There's some kind of issue where we are conceptualizing the two careers in different ways; the guy who acts on the side and gets cast in commercials while waiting tables and hoping to make it big is an underpaid artist; the person doing the occasional freelance programming job while waiting tables and hoping to break into full time work isn't a programmer. Or he is but unlike the artist we know he'll succeed(?).

The low paid artist isn't a low paid artist, he's a synecdoche for something else, as is the middle class working programmer.

We need to lay more blame for "Kids don't know how computers work" at the feet of the people responsible: Google.

Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.

Tech literacy didn't mysteriously vanish, it was fucking murdered for profit.

Linux is a very good and powerful alternative.

Enlightenment is man's emergence out of his self-imposed lack of responsibility/capacity/maturity.

Anyway, isn't it weird how people who don't use Linux draw the line below knowing Linux? Everything is know about computers is computer literacy, everything beyond that is arcane nerd shit.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

We don't like Linux for some reason? It seems to work pretty OK to me. Presumably the same kind of locked down "Give people computers but for God's sake don't ever tell them how things work or let them experiment" attitude that modern schools cultivate makes Linux look very imposing.

There's this perception on here among neurodivergent people that neurotypical social behaviour is all fake and arbitrary. That it's a cruel, baseless game played to "weed out" ND people or to cause pain and complicate things on purpose.

This is wrong. All of those social rules and nuances ARE communication. Sorry if this is rude but it's not the NTs' fault if things don't gel- the gap goes both ways. Just because communication doesn't make sense to you, doesn't mean it's random or purposeless. Remember this post?

Every interaction in an NT conversation has purpose, and communicates something, and I don't understand why nobody ever explains this to ND people. There's information on basic stuff like facial expressions, but never what any of it actually means.

Small talk about the weather isn't about the weather. It's about how nice it is to be around the people you're talking to, or feeling out their understanding of the world, or just saying that you're both present and people and you're being people together. It's not literal. The words are, but the broad scope isn't.

A conversation is not just an exchange of words, it's an exchange of acknowledgement, attention, and emotional understanding. Of course it confuses people when their part in that exchange is met with flat affect or unembelished words. It's like looking in a mirror and not seeing your reflection.

i've seen some very passionate rebuttals to this, but i'm sorry, the equivalent of the particular narrative about autism (that this post is arguing against) for, say, blindness, would be not just asking for accessible computer intetrfaces, or proposing that everybody use those instead of our current screens, even - it's saying that screens are completely dead flat surfaces with no changes on them, and every time a seeing person claims to receive information by looking at a screen, they are either lying or hallucinating.

Strive for a future in which we all recognise that others have ways of communicating that are real that we do not understand

Allistic people, in my experience, will frequently be entirely baffled at the idea that there is anything to *explain*. There's just some things you know to do and some things you know not to do and like, that's all there is to it, if you think there's a pattern you're overthinking it, you just kind of do certain things sometimes because that's what you do, you know?

While I really hate the narrative of "tech bros" because of how it conflates shitty CEOs with non-shitty base-level programmers, and how it conflates Dunning-Kruger-y early adopters with people who Know Their Shit about computers...

...On the AI art issue, I will say, there is probably a legit a culture clash between people who primarily specialize in programming and people who primarily specialize in art.

Because, like, while in the experience of modern working illustrators a free commons has ended up representing a Hobbseyan experience of "a war of all against all" that's a constant threat to making a living, in software from what I can tell it's kinda been the reverse.

IE, freedom of access to shared code/information has kinda been seen as A Vital Thing wrt people's abilities to do their job at a core level. So, naturally, there's going to be some very different reactions to the morality of scraped data online.

And, it's probably the same reason that a lot of the creative commons movement came from the free software movement.

And while I agree a lot with the core principles of these movements, it's also probably unfortunately why they so often come off as tone-deaf and haven't really made that proper breakthrough wrt fighting against copyright bloat.

It also really doesn't help that, in terms of treatment by capital, for most of our lives programmers have been Mother's Special Little Boy whereas artists (especially online independent artists post '08 crash) have been treated as The Ratboy We Keep In The Basement And Throw Scraps To.

So, it make sense the latter would have resentment wrt the former...

This is, to put it bluntly, short-sighted. "Professional Artist living a high-class lifestyle" has been a rare, rare job for most of human history. Very few people were ever able to support themselves as Artists, because there have always been more wannabe artists than there is demand for full-time artists.

The modern era is very much a golden era for the number of people who get to make a living doing art all day. Both because for almost all of human history your were lucky to not be a peasant farmer, but even past the second industrial revolution it's only recently that there's enough spare wealth for so many people to be Graphic Designers or Painters or what have you. 2008 was not a big shift in this except in how everyone, everywhere got fucked by it.

