We have ombudsmen for various industries in the UK. They can award small amounts of compensation, but rarely fix primary problems. Toothless watchdogs!
Yes, you’ve persuaded me that your country has its administrative problems too, but I still think you have better systems in place to resolve them, fewer perverse incentives and more national cohesion. You’ve got Hilary Cass, Kemi Badenoch, Hannah Barnes, and so many others, while we’ve still got Rachel Levine giving keynote addresses to the nation’s pediatricians, for example.
That's a good point; I don't know of a major British politician who would make a public declaration in support of medical and surgical interventions on gender-incongruent children. Daley Thompson is interesting on the sports question. He's a black British Olympian and household name here, with nothing to gain by stating that sex is real, but he's made a public declaration all the same.
“The value of Sage as an AI rather than a software program will be her capacity to integrate new information and behave as a continually self-correcting institution would.”
I assume you realize that, at this point, AI does not have that capacity. AIs (especially LLMs, the AIs to which we are most exposed) don’t really “integrate information” or “self-correct” in the sense of understanding their inputs and outputs. There’s a huge garbage in, garbage out problem with AI. LLMs’ inability to “think” is evident if you give them even a simple math problem— the output is often nonsense. Put another way, they have no judgment, no discernment, no common sense. (Of course, the same can be said for many people…)
You’ve exposed my kindergarten level IQ in all aspects of STEM! I kind of know about generative AI being the holy grail, that it’s a Pandora’s box and that’s it’s not here yet, which is probably a good thing. I really just want Sage to demonstrate the utility of saying what’s true, to expose the spineless and the captured for their harmful deceptions — to shake us awake, like a robot messiah, then step back and let us figure out how to clean up. Maybe she’s more of a ‘function’ or a ‘platform’ — but if she’s going to get the necessary attention and buy-in, those words won’t impress the marketing team, lol! She’s early-stage, what can I say?
Maybe the problem isn't that we need AI or any other technology to improve upon our government. Maybe the problem is government itself/ (Govern - control, ment = mind; the problem is spelled out in the word itself). Maybe the problem is that a feature of government, rather than a bug, is that it attracts people who believe they know better than the rest of us how things should be run, and then grows their hubris and egos and even narcissistic tendencies in ways we non-governments can't comprehend. And are there captured and stupid humans/ of course. But how do we prevent those very people from getting into government.
Maybe the real problem is that government is designed to promote propaganda and needs stupid and captured humans to keep itself alive and growing, devouring everything good and creative in its path. Maybe the tiny little differences between teams Red and Blue are so minor as to be irrelevant in the long run, and the illusion of control or participation we get by periodically choosing between Red and Blue is part of the stupefying and capture of the humans.
Imagine the trans agenda being so far along as it is today without government. It's unlikely we would see the sweeping capture of so many Americans, people who care deeply and are trying to be compassionate and inclusive,, without government propaganda. It's unlikely so many families would be ripped apart without government interference. Abolition of the family is a crucial part of the agenda, after all.
Your idea about Sage is good, but the consensus you imagine that would be necessary for it to succeed would never happen. And even if it did happen, there are plenty of people who would say it was rigged. Maybe it's time to focus on raising our collective consciousness past the point of feeling like we need any outside authority to tell us how to live, what's right and wrong, how to treat each other, etc. Relying on any technology, no matter how good or advanced it is, and relying on government and its illusory authority, automatically invalidates our own internal experience, wisdom, and responsibility. And no matter who is in charge, that's a recipe for disaster.
You sound like someone who’s been reading Orwell, as we all should. I’m reading Steven Pinker at the moment so I’m much more bullish on organized societies and esp participatory democracy as the formula for peace and prosperity. Self-regulation only works if everyone is honest and good; also, we’re designed for community. I think government is the baby, not the bathwater, and we should figure out how to filter the water so baby stays clean. (It’s a tortured metaphor, but I kind of like it!)
"When the Democratic Party dedicated itself to instantiating the unabridged wish list of ‘trans’ activism, it slowly backed its adherents into a corner where the conditions are incompatible with political survival." Wow. Something good came out of your bout with the black death. Also nailing the erosion of trust--yes.
> "The ombudsman will be an Artificial Intelligence bot. ... A group of top programmers will build a prototype AI Ombudsman. I propose naming it 'Sage.' ..."
I wonder if you're familiar with the Jewish folklore tale of the golem which many have drawn parallels to in AI:
Available on Amazon and the like, but also available on the net in PDF, not that I've more than skimmed it -- the theme and outline, which he had addressed before in his Human Use of Human Beings, being "disconcerting" enough:
As for Dawkins Himself 😉🙂, while I don't want to tarnish his reputation (much), you may want to take a gander at a recent if brief conversation I had with him:
Steersman— you keep coming back to this notion that prepubescent children are sexless because they do not produce functional gametes.
May I ask, then, what you think of the terms “girl” and “boy”? Do they, or do they not, refer to a meaningful distinction between two categories of children?
Of course there's such a "meaningful distinction", there's an objective and quantifiable difference between members of those two categories: as the Kindergarten Cop movie put it, girls have vaginas and boys have penises. Though the more fundamental difference, though not as easily detected at least for girls, is that girls have ovaries and boys have testicles -- but they're not functional until the onset of puberty.
But it's not just me who's promoting that "notion". For example, US "biologist" PZ Myers has argued that many "cis women" don't qualify as females because their ovaries are no longer functional -- though I don't have that tweet of his close at hand.
