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What ever happened to the transhumanists?

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Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#361

Post by jl6 »

kuschku wrote: post #339
jl6 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if transhumans with augmentations wanted to compete with humans in sports, or if parents wanted to give their children irreversible experimental augmentations, you would find very similar concerns.

Parents aren't giving their children any irreversible modifications though, that's not even legal. All that's done is pausing puberty until the children are old enough to legally consent to changes, if they do want them. If they do not, puberty can be resumed at any time without any harm (puberty blockers are used significantly more often on cis kids whose puberty started too early than on trans kids). No child is ta…

It is in fact legal, and does in fact happen. Three examples found with three minutes googling[1][2][3], plus an article identifying 51 mastectomy approvals for under-18s[4] in Scotland alone.

Are these just isolated cases performed by overzealous doctors? No, WPATH's current guidelines allow for mastectomies at age 16, and the latest Standards of Care draft[5] calls for reducing this to 15.

What about the safety and reversibility of puberty blockers? We don't know. See this letter[6] arising from the Cass Review outlining the evidence gap. The current approach to treating gender dysphoria is a slow-motion trainwreck medical scandal. I strongly recommend reading the Cass Review interim report[7] which outlines the numerous ways in which gender-dysphoric children are being failed by current treatment models.

[1] https://thevelvetchronicle.com/double-mastectomy-at-15-detra...

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/18/about-a-boy-2

[3] https://mercatornet.com/chloe-cole-gender-transition/80073/

[4] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scottish-doctors-approved...

[5] https://www.wpath.org/media/cms/Documents/SOC%20v8/SOC8%20Ch...

[6] https://cass.independent-review.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/0...

[7] https://cass.independent-review.uk/publications/interim-repo...

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#362

Post by antifa »

cycomanic wrote: post #345
yarg wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can assure you, my only concern here is inate fertility - (idiocracy aside) I don't give a shit about people deciding not to have children. As for the danger, population collapse is often precipitous - and by the time you notice it, is very hard to roll back. And it's not just our species impacted by the changes.

Population collapse is likely not going to come from too many people becoming steralized (I mean what percentages are we talk g about here, there would have to be a massive growth to even make a measurable dent into populations). Typical population collapse in biological systems comes from overpopulation that cannot be sustained by the ecosystem, which results in the sudden collapse. When we talk about the survival o…

> Population collapse is likely not going to come from too many people becoming steralized

And if it did, it would probably be from something like pollution/climate change, not a tiny minority of trans people.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#363

Post by alexvoda »

Banana699 wrote: post #317
tsimionescu wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They kill their own number 7 times per year ? I call bullshit. You think an eagle can live for a whole year while eating less than 7 other animals? If not, then there's a simple calculation: if each eagle in the world survives for at least 1 year, and each eagle needs to kill 7+ other animals to live for that 1 year, then all the world's eagles combined must kill 7+x their numbers every year. Not to mention that a…

It was a mistake to phrase this in relative terms. Here's another, better, formulation : while non-human animals kill n times their number per year, their number isn't 8 billion. So the total damage done is far far less than humans, enough to deserve a qualitatively different view. And while non-human carnivorous animals kill their prey purely by hunting, which is 'fair' and limited in a sense, humans kill animals by…

Cats are the most active hunters for pleasure doing so far more often than humans.

I am not even entirely sure that herding is uniquely human.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#364

Post by antifa »

monstertank wrote: post #228
toofy wrote: post #210

We currently have a massive chunk of society who are losing their collective minds about people engaging in the very early iterations of transhumanism—transgender folks. I still regularly encounter people who are spitting angry against transgender folks and then later in the conversation will completely unironically talk about how much they love the cyberpunk genre. Not many of them realize they would be the weird cu…

Quoted post unavailable.

> I always wondered how the LGBTQI++ community will react when transhumanism allows all their sexual identities to become a choice. Will they still insist that they have no control over it?

If there was a simple pill that cured gender dysphoria, a pretty reasonable number of people would take it.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#365

Post by simonh »

rpdillon wrote: post #358
simonh wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15295192.2020.1... > Of the adult trans population, between 25% and 49% of individuals are believed to be parents (Dierckx, Motmans, Mortelmans, & T’sjoen, 2016)

Parenthood doesn't imply fertility. From that link: > Trans parents may form their families in a range of ways, including through biological parenthood, step-parenthood, adoption, fostering, and assisted reproduction, with an increasing number of options available to trans people wishing to become parents.