And beyond that: While it does suck that you like to make art and programmers like to make software but only the latter get to also make big bucks for it, there are a lot of people who would like to be paid more to do what they love, or who gave up doing what they love to make more money.

I am fully approving of everyone getting enough support that they can take the time to make their own Magnum Opus. But whatever your flavor of politics, a society has a limited number of full-time artists it can support. Not everyone can be an artist free to make what they want, and whether under a socialist or capitalist system someone is gonna have to instead work cleaning the bathrooms, (even if they are also guaranteed time off to pursue art).

And either you let those positions be chosen by patronage, or you make it some judgement by merit, where Tex Avery gets resources to make cartoons full-time and someone else has to run the power plant.

And, while I will not pretend the differences in pay Software Engineers get is just and unquestionable, the reason they get so many more positions is that there's just more demand for software than there is art, relative to the number of people who want to be software engineers and artists, and even under your preferred brand of communism you're going to run into the problem that the marginal extra professional artist is not as needed as another Cook or Trucker or Miner or whatever, and that's going to either look a lot like Capital Giving Artists scraps, or like only a special few getting to be artists and Gatekeeping the rest.

Okay, but like...

I'm trying to be nicer but *all* of the above strikes me as so besides the point that I don't even know where to begin. I'm going to do it stream of consciousness.

There's no "free commons" with regard to art and there hasn't been within the lifetime of anybody currently living, let's maybe start there.

I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean, exactly... The constantly increasing ease of mechanical reproduction has created a thriving set of grey and black markets for both the illicit distribution of total copies and the use of "IP" through "fan works".

This has lead to the shameful phenomenon of people who write fanfiction or draw fanart ranting about the dangers of plagiarizing the ideas of other people.

The last sentence of that first post, which characterizes artistic antipathy towards AI as driven by Nietzchean ressentiment is closer to the mark.

Here's the bad news:

Tech politics is heavily driven by ressentiment towards artists expressed in nearly exactly the same terms.

It's more difficult for me to explain what I find annoying about "Well, someone has to run the power plant".

Okay... stepping back towards that first post again, Capital treating programmers "better" then artists here means...

Uh... what does it mean?

It seems to mean something like "the median programmer earns more than the median artist" and in fact I'm not sure you could possibly add anything else.

Employee programmers at Google don't own their code; they are subject to being hired or replaced; their employer has engaged in illegal collusion with other tech companies (Including, and really emphasize this in your head, Pixar) to depress their wages.

Okay, here's a sketch of the problem I have, which probably isn't quite the crux of my objection but maybe it gets us closer.

It has become very difficult to articulate an objection to market shocks.

Well... Okay, no, I need to go back further. For most of history, "professional engineer living a high class lifestyle" has *also* been a rare job.

One of the major unspoken assumptions that animates this discussion is that a failed engineer is not an engineer, but a failing artist is still an artist. There are probably more people who would like to work at Google than is useful for Google to hire, but that's understood by everyone as a non-issue, so much so that I've never seen anybody even bring it up, certainly not to contrast it with the question of whether or not there would be more or fewer programmers in another economic system.

Okay, here's the thing:

High art celebrities like Jeff Koons, Banksy, and Takashi Murakami face, in my opinion, essentially zero threat from AI art and in fact will probably find it a boon.

Meanwhile, mid-level journeyman programmers may, in fact, face significant economic threat from Chat-GPT if it continues to improve at the production of useful code (All anxiety about AI depends on a near-term jump in quality, if there are unexpected obstacles that prevent that jump the whole thing is moot).

I think the biggest source of anxiety in the world right now is that sudden price shocks represent a statement about your value. In order to combat them you'd have to make a case that what you do has value, but the very fact that there is a price shock *at all* makes that case incredibly difficult to make, because price is a value signal.

I guess one of the problems I'm trying to understand is why the economically precarious artist animates our imagination but the economically precarious programmer is an imaginative non-entity.

...Reblogging because you make some interesting points, and I'll add a part of what I mean by programmers being treated "better" than artists that you kinda made me realize.

As far as I can tell, programmers being treated as disposable cogs and their skills being undervalued is thought of by most people as a genuine injustice, whereas for artists it's thought of as normal and something to victim blame them over.

Like, this is perhaps antecdotal, but people with programming or engineering degrees being stuck working food service* is generally thought of as an outrage, a sign of the way society is wildly inefficient at allocating people and their skills.

But a trained artist being stuck in that same position is greeted with "Lol, shoulda got an engineering degree, burger-flipper."