And see this article in the Wiley Online Library by a trio of biologists which endorses that view:
Wiley: "For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET." (my emphasis)
No "reproductive competence", no sex category membership card.
The problem is generally that "vagina-haver" and "penis-haver" have become synonymous with "female" and "male", largely because that is the only trait detected at birth used to "assign" a sex to babies. Causes no end of problems -- "Change your genitalia, change your sex! Act now! Offer ends soon! 🙄"
For some elaborations on those themes, you in particular might want to take a close look at my open letter to the erstwhile reputable biological journal "Cell" which had asked, apparently in all seriousness, "Is 'sex' a useful category?":
Ok, let me try this another way (though I have a feeling I'll regret re-engaging, but hey, if Richard Dawkins tried more than once, so can I).
Looks like we agree that it is possible to distinguish between girls and boys.
And, I think you would acknowledge that every adult human female (or reproductively competent woman) was once a girl. No boy has grown up to be female. Girls are born with ovaries (and ova, for that matter) and, if all goes well, will start releasing those ova once a month or so after menarche.
Similarly, every adult human male (or reproductively competent man) was once a boy. No girl has ever grown up to be male. Boys are born with testes and, if all goes well, will start producing spermatozoa at spermarche (which I didn't know was a word till I looked it up just now).
And you do use the term "sex" to distinguish between egg-producers (members of the female sex category) and sperm-producers (members of the male sex category).
I'm trying to understand why, then, you so vehemently insist that girls and boys are "sexless" before puberty. Are you really, truly, saying that it is incorrect to say that girls are female and boys are male? Does that not further play into the hands of the trans rights activists, who seem to think that puberty is optional and can be blocked and even redirected through cross-sex hormones? Wouldn't it be right up their alley to say that children are sexless, malleable beings that can become either male or female, or neither ("non-binary")?
I understand using the term "sexless" for sequential hermaphrodites, to accurately denote the phase where they are producing neither ova nor spermatozoa. But for humans, which, like other mammals (and unlike certain species of fish), do not undergo sequential hermaphrotidism, this seems at best pedantic, at worst problematic for the reasons I set out in the previous paragraph.
I commend your tenacity and your courage to throw your shield to the wind and to cross swords on the issue ... 😉🙂
And I very much appreciate that you at least took a gander at my conversation with Dawkins. Though you might weigh-in there as it might lead him to likewise take the bull by the horns -- my comments were something of a shot across his bow.
But I kind of think you answered your own question -- "Wouldn't it be right up [the TRA's] alley to say that children are sexless, malleable beings that can become either male or female, or neither ('non-binary')?" -- with your own "No girl has ever grown up to be male". And that's because there's no way, on gawd's green earth, that any transwoman will EVER have ANY "functional" ovaries of his own since they don't have any ovaries to begin with. Kind of the precursor to having functional gonads of either of two types is to have the non-functional variety first -- e.g., the prepubescent.
But a couple of related points that may be of some relevance. First, you say:
"Girls are born with ovaries (and ova, for that matter) ..."
Gametogenesis -- the creation of sperm or ova -- seems one of the more complicated processes in the human body, in any anisogamous species for that matter. Although it may be somewhat more complicated in females since there's typically an extra step or two -- why the human ova is some 100,000 times the size of the human sperm cell:
But it seems that that process doesn't really complete until the onset of puberty, and baby XXers are born only with several million "ootids" that don't fully mature until ovulation -- one or two a month:
But baby XYers start cranking out some "200 to 300 million spermatozoa daily", likewise after the onset of puberty. I like to think of it as the difference between building one or two Ferraris a month versus cranking out thousands of Volkswagens every day ... 😉🙂 Quality versus quantity, though there's some reason to argue that the total resources required in each case is about the same.
Secondly, your comment about "all going well" -- i.e., "Boys are born with testes and, if all goes well, will start producing spermatozoa at spermarche (which I didn't know was a word till I looked it up just now)."
👍 Learn something new every day, another word to add to my vocabulary. 🙂
But a phrase that feminist philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith had once used in a Medium post -- before being defenestrated there for running afoul of various transloonie thugs:
Lawford-Smith: "But it’s far from clear that we should accept the ‘not male’ part of the reasoning. It’s not as though every male person is such that he actually produces sperm. The best way to understand the ‘sperm or ova’ binary is that it’s true all going well. Of course an individual man could end up with testicular cancer and have to have his testicles removed. Does that mean he’s no longer male? Of course not. He’s the kind of individual who, all going well, produces sperm. He’s not the kind of individual who, all going well, produces ova. There’s no reason why we should treat the person who loses the capacity to produce sperm involuntarily any differently from the person who loses the capacity to produce sperm voluntarily."
Which I suggested was rather intellectually dishonest and a case of motivated reasoning in my own Medium article:
Steersman: "So, she, in effect, argues that there is some wooish, je ne sais quoi element that leaps into the fray, a philosophical Deus ex machina, that miraculously rescues such sadly 'de-nutted' individuals from the shame and ignominy of no longer qualifying as members of that other exalted category, 'males'. .... But Lawford-Smith’s argument there rather looks like postulating that some *other* category — the 'all going well' category? — has a significant role to play, elements of which are somehow magically capable of bestowing category membership absent the one that supposedly provided the 'single necessary condition'. ...."