So what? Human societies have always and everywhere included multiple modes of parenthood. I don't understand this obsession with personal biological reproduction. That's not how human societies work. Adoption, fostering, etc are an important part of social sustainability and always have been.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#366

Post by simonh »

ungamedplayer wrote: post #344
simonh wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15295192.2020.1... > Of the adult trans population, between 25% and 49% of individuals are believed to be parents (Dierckx, Motmans, Mortelmans, & T’sjoen, 2016)

That was much higher than I had expected.

Me too, but I suppose being trans doesn't eliminate all the other aspects of human behaviour and psychology, including the desire to have or care for children.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#367

Post by antifa »

fastball wrote: post #309
Elinvynia wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transitioning for small children is literally just wearing different clothing. When they get a bit older, at most they can extremely rarely (due to people pushing against it, even though it reduces suicide rates and saves lives!) get puberty blockers. Those can then be stopped with minimal consequences if they decide that's not something they wanna do. What is actually cruel is FORCING kids to undergo their AGAB pube…

> undergo their AGAB puberty against their will It's also weird mental gymnastics like this that people are pushing against. For anyone who is not familiar with the acronym, AGAB means "Assigned Gender At Birth", and is push back against the fact that we broadly lump all people into either the male / female camp when they are born. It can be useful when talking about gender norms, etc – which are discussions worth ha…

> Nobody is FORCING anything

Well except Texas law makers

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#368

Post by ludston »

drdaeman wrote: post #190
magpi3 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just playing with semantics. If everything humans do is natural than everything is natural: computers, plastics, concrete, etc. The purpose of using the word natural is to distinguish from what is unnatural, and without grabbing a dictionary, for me that generally means something that does not "naturally" occur (i.e. without human intervention specifically) in the natural world. Chemical engineers create unnat…

That's the whole point. Word "natural" is not good in any serious argument because it simply doesn't have well-recognized unambiguous semantics most people can agree on. Ask a bunch of folks if some things are natural and while they'll most likely agree on the basics (wild forest flower is most likely would be called "natural", while a mobile phone is most likely not) the opinions will start to diverge on less obviou…

I disagree. It's easy to choose this as a position if you intend to argue disingenuously, and therefore you always ensure that your argument positions are logically sound, and complex and abstract enough so as to exclude most others from being able to argue back. On the other hand, if you are steel manning the other person's argument, instead of playing a complex word definition game that invalidates what they've said on account that they haven't explicitly defined for you all of the axioms of their position, (and if they did you can attack their argument with a different set of nit picking fallacies such as "too long didn't read"), you would probably find their argument compelling, or at the very least you would be forced to reveal the true reason you disagree with them. It's much easier to attack somebody else's argument for using the wrong language than it is to present your own position.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#369

Post by antifa »

daoist_shaman wrote: post #6

I used to identify as a transhumanist and believed that technology could do no harm. I was an adolescent donning rose-colored glasses, with a burning passion for science, technology, and improvement of our species. Only after an electrical engineering degree, 10-15 years of more wisdom, and dabbling in biohacking have I realized that we really have no clue about the massive deleterious impacts that technology has on…

Transhumanism was cool before we realized it was going to be cheap shoddy products that overheat under your skin and required Facebook accounts.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#370

Post by alexvoda »

Banana699 wrote: post #323
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I point out your own hypocrisy, and that of most people, when they worship those mass killers You're sure free to tell me what I think. You should stop, because you're not very good at it. > They kill their own number 7 times per year ? I call bullshit. You don't think a cat kills 7 birds and/or rodents a year? They've put cameras on cats' collars. They're far more deadly than just 7 kills a year. You don't think a…

>You're sure free to tell me what I think You mean you don't view any of those 3 people I mentioned as heros? Ok, This still doesn't change anything, unless you're radically anti war in a way very few people are, there is someone you idol who killed far far more than Ted can ever dream of. >You don't think a cat kills 7 birds and/or rodents a year I concede this point, see my reply to your sister comment for why its…

And so another suicidal terrorist sect will be born.

I am flabbergasted that you lack the selfawareness to realise you are part of the very evil you decry.

Not in the suicidal way, thinking that you need to be destroyed allong with all others, but in the way that instead of choosing to oppose evil, you choose evil and then claim that evil is inevitable, and then complain noone is opposing evil.

I confess I also sometimes lose faith in humanity and my own powerlessness to change things at a sistematic level. And in those times I basically think that "Thanos was right" but if I were ever given that kind of unlimited power i would probably rather use it to make the problems be nonissues rather than erase sentience. Destruction often feels easier to achieve, yet once one has the power to achieve destructive effects at a certain scale, nondestructive effects at the same scale are equally achievable.

You are at the very small scale of murder (individual action) and proselitising murder (convincing others). At that same scale you can attempt any other individual action and attempt to convince others of anything else.

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