The amount of people animated by the narrative of the struggling artist is actually very small, most normies think they have it coming, hence why there's such disproportionately high outrage from those animated by it, because most people outside of that were never outraged at their impoverishment, even before the AI boom percieved as "the final insult"

At least, that's from what I can see.

But also, you made one really good point I want to highlight:

Like, you did it! You broke down why neoliberalism's marketization of everything has created a world hostile to human life to its' bare essentials!

Now if only we can get artists united with programmers against that, instead of the wall of fear that is towards "tech bros"...

*Which is not a shameful job for the record, and not unskilled either, but those two facts are precisely why we should be getting people who are best at food service to do those jobs; not the people who are best at coding or painting

Bad news for everybody everywhere: Programmers often hold a mirror version of that exact same resentment towards softer subjects.

If I could understand why the current mindset is to imagine an unsuccessful artist and a successful engineer and then to try to decide which one is the bad guy I'd be able to crack open all of pop culture and politics.

Our wagons wheels have fallen right into the perfectly spaced ruts, but bad news, this road doesn't go anywhere. Perhaps by using that amazing piece of STEMlord technology, the lever, we can pull ourselves out and blaze a new trail.

@phaeton-flier

"And, while I will not pretend the differences in pay Software Engineers get is just and unquestionable, the reason they get so many more positions is that there's just more demand for software than there is art, relative to the number of people who want to be software engineers and artists,"

No, this is not quite right. You aren't comparing people who want to be programmers with people who want to be artists; you are comparing people who are programmers with people who want to be artists.

Society can also support only a limited number of engineers; the marginal engineer is not as needed as another cook, truck driver, miner, etc. but somehow this doesn't cash out to "Either capital throws scraps to engineers or a small elite get to be engineers and gate-keep the rest."

I'm actually fairly certain that the supply of people who want to work at, let's say, Google is quite high relative to Google's demand for programmers, but Google doesn't actually have demand for most of them. The number of people who Google actually wants to hire is low compared to Google's hiring demands, so Google engineers command high salaries (Modulo Google's demonstrated collusion with other tech companies to depress wages of course)

Compare: The number of people who want to be Jeff Koons is very high compared to the demand for gargantuan aluminum balloon animals; the number of people who are Jeff Koons is low compared to the demand for gargantuan aluminum balloon animals, so Koons commands incredible sums of money, even compared to most engineers.

So why is your archetypal artist the wannabe and your archetypal programmer the highly-paid engineer? Why not compare the multi-millionaire artist or film star to the guy who washed out of college while trying to get a computer science degree and works at McDonalds?

No, seriously, I am asking, this seems like a crucially important question that I do not know the answer to.

As a number of surly people have pointed out to me, in the market demand for a good is demand for a good at a certain price. Maybe you aren't in the market for a Ferrari now, but what if I offered to sell you a brand new one for ten bucks?

AI art (And programming) is likely to increase the demand for certain images, because the cost of producing those images will go down. People who have no demand for something at a cost of $50 might be happy to buy it at $10.

Unfortunately, if you sell your labor, rather than owning capital, you are in a very bad position to exploit the increase in demand that attends decrease in cost due to high supply.

If you make widgets in a widget factory and the price of widgets goes down, you can arbitrarily increase the number of widgets you make; if you provide man-hours of labor, and the price at which you sell a man-hour of labor goes down, you can't just produce arbitrarily more man-hours to compensate; there is a very low upper limit to the number you can provide.

My point is, what happens when all labor becomes low-skilled labor because AI makes it possible for anybody to make an image, or a computer program, or pilot a plane? Because all labor cashes out to "Tell the AI what it ought to do"?

How is this not seen as a giant fucking looming crisis for the capitalist economic system?

Pointing out that impoverished commie societies are unable to support a large number of artists, or even that society in general is limited in the number of artists it can support relative to fry cooks is pretty much entirely a non-sequitur given the actual dynamics at work and the actual threat.

So I'm a little tired of having people assume things I did not say in this thread; morlock I have great respect for you and it is a smaller assumption you made but it is irritating to have happen, especially the previous reblog by OP which among other things put words in my mouth actually said by their parents about their art career, that I did not say and do not believe.

My original point was in contrast to the final paragraph in OP, which I quoted. I'm not arguing that art doesn't have value or that artists or the poor should starve. I'm arguing against the idea that artists being poor and programmers being well-off is purely due to the whims of capital and little else.

It's silly, because among other things it implies the only thing we need to do to Fix Capitalism is replace the capitalists with nice capitalists. Which is not systemic thinking! These problems run deeper!