She might just as well have argued that, "all going well", all babies -- of either "potential" sex -- are still teenagers, right from birth, since they might eventually become people between the ages of 13 and 19. It is the presence of an actual property -- age range or the presence of functional gonads -- that is the criterion for category membership. Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright once tweeted support for that view, even if it was somewhat poorly phrased:
Finally, I can at least sympathize with your "this seems at best pedantic". We might reasonably say that baby XXers and XYers are at least "nominally" or "potentially" female and male, in name only. But there's a great deal of merit, at least in comparative or descriptive biology, to know, and say, exactly what it takes to qualify as male and female. You in particular might appreciate a PhilPapers Archive article by philosopher of science Paul Griffiths on "What are biological sexes?" which discusses the concept of "prospective narration" to cover that case:
Griffiths: "Assigning sexes to pre-reproductive life-history stages involves ‘prospective narration’ – classifying the present in terms of its anticipated future. Assigning sexes to adult stages of non-reproductive castes or non-reproductive individuals is a complex matter whose biological meaning differs from case to case."
It seems that much of the transgender issue turns on defining exactly what it takes to qualify as male and female. And only the standard biological definitions have anything in the way of solid principles and brute biological facts to justify them.
Well, I’m going to respectfully point out that saying babies are teenagers from birth because “all going well” they’ll get there isn’t a good analogy, because teenagerhood is by definition contingent on being a certain age.
Looks like “baby XXers” (girls) being “nominally” female and “baby XYers” being “nominally” male is as close as we’re going to get on agreeing on terminology.
It still seems to me that insisting that non-reproductively-competent humans cannot be definitively placed into a sex category comes too close to agreeing with the TRAs who use the existence of sequential hermaphroditism in other species to muddy the waters regarding sex categorization in humans. You insist (correctly) that humans cannot change sex — but then you undermine your argument by saying that we DO change from sexless to sexed (and in some cases back again). You’ve said (correctly) that men cannot become women by means of surgical intervention (removing the male genitalia, creating a neovagina) but then you say men stop being male when they are “de-nutted.” So by your logic, a castrated man and a post-menopausal woman are in the same category—sexless? (Along with those sexless boys and girls?) Or perhaps you could at least acknowledge them as “formerly” male and female, respectively, reflecting a real sex-dependent difference between them.
Personally, I’m going to stand by my position that human beings are either male or female, from conception to death, depending on whether the sperm in question had a Y chromosome or not. (And I am not going to go down the rabbit hole of DSDs, which I think we both know are very rare — with truly ambiguous intersex conditions being vanishingly rare, far rarer than the trans activists would have us all think.)
Of course, at the end of the day, none of this discourse is going to move the needle on gender identity politics — because we are trying to talk biology here, i.e., sex, and the trans activists will just flip the narrative and talk about “gender” instead — whatever the heck that is. (I have yet to see a definition that isn’t circular, based on stereotypes, or both.) But that’s a discussion for another day.
PhDBiologist: "... because teenagerhood is by definition contingent on being a certain age."
Sure. But that is the same thing with "bachelor" and "male" and "female". Bit of a fine philosophical point, though a crucial one on how definitions work, at least in a logical or scientific context:
Wikipedia: "An intensional definition gives meaning to a term by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for when the term should be used. In the case of nouns, this is equivalent to specifying the properties that an object needs to have in order to be counted as a referent of the term."
The property that a person must have to be counted as a referent of the term "teenager" is "being 13 to 19". As the property that a person, or any anisogamous organism, must have to be counted as a referent of the terms "male" or "female" is "produces small gametes" or "produces large gametes".
PhDBiologist: "... then you undermine your argument by saying that we DO change from sexless to sexed (and in some cases back again)."
Not quite sure how you reach that conclusion, though it seems predicated on a common misperception that "sexless" is somehow a sex, that everyone has to have a sex from conception to death, that "male" and "female" are "exhaustive" categories. For example and generally speaking, we all manage to pass from the "teenager-less" category, then into the "teenager" one, and then out again into the "teenager-less" category, all without too much grief or lasting PTSD. Griffiths had an Aeon article that you might also appreciate where he emphasizes that and related points:
PhDBiologist: "Or perhaps you could at least acknowledge them as “formerly” male and female, respectively, reflecting a real sex-dependent difference between them."
Sure, no problemo on the "formerly". 👍🙂 But not sure what you mean by a "sex-dependent difference". There are certainly physiological differences between the "former males" and "former females" -- notably genitalia and karyotype -- but they are, technically speaking at least, still sexless -- THAT is what is meant by "formerly". For example, "dead" but "formerly alive" most certainly isn't "still alive" ... 😉🙂
PhDBiologist: "I’m going to stand by my position that human beings are either male or female, from conception to death, depending on whether the sperm in question had a Y chromosome or not."
Kinda think you're using Y chromosomes as an "operational definition" -- you might take a gander at what Griffiths has to say on the topic in his PhilPapers Archive paper. Has some rough-and-ready utility, but it loses the "essence" of what it means to be male and female in the first place -- i.e., having the ability to reproduce because of the presence of certain types of gametes.
PhDBiologist: "... none of this discourse is going to move the needle on gender identity politics ..."
