I Met Paul Graham Once

It asked for specific metrics backing your claim.

Your claim was that tech billionaires contributed more towards the good of society than any other group.

You provided a list of metrics that are in no way exclusively attributable to tech billionaires, and no actual data/number on how and how much these are attributable to tech billionaires.

Your analogy is completely unrelated too.

It's more like if you said 'whales are the best animal' and then gave me a bunch of random metrics about the state of the world.

As it frequently happens, such interpretation says more about your own mindset than the piece itself, and sounds embattled.

That is, if you can’t consider complaints against folks who share your position but but took things too far.

> No, under transgender ideology -- "transwomen are women" -- the MtF trans-woman being naked, penis-and-all in a locker room is not a crime. In fact, states that have fully adopted this ideology have made it illegal to expel that trans-woman from the locker room. It is this ideology that I reject. See for instance: https://reduxx.info/korean-womens-spa-forced-to-erase-biolog... https://www.courthousenews.com/after-banning-trans-women-was...

The way you wrote your example, I didn't read it as "the person happened to be naked near my wife and child," I read it as "the person purposefully exposed themselves to my wife and child intending them to see it." It's not normal changing room etiquette to present your genitalia to people forcefully or purposefully and it could be a crime of assault even if the person had the same genitalia as the offender. Did I misunderstand you?

Assuming you actually meant "a person was incidentally naked around my wife and child and a penis was visible for a moment," I am having a much harder time finding that objectionable in the same way as I found what I understood the scenario to be. I'm not saying I'm for it, maybe there needs to be some third solution so people aren't uncomfortable, but I'm not seeing it as harmful in the same way an open sexual assault would be. Is the concern that trans people will commit assault, or is it that they will be present at all?

> So it would be the same with the trans person I meet later on. I would simply not use the person's pronouns, I would be polite and neither affirm nor deny their status. I would be wary and limit my interactions because I would, charitably speaking, lack of a theory of that person's mind, and it would simply not be worth by time, energy, and risk for me to try to navigate the situation without getting myself in trouble.

I don't agree that this example with Mike is an apples-to-apples comparison. You have a mapping in your head of "wears dresses and skirts and makeup and long hair, must have a vagina," and I just don't consider that mapping to be valid. Here's a counter-example that I think is more accurate to the situation:

Your colleague Mike wears a ring on his ring finger. He has many photos on his desk of himself with a woman about his age, in which they are hugging or in funny poses together. He refers to her as "Alice" and he mentions her frequently. You assume that Mike is married, and Alice is his wife. For years you and Mike talk about Alice together and he never quite says anything to dispel this, nor do you ask.

Years after you work together, you find out that Alice is Mike's sister, and the ring is a family heirloom. Mike is not and has never been married and is confused and maybe grossed out at someone's suggestion that he's married to Alice.

Did Mike lie to you, or did you just make an assumption about him that wasn't accurate?

There seems to be this fundamental expectation that people will organize and present themselves in a way that allows you to map them into the categories you have in your head. When people don't fall neatly into those categories, it seems like you treat them as incomprehensible at best, purposeful liars at worse, when the reality is that all assumptions are just assumptions and there's no reason not to just be like "oh, I made a wrong assumption" and then move on.

> There is a big difference between a third gender and a man saying, "I'm a woman because I say so" or "transwomen are women." Eunuchs, eg, were not women, and were not considered to be so. If we want to say that cross-dressing men are a "third gender" that is more acceptable to me than saying they are women and entitled to all the rights and privileges of women and you are fired or cancelled if you say otherwise.

I think you should look into concepts like "nonbinary" and "genderfluid"; all of these things exist along a spectrum of "trans" identity and they're not as distinct from each other as you consider them to be. The "third gender" example is only one that I supplied for convenience. There are plenty of others. The point is that gender is not an immutable concept.

Honestly, if I had to sum up one overall point over these comments, it feels like I'm saying "gender is not immutable and doesn't need to be" and you're saying "yes it is and when people try to make it otherwise it's disturbing." I'm having a lot of trouble understanding that perspective.

Yeah, I don't think people understand what transgender person is. They understand being born like that, but not why someone chooses to change their gender. It simply is not in anyone's experience nor there is any analogous thing to bridge understanding. It is NOT like being GAY, because I know and read about gay animals, and say ok, this is not specific to humans. There isn't anything like that for TGs, because animals obviously don't dress. They just are.

I also understood one thing. Most people were paying lip service to TGs. This includes people like Mark and PG. And we like, good employees, are just following what HR says without rocking the boat. I now doubt head of HR knows or understands what this is about.

Also, there are not many people who are TG. Should society adjust itself for everyone on the margin is a question one should ask themselves? Does it adjust for everyone who has kidney disease, or other ailments? I know western countries do a good job of addressing handicapped people in several ways, but the last 1% is very hard and expensive to reach. And I feel we are paying the price. Is TG issue big enough to put Climate Change activism at risk, which it is now? I am not against TG, I am against not prioritizing what's more important.

> Regarding "liking woman a lot", I was quoting the original author - it seemed like an autogynophilic statement to me, the idea that you are sexually attracted to something so much you want to become it. Maybe I'm misunderstanding! > Yeah it's interesting what you say about Blanchard... the fascinating thing for me about Blanchard is the measurement of groin blood pressure to test for arousal in response (rather than relying on self-reporting), I think his solutions were sexist and backwards and a great example of how blinkered medical professionals can be.

To be clear, I don't agree with Blanchard's typography or think it is correct to modern science. But it was never as simple as how it's typically portrayed. I suspect the author of the original post was being sort of ironic/humerous, though it reads as "this is the Blanchardian sense of why I want to transition."

The main thing I want to stress though is that Blanchard was never in the "every person with sperm must use he/him and be masculine and every person with eggs must use she/her and be feminine" camp. He definitely was (is) sexist and backwards, but I think at the time, he was genuinely trying to help people. Ego seems to have gotten in the way of his updating his views and ideas to match reality as science evolved.

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> Regarding the actress you mentioned, Brian, I can totally see I might mistake her for a man as she's gone out of her way to masculinise her appearance. I wouldn't feel guilt if I used male pronouns then later realised that was incorrect (according to my own rules) - perhaps surprise? I wouldn't even feel temporary embarrassment because she's gone to lengths to look male. I would correct myself to use she/her - even in direct conversation. That might be awkward but it's fine.

> If I was in a country, organization or situation where my livelihood was at risk for using sexed pronouns, I would avoid using pronouns entirely as regrettable prudence. This isn't hypothetical: parts of my social life overlap with these kinds of people and I steer through it, often by saying less, but I won't lie to someone directly.

This goes to what I've been saying in the other threads. It's hard for me to comprehend why this is so important. I can understand easily the arguments about sexual assault, participation in sports, and so on - whether I agree with them or not. But needing to use pronouns that are equivalent to someone's genitalia or sperm/egg creation status so stringently that you'd go out of your way to correct yourself to