To answer your question, the reason programmers get paid more than artists, despite hypothetically equal desire to do either, is that there are less people who can do what's asked by programmers and more demand for them. And the opposite for artists: more people want to be hired to make art than there are jobs for artists. And so one gets paid more because she has a bunch of other companies she can work for if they don't pay her enough. And the other gets scraps because there's 5 other artists willing to do the same job.

Could a megacompany hire 200 graphic designers and sculptors and painters at 6 figures to make art, while offer pennies for a few programmers in the corner? Sure. And it would produce a lot of beautiful, worthy art and get alive by every other company that didn't because they had no programmers, because all of them preferred to work at the place that paid well and they had the option. Horrors of capitalism.

(Why am I comparing the median artist to the median programmer? Because that's apples to apples, who gives a shit how the richest programmer compares to the richest artist?)

Note that none of this me calling the system Just or Good or A Fact Of The World, or saying artists should get real jobs. Just pointing out that its not "the whims of capitalists" that professional artists are poor, it's the result of the incentives in the system.

And while many of those incentives can and should be changed, some parts of it don't disappear! In a just society, a janitor and a miner and a truck driver all have strong protections and respect and the ability to travel and study and laugh. And they all work few enough hours that they can rest and see friends and celebrate and dance and not come home 6 days a week drained of energy barely able to cook a shitty meal and sleep.

But even in a world where all of that is true, where no one is choosing between a boss that screams at them for not smiling enough and getting evicted, I think a lot more people will want to be artists that miners or truck drivers or janitors, because making art is pleasurable and it's a white collar job and involves much less cleaning up vomit.

No time for a long response, but you've misunderstood my objection fundamentally. Why does "Is it good that the worst paid artists who still constitute working artists are paid less than the worst paid programmers who still count themselves as working programmers" seem like the most obvious question in the world to us?

I'm going to assert that the highest paid, most in demand artists are paid significantly more than the highest paid, most in demand programmers.

Why does this fact feel irrelevant to us but the reverse feels like the most important issue in the world?

There are reasons, but it's a weird weird starting point.

Straight up I think Iran did a very good job of showing a ton of 'fuck you' force to establish credibility while not actually damaging Israel enough to justify any serious counterattack, and meanwhile signalled well they consider the matter resolved. Like this is a dumbshit game to play but most countries play it, once I accept the fallen world as is I think this is one of the better outcomes on the table.

Assuming Israel takes the hint of course and also backs down for the next few months, at least. Which they obviously might not do, because they are chucklefucks. Lets hope they think a 2 front war is enough for them to feel busy.

Getting 90-plus percent of your attack shot down by a multinational coalition that immediately formed against you doesn't really say "fuck you force".

If anything, it says the same thing as a guy sniffling in a bathroom stall, holding toilet paper to his bloody nose, telling himself that if he hadn't been holding back he'd totally have kicked that guy's ass but he didn't want to make the dude look bad and next time he'll really show him.

That is only if you use a very twisted lens! You have to focus on the means and goals. For one, this was by most estimates <1% of their stocks. You can't just throw 'hundreds' up like 'oooh its a lot', it means nothing outside of context. Instead what it showed is that Iran will respond heavily to future aggression - like how much do you think Israel and the US just spent in a single day defending against that? I dont know, but I bet it's measured in tens or hundreds of millions. They dont love that idea being repeated.

And ofc the main audience for all this is domestic and widespread international actors. It showed domestic audiences "we are taking this seriously" and international audiences "we will bite back if attacked" which is the rules of the game. But its other target is the US and Israel, which amusingly it wanted to tell "look lets end this here". So they did a big show but did little damage so the US & Israel dont have a big reason to counterattack while being able say "we are taking this seriously" to others.

(Like, Iran understands what the Iron Dome is. The outcome they got was within one standard deviation of the outcome they expected.)

But for sure its a gamble, Israel might go hard on the counterattack anyway for their own political reasons. We will see how that pays off in the end.

@theresponseblog

That's a really weird way to think about this. Iran's goal really clearly isn't to say, "Yo we could crush you easily if we wanted" it's to say, "There will be enough consequences on bombing our embassies that you should think twice about doing it in the future" and of course to tell domestic people that they've just said it.

Your metaphor is not so good because it plausibly applies to *any* response to an embassy bombing not aimed at provoking and winning an actual war.

Yeah it is in fact crucial that iran super super extremely does not want a war. Yall think they are fucking idiots? Israel has nukes and is backed by the US. That is a huge constraint on the action space, and the attack should be seen as the needle thread it is.

Honestly, that metaphor really bugs me because this principle holds even in the world of petty bar beef and high school bullying.