May be some truth to that, though I still think, Griffiths thinks according to his PhilPapers article, that the biological definitions are the line in the sand:
Griffiths: "Nevertheless, [evolutionary biologist and transwoman Joan Roughgarden] sees the conventional definition of the sexes as undermining rather than reinforcing the projection of cultural norms of gender onto biology. Like Roughgarden, I think the biological definition of sex is part of the solution, not part of the problem."
PhDBiologist: "I have yet to see a definition [for gender] that isn’t circular, based on stereotypes, or both."
Bit of a dog's breakfast, but try thinking of it as a set of sexually dimorphic personality traits, a view that has some currency and scientific justifications. For example, see my "A Multi-Dimensional Gender Spectrum":
"In their lexicons, 'gender' generally refers to sexually dimorphic — i.e., feminine and masculine — behaviours, personalities, and stereotypes typical of, but not unique to, human males and females, whereas 'sex' generally refers only to a very limited subset of reproductive abilities or aspects thereof."
The flu has been rebranded. As with trans, contagion is not what we’ve been conditioned to believe….feel better…but know it’s probably organic to your body and environment and not a collective phenomena. More a detox of biology. Your body healing itself from local insults. Xo
I'm curious to hear more about why you find Harari so compelling. I must admit that my experience is more of a heebe-jeeby kind a thing due to my larger discomfort with the transhumanism which seems to be the endpoint of all technological innovations of late....
I found Sapiens pretty engrossing, and I like listening to Harari talk. My idea of helpful technology right now is filling gaps left by stupid or captured humans where the gaps are causing catastrophic problems, but I resist self-checkout at the grocery store because that’s a job humans do better than machines. That’s 1000x true of human reproduction, so I think we’re in sync on the big questions. Sage would be a better ethical compass than my governor, congressman or senators; but she’s no handmaid.
Isn't any "helpful technology" beyond mechanical automation a slippery slope? Robots were supposed to clean our houses and do our dishes, freeing up humans to pursue our creative endeavors of art, writing, music, etc. The narrative has been flipped and putting the genie back in the bottle is pretty much impossible at this point. I'm no Luddite and love my iphone and computer and the many luxuries I am fortunate enough to own. But as with so many things, just because we can doesn't mean we should. and it's interesting that you think a computer has better ethics than your "representatives". Do you think we should put AI in place of government and defer to somebody else's computer rather than our own human intuition? Can AI have compassion as well as ethics?
These are honest questions. AI is here to stay, and my partner often discuss the role of AI in our children's education and other endeavors. I think it's a wonderful tool. And I also think we need to be aware of the limitations and have these discussions before more genies we didn't consider are running around creating havoc we didn't want or intenf.
Glad you were able to gather strength and wisdom and humor from your fever. I think AI can be useful but I fear that the input will be too skewed for the truth to prevail. The idea of a neutral repsoitory for information and analysis is certainly compelling though!
What I think may happen (best case scenario) with respect to the current gender-based insanity and evil that may rid us of it is that at some point, it will be too obvious to too many people how insane it all is. At that point, people will begin to distance themselves from it and slowly back away from “pronouns,”’”gender affirming care,” and men in women’s spaces.
A few years down the line from that, it will be like it never happened - except for the many thousands of scarred and hurting detransitioners and confused “trans” people realizing they can never really go back and that society does not truly believe they are the opposite sex, the families that have been gutted and traumatized, and the women who have been raped in jail or who have lost opportunities in sports.
The Democratic Party will surely pretend it had nothing to do with all of that - although the Republicans Party will occasionally throw it in their faces.
I know this is far from what you were writing about, but it’s where my mind went when I read it.
I agree with your prognosis, and the fallout is never far from my thoughts. What's so hard to stomach is that the science IS settled, the experiment was an abject disaster, and yet the charlatans are going to take down as many additional victims as they can get their hands on before the last plane leaves Saigon. Some of them must have known from the start that it was a multi-level marketing scam that only had a chance if enough victims were recruited. 'Sage' is a hail-Mary fantasy of pulling aside the curtain (last metaphor, promise!) before they grab one more poor sucker. I'm a little extra riled up after listening to Exulansic's devastating post this afternoon, about a butchered kid who left candid Yelp reviews for each of the monsters who 'treated' him, then committed suicide. Sorry to leave it there. :(
Well stated and I agree 100%. My frustration with the people I voted for and the army of captured servants of trans ideology throughout our institutions — they are key —is their inability to say what they know to be true, even though they can see the harm it’s doing. If the genie is out as you say, why not get the max benefit from what it does well? Politicians are pros at compassion; it’s courage and honesty they lack. Sage wouldn’t! Finally, my argument curbs her power, keeping it subordinate to humans’ when it comes to taking action. She would tell us the truth based on evidence, then sit quietly while we decide what to do about it. Thanks for the great comment!
We have ombudsmen for various industries in the UK. They can award small amounts of compensation, but rarely fix primary problems. Toothless watchdogs!
Yes, you’ve persuaded me that your country has its administrative problems too, but I still think you have better systems in place to resolve them, fewer perverse incentives and more national cohesion. You’ve got Hilary Cass, Kemi Badenoch, Hannah Barnes, and so many others, while we’ve still got Rachel Levine giving keynote addresses to the nation’s pediatricians, for example.
That's a good point; I don't know of a major British politician who would make a public declaration in support of medical and surgical interventions on gender-incongruent children. Daley Thompson is interesting on the sports question. He's a black British Olympian and household name here, with nothing to gain by stating that sex is real, but he's made a public declaration all the same.