Some tough person gets up in your face and does something you don't like, dumps your books, whatever.

If you just go, "Gosh, getting into a fight with you would be really bad" then guess what? The bully keeps dumping your books.

You don't want to get into a fight with the guy, but you also don't want him to keep dumping your books, so your goal is to signal, "Things haven't escalated yet, but keep behaving that way and they will, and that will cost you as much as it would cost me."

"I don't want to escalate but I will if I have to and then neither of us will be happy" is an extremely valuable signal to be able to send in any kind of conflict, from the dumbest to the most consequential, and with Iran literally saying in almost as many words that this is what they are trying to do, I feel like it's reasonable to judge on those terms.

The issue is that you have to be a credible threat and not just this.

???

What, to your mind, would demonstrating that look like from the Iranian side, if the goal is to deter further attacks rather than get into a war with Israel?

We need to lay more blame for "Kids don't know how computers work" at the feet of the people responsible: Google.

Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.

Tech literacy didn't mysteriously vanish, it was fucking murdered for profit.

No, this was a simple case of the market supplying what buyers (schools) wanted:

Simplicity above all else.

Before Chromebooks, schools were full of Macs. Time was every school library and computer room was full of this guy, the iMac G3,

sometimes in color and other times in plain white. Because it was the simplest, easiest to configure, hardest to fuck up, least user-modifiable PC available. And it was available fairly cheap - not below cost, because they're not idiots (nor is Google), but for fairly low profit margins.

Then the Chromebook was developed, specifically for that market. I was on the Chromebook team for a while, and let me tell you, they were pushing for adoption in a hell of a lot more places than schools. But schools bought them, because they were even simpler to configure and even harder to fuck up than the Macs (and, relatedly, also cheaper). Many large companies were equally interested, because for large company purposes they are, just like at schools, obviously and massively superior, but due to principal-agent problems the people making the purchasing decisions stood to lose money if they switched*, so it was only the schools that could switch over easily.

No one was selling anything at a loss. No one was doing anything sinister. The market - specifically the many, many overworked and underpaid local school sysadmins - begged for something simpler, harder for kids to fuck up. And the foolproof way to keep kids from fucking up school hardware is to prevent them from modifying the software on that hardware. And so the market delivered.

Okay... This doesn't work for me because *why* did schools need closed off computers that students couldn't modify? Schools still, I believe, teach shop, or auto mechanics. You could think long and hard about how to teach kids about modifying computers, but for reasons it became very important that kids have, but not do things with, computers.

This is still a weird set of priorities in my opinion. Imagine cancelling auto shop and then issuing every student a free car with a locked hood that they weren't supposed to be able to look under. That would be awfully peculiar.

I guess a clearer way to phrase my objection is, if we don't want the students to use their computers, why are we spending a huge chunk of the school budget buying computers for them?

Never been able to understand that.

We need to lay more blame for "Kids don't know how computers work" at the feet of the people responsible: Google.

Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.

Tech literacy didn't mysteriously vanish, it was fucking murdered for profit.

No, this was a simple case of the market supplying what buyers (schools) wanted:

Simplicity above all else.

Before Chromebooks, schools were full of Macs. Time was every school library and computer room was full of this guy, the iMac G3,

sometimes in color and other times in plain white. Because it was the simplest, easiest to configure, hardest to fuck up, least user-modifiable PC available. And it was available fairly cheap - not below cost, because they're not idiots (nor is Google), but for fairly low profit margins.

Then the Chromebook was developed, specifically for that market. I was on the Chromebook team for a while, and let me tell you, they were pushing for adoption in a hell of a lot more places than schools. But schools bought them, because they were even simpler to configure and even harder to fuck up than the Macs (and, relatedly, also cheaper). Many large companies were equally interested, because for large company purposes they are, just like at schools, obviously and massively superior, but due to principal-agent problems the people making the purchasing decisions stood to lose money if they switched*, so it was only the schools that could switch over easily.

No one was selling anything at a loss. No one was doing anything sinister. The market - specifically the many, many overworked and underpaid local school sysadmins - begged for something simpler, harder for kids to fuck up. And the foolproof way to keep kids from fucking up school hardware is to prevent them from modifying the software on that hardware. And so the market delivered.

Okay... This doesn't work for me because *why* did schools need closed off computers that students couldn't modify? Schools still, I believe, teach shop, or auto mechanics. You could think long and hard about how to teach kids about modifying computers, but for reasons it became very important that kids have, but not do things with, computers.

This is still a weird set of priorities in my opinion. Imagine cancelling auto shop and then issuing every student a free car with a locked hood that they weren't supposed to be able to look under. That would be awfully peculiar.