“The value of Sage as an AI rather than a software program will be her capacity to integrate new information and behave as a continually self-correcting institution would.”
I assume you realize that, at this point, AI does not have that capacity. AIs (especially LLMs, the AIs to which we are most exposed) don’t really “integrate information” or “self-correct” in the sense of understanding their inputs and outputs. There’s a huge garbage in, garbage out problem with AI. LLMs’ inability to “think” is evident if you give them even a simple math problem— the output is often nonsense. Put another way, they have no judgment, no discernment, no common sense. (Of course, the same can be said for many people…)
It’s a nice (fever) dream, though.
You’ve exposed my kindergarten level IQ in all aspects of STEM! I kind of know about generative AI being the holy grail, that it’s a Pandora’s box and that’s it’s not here yet, which is probably a good thing. I really just want Sage to demonstrate the utility of saying what’s true, to expose the spineless and the captured for their harmful deceptions — to shake us awake, like a robot messiah, then step back and let us figure out how to clean up. Maybe she’s more of a ‘function’ or a ‘platform’ — but if she’s going to get the necessary attention and buy-in, those words won’t impress the marketing team, lol! She’s early-stage, what can I say?
Maybe the problem isn't that we need AI or any other technology to improve upon our government. Maybe the problem is government itself/ (Govern - control, ment = mind; the problem is spelled out in the word itself). Maybe the problem is that a feature of government, rather than a bug, is that it attracts people who believe they know better than the rest of us how things should be run, and then grows their hubris and egos and even narcissistic tendencies in ways we non-governments can't comprehend. And are there captured and stupid humans/ of course. But how do we prevent those very people from getting into government.
Maybe the real problem is that government is designed to promote propaganda and needs stupid and captured humans to keep itself alive and growing, devouring everything good and creative in its path. Maybe the tiny little differences between teams Red and Blue are so minor as to be irrelevant in the long run, and the illusion of control or participation we get by periodically choosing between Red and Blue is part of the stupefying and capture of the humans.
Imagine the trans agenda being so far along as it is today without government. It's unlikely we would see the sweeping capture of so many Americans, people who care deeply and are trying to be compassionate and inclusive,, without government propaganda. It's unlikely so many families would be ripped apart without government interference. Abolition of the family is a crucial part of the agenda, after all.
Your idea about Sage is good, but the consensus you imagine that would be necessary for it to succeed would never happen. And even if it did happen, there are plenty of people who would say it was rigged. Maybe it's time to focus on raising our collective consciousness past the point of feeling like we need any outside authority to tell us how to live, what's right and wrong, how to treat each other, etc. Relying on any technology, no matter how good or advanced it is, and relying on government and its illusory authority, automatically invalidates our own internal experience, wisdom, and responsibility. And no matter who is in charge, that's a recipe for disaster.
You sound like someone who’s been reading Orwell, as we all should. I’m reading Steven Pinker at the moment so I’m much more bullish on organized societies and esp participatory democracy as the formula for peace and prosperity. Self-regulation only works if everyone is honest and good; also, we’re designed for community. I think government is the baby, not the bathwater, and we should figure out how to filter the water so baby stays clean. (It’s a tortured metaphor, but I kind of like it!)
Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
"When the Democratic Party dedicated itself to instantiating the unabridged wish list of ‘trans’ activism, it slowly backed its adherents into a corner where the conditions are incompatible with political survival." Wow. Something good came out of your bout with the black death. Also nailing the erosion of trust--yes.
Thanks for reading, Sarah. I love that you quoted my favorite sentence!❤️
> "The ombudsman will be an Artificial Intelligence bot. ... A group of top programmers will build a prototype AI Ombudsman. I propose naming it 'Sage.' ..."
I wonder if you're familiar with the Jewish folklore tale of the golem which many have drawn parallels to in AI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem
For examples, see David Cole's article at Taki magazine:
https://www.takimag.com/article/stop-with-the-golems-already/
For a more thorough elaboration, see Norbert Wiener's "God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_%26_Golem,_Inc.
Available on Amazon and the like, but also available on the net in PDF, not that I've more than skimmed it -- the theme and outline, which he had addressed before in his Human Use of Human Beings, being "disconcerting" enough:
https://monoskop.org/images/1/1f/Wiener_Norbert_God_and_Golem_A_Comment_on_Certain_Points_where_Cybernetics_Impinges_on_Religion.pdf
As for Dawkins Himself 😉🙂, while I don't want to tarnish his reputation (much), you may want to take a gander at a recent if brief conversation I had with him:
https://richarddawkins.substack.com/p/the-delegates-tale/comment/66131750
Steersman— you keep coming back to this notion that prepubescent children are sexless because they do not produce functional gametes.
May I ask, then, what you think of the terms “girl” and “boy”? Do they, or do they not, refer to a meaningful distinction between two categories of children?
Of course there's such a "meaningful distinction", there's an objective and quantifiable difference between members of those two categories: as the Kindergarten Cop movie put it, girls have vaginas and boys have penises. Though the more fundamental difference, though not as easily detected at least for girls, is that girls have ovaries and boys have testicles -- but they're not functional until the onset of puberty.
But it's not just me who's promoting that "notion". For example, US "biologist" PZ Myers has argued that many "cis women" don't qualify as females because their ovaries are no longer functional -- though I don't have that tweet of his close at hand.
And see this article in the Wiley Online Library by a trio of biologists which endorses that view:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202200173?af=R
Wiley: "For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET." (my emphasis)
No "reproductive competence", no sex category membership card.
The problem is generally that "vagina-haver" and "penis-haver" have become synonymous with "female" and "male", largely because that is the only trait detected at birth used to "assign" a sex to babies. Causes no end of problems -- "Change your genitalia, change your sex! Act now! Offer ends soon! 🙄"
For some elaborations on those themes, you in particular might want to take a close look at my open letter to the erstwhile reputable biological journal "Cell" which had asked, apparently in all seriousness, "Is 'sex' a useful category?":
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/is-sex-a-useful-category
Ok, let me try this another way (though I have a feeling I'll regret re-engaging, but hey, if Richard Dawkins tried more than once, so can I).
Looks like we agree that it is possible to distinguish between girls and boys.
And, I think you would acknowledge that every adult human female (or reproductively competent woman) was once a girl. No boy has grown up to be female. Girls are born with ovaries (and ova, for that matter) and, if all goes well, will start releasing those ova once a month or so after menarche.
Similarly, every adult human male (or reproductively competent man) was once a boy. No girl has ever grown up to be male. Boys are born with testes and, if all goes well, will start producing spermatozoa at spermarche (which I didn't know was a word till I looked it up just now).
And you do use the term "sex" to distinguish between egg-producers (members of the female sex category) and sperm-producers (members of the male sex category).
I'm trying to understand why, then, you so vehemently insist that girls and boys are "sexless" before puberty. Are you really, truly, saying that it is incorrect to say that girls are female and boys are male? Does that not further play into the hands of the trans rights activists, who seem to think that puberty is optional and can be blocked and even redirected through cross-sex hormones? Wouldn't it be right up their alley to say that children are sexless, malleable beings that can become either male or female, or neither ("non-binary")?
I understand using the term "sexless" for sequential hermaphrodites, to accurately denote the phase where they are producing neither ova nor spermatozoa. But for humans, which, like other mammals (and unlike certain species of fish), do not undergo sequential hermaphrotidism, this seems at best pedantic, at worst problematic for the reasons I set out in the previous paragraph.
"Before my body I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff, And damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!' ":
https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=macbeth&Act=5&Scene=8&Scope=scene
I commend your tenacity and your courage to throw your shield to the wind and to cross swords on the issue ... 😉🙂
And I very much appreciate that you at least took a gander at my conversation with Dawkins. Though you might weigh-in there as it might lead him to likewise take the bull by the horns -- my comments were something of a shot across his bow.
But I kind of think you answered your own question -- "Wouldn't it be right up [the TRA's] alley to say that children are sexless, malleable beings that can become either male or female, or neither ('non-binary')?" -- with your own "No girl has ever grown up to be male". And that's because there's no way, on gawd's green earth, that any transwoman will EVER have ANY "functional" ovaries of his own since they don't have any ovaries to begin with. Kind of the precursor to having functional gonads of either of two types is to have the non-functional variety first -- e.g., the prepubescent.
But a couple of related points that may be of some relevance. First, you say:
"Girls are born with ovaries (and ova, for that matter) ..."
Gametogenesis -- the creation of sperm or ova -- seems one of the more complicated processes in the human body, in any anisogamous species for that matter. Although it may be somewhat more complicated in females since there's typically an extra step or two -- why the human ova is some 100,000 times the size of the human sperm cell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gametogenesis
But it seems that that process doesn't really complete until the onset of puberty, and baby XXers are born only with several million "ootids" that don't fully mature until ovulation -- one or two a month:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oogenesis#Ootidogenesis
But baby XYers start cranking out some "200 to 300 million spermatozoa daily", likewise after the onset of puberty. I like to think of it as the difference between building one or two Ferraris a month versus cranking out thousands of Volkswagens every day ... 😉🙂 Quality versus quantity, though there's some reason to argue that the total resources required in each case is about the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spermatogenesis#Duration
Secondly, your comment about "all going well" -- i.e., "Boys are born with testes and, if all goes well, will start producing spermatozoa at spermarche (which I didn't know was a word till I looked it up just now)."
👍 Learn something new every day, another word to add to my vocabulary. 🙂
But a phrase that feminist philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith had once used in a Medium post -- before being defenestrated there for running afoul of various transloonie thugs:
https://medium.com/@aytchellis/is-it-possible-to-change-sex-8d863ce7fca2
https://web.archive.org/web/20190502004710/https://medium.com/@aytchellis/is-it-possible-to-change-sex-8d863ce7fca2
Lawford-Smith: "But it’s far from clear that we should accept the ‘not male’ part of the reasoning. It’s not as though every male person is such that he actually produces sperm. The best way to understand the ‘sperm or ova’ binary is that it’s true all going well. Of course an individual man could end up with testicular cancer and have to have his testicles removed. Does that mean he’s no longer male? Of course not. He’s the kind of individual who, all going well, produces sperm. He’s not the kind of individual who, all going well, produces ova. There’s no reason why we should treat the person who loses the capacity to produce sperm involuntarily any differently from the person who loses the capacity to produce sperm voluntarily."
Which I suggested was rather intellectually dishonest and a case of motivated reasoning in my own Medium article:
Steersman: "So, she, in effect, argues that there is some wooish, je ne sais quoi element that leaps into the fray, a philosophical Deus ex machina, that miraculously rescues such sadly 'de-nutted' individuals from the shame and ignominy of no longer qualifying as members of that other exalted category, 'males'. .... But Lawford-Smith’s argument there rather looks like postulating that some *other* category — the 'all going well' category? — has a significant role to play, elements of which are somehow magically capable of bestowing category membership absent the one that supposedly provided the 'single necessary condition'. ...."
https://medium.com/@steersmann/reality-and-illusion-being-vs-identifying-as-77f9618b17c7
She might just as well have argued that, "all going well", all babies -- of either "potential" sex -- are still teenagers, right from birth, since they might eventually become people between the ages of 13 and 19. It is the presence of an actual property -- age range or the presence of functional gonads -- that is the criterion for category membership. Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright once tweeted support for that view, even if it was somewhat poorly phrased:
https://x.com/SwipeWright/status/1240781010800979968
Finally, I can at least sympathize with your "this seems at best pedantic". We might reasonably say that baby XXers and XYers are at least "nominally" or "potentially" female and male, in name only. But there's a great deal of merit, at least in comparative or descriptive biology, to know, and say, exactly what it takes to qualify as male and female. You in particular might appreciate a PhilPapers Archive article by philosopher of science Paul Griffiths on "What are biological sexes?" which discusses the concept of "prospective narration" to cover that case:
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
Griffiths: "Assigning sexes to pre-reproductive life-history stages involves ‘prospective narration’ – classifying the present in terms of its anticipated future. Assigning sexes to adult stages of non-reproductive castes or non-reproductive individuals is a complex matter whose biological meaning differs from case to case."
It seems that much of the transgender issue turns on defining exactly what it takes to qualify as male and female. And only the standard biological definitions have anything in the way of solid principles and brute biological facts to justify them.
Well, I’m going to respectfully point out that saying babies are teenagers from birth because “all going well” they’ll get there isn’t a good analogy, because teenagerhood is by definition contingent on being a certain age.
Looks like “baby XXers” (girls) being “nominally” female and “baby XYers” being “nominally” male is as close as we’re going to get on agreeing on terminology.
It still seems to me that insisting that non-reproductively-competent humans cannot be definitively placed into a sex category comes too close to agreeing with the TRAs who use the existence of sequential hermaphroditism in other species to muddy the waters regarding sex categorization in humans. You insist (correctly) that humans cannot change sex — but then you undermine your argument by saying that we DO change from sexless to sexed (and in some cases back again). You’ve said (correctly) that men cannot become women by means of surgical intervention (removing the male genitalia, creating a neovagina) but then you say men stop being male when they are “de-nutted.” So by your logic, a castrated man and a post-menopausal woman are in the same category—sexless? (Along with those sexless boys and girls?) Or perhaps you could at least acknowledge them as “formerly” male and female, respectively, reflecting a real sex-dependent difference between them.
Personally, I’m going to stand by my position that human beings are either male or female, from conception to death, depending on whether the sperm in question had a Y chromosome or not. (And I am not going to go down the rabbit hole of DSDs, which I think we both know are very rare — with truly ambiguous intersex conditions being vanishingly rare, far rarer than the trans activists would have us all think.)
Of course, at the end of the day, none of this discourse is going to move the needle on gender identity politics — because we are trying to talk biology here, i.e., sex, and the trans activists will just flip the narrative and talk about “gender” instead — whatever the heck that is. (I have yet to see a definition that isn’t circular, based on stereotypes, or both.) But that’s a discussion for another day.
PhDBiologist: "... because teenagerhood is by definition contingent on being a certain age."
Sure. But that is the same thing with "bachelor" and "male" and "female". Bit of a fine philosophical point, though a crucial one on how definitions work, at least in a logical or scientific context:
Wikipedia: "An intensional definition gives meaning to a term by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for when the term should be used. In the case of nouns, this is equivalent to specifying the properties that an object needs to have in order to be counted as a referent of the term."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_definitions
The property that a person must have to be counted as a referent of the term "teenager" is "being 13 to 19". As the property that a person, or any anisogamous organism, must have to be counted as a referent of the terms "male" or "female" is "produces small gametes" or "produces large gametes".
PhDBiologist: "... then you undermine your argument by saying that we DO change from sexless to sexed (and in some cases back again)."
Not quite sure how you reach that conclusion, though it seems predicated on a common misperception that "sexless" is somehow a sex, that everyone has to have a sex from conception to death, that "male" and "female" are "exhaustive" categories. For example and generally speaking, we all manage to pass from the "teenager-less" category, then into the "teenager" one, and then out again into the "teenager-less" category, all without too much grief or lasting PTSD. Griffiths had an Aeon article that you might also appreciate where he emphasizes that and related points:
Griffiths: “Sex Is Real: Yes, there are just two biological sexes. No, this doesn’t mean every living thing is either one or the other.”; https://aeon.co/essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity
PhDBiologist: "Or perhaps you could at least acknowledge them as “formerly” male and female, respectively, reflecting a real sex-dependent difference between them."
Sure, no problemo on the "formerly". 👍🙂 But not sure what you mean by a "sex-dependent difference". There are certainly physiological differences between the "former males" and "former females" -- notably genitalia and karyotype -- but they are, technically speaking at least, still sexless -- THAT is what is meant by "formerly". For example, "dead" but "formerly alive" most certainly isn't "still alive" ... 😉🙂
PhDBiologist: "I’m going to stand by my position that human beings are either male or female, from conception to death, depending on whether the sperm in question had a Y chromosome or not."
Kinda think you're using Y chromosomes as an "operational definition" -- you might take a gander at what Griffiths has to say on the topic in his PhilPapers Archive paper. Has some rough-and-ready utility, but it loses the "essence" of what it means to be male and female in the first place -- i.e., having the ability to reproduce because of the presence of certain types of gametes.
PhDBiologist: "... none of this discourse is going to move the needle on gender identity politics ..."
May be some truth to that, though I still think, Griffiths thinks according to his PhilPapers article, that the biological definitions are the line in the sand:
Griffiths: "Nevertheless, [evolutionary biologist and transwoman Joan Roughgarden] sees the conventional definition of the sexes as undermining rather than reinforcing the projection of cultural norms of gender onto biology. Like Roughgarden, I think the biological definition of sex is part of the solution, not part of the problem."
PhDBiologist: "I have yet to see a definition [for gender] that isn’t circular, based on stereotypes, or both."
Bit of a dog's breakfast, but try thinking of it as a set of sexually dimorphic personality traits, a view that has some currency and scientific justifications. For example, see my "A Multi-Dimensional Gender Spectrum":
"In their lexicons, 'gender' generally refers to sexually dimorphic — i.e., feminine and masculine — behaviours, personalities, and stereotypes typical of, but not unique to, human males and females, whereas 'sex' generally refers only to a very limited subset of reproductive abilities or aspects thereof."
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/a-multi-dimensional-gender-spectrum
The flu has been rebranded. As with trans, contagion is not what we’ve been conditioned to believe….feel better…but know it’s probably organic to your body and environment and not a collective phenomena. More a detox of biology. Your body healing itself from local insults. Xo
I'm curious to hear more about why you find Harari so compelling. I must admit that my experience is more of a heebe-jeeby kind a thing due to my larger discomfort with the transhumanism which seems to be the endpoint of all technological innovations of late....
I found Sapiens pretty engrossing, and I like listening to Harari talk. My idea of helpful technology right now is filling gaps left by stupid or captured humans where the gaps are causing catastrophic problems, but I resist self-checkout at the grocery store because that’s a job humans do better than machines. That’s 1000x true of human reproduction, so I think we’re in sync on the big questions. Sage would be a better ethical compass than my governor, congressman or senators; but she’s no handmaid.
Isn't any "helpful technology" beyond mechanical automation a slippery slope? Robots were supposed to clean our houses and do our dishes, freeing up humans to pursue our creative endeavors of art, writing, music, etc. The narrative has been flipped and putting the genie back in the bottle is pretty much impossible at this point. I'm no Luddite and love my iphone and computer and the many luxuries I am fortunate enough to own. But as with so many things, just because we can doesn't mean we should. and it's interesting that you think a computer has better ethics than your "representatives". Do you think we should put AI in place of government and defer to somebody else's computer rather than our own human intuition? Can AI have compassion as well as ethics?
These are honest questions. AI is here to stay, and my partner often discuss the role of AI in our children's education and other endeavors. I think it's a wonderful tool. And I also think we need to be aware of the limitations and have these discussions before more genies we didn't consider are running around creating havoc we didn't want or intenf.
Glad you were able to gather strength and wisdom and humor from your fever. I think AI can be useful but I fear that the input will be too skewed for the truth to prevail. The idea of a neutral repsoitory for information and analysis is certainly compelling though!
What I think may happen (best case scenario) with respect to the current gender-based insanity and evil that may rid us of it is that at some point, it will be too obvious to too many people how insane it all is. At that point, people will begin to distance themselves from it and slowly back away from “pronouns,”’”gender affirming care,” and men in women’s spaces.
A few years down the line from that, it will be like it never happened - except for the many thousands of scarred and hurting detransitioners and confused “trans” people realizing they can never really go back and that society does not truly believe they are the opposite sex, the families that have been gutted and traumatized, and the women who have been raped in jail or who have lost opportunities in sports.
The Democratic Party will surely pretend it had nothing to do with all of that - although the Republicans Party will occasionally throw it in their faces.
I know this is far from what you were writing about, but it’s where my mind went when I read it.
I agree with your prognosis, and the fallout is never far from my thoughts. What's so hard to stomach is that the science IS settled, the experiment was an abject disaster, and yet the charlatans are going to take down as many additional victims as they can get their hands on before the last plane leaves Saigon. Some of them must have known from the start that it was a multi-level marketing scam that only had a chance if enough victims were recruited. 'Sage' is a hail-Mary fantasy of pulling aside the curtain (last metaphor, promise!) before they grab one more poor sucker. I'm a little extra riled up after listening to Exulansic's devastating post this afternoon, about a butchered kid who left candid Yelp reviews for each of the monsters who 'treated' him, then committed suicide. Sorry to leave it there. :(
Well stated and I agree 100%. My frustration with the people I voted for and the army of captured servants of trans ideology throughout our institutions — they are key —is their inability to say what they know to be true, even though they can see the harm it’s doing. If the genie is out as you say, why not get the max benefit from what it does well? Politicians are pros at compassion; it’s courage and honesty they lack. Sage wouldn’t! Finally, my argument curbs her power, keeping it subordinate to humans’ when it comes to taking action. She would tell us the truth based on evidence, then sit quietly while we decide what to do about it. Thanks for the great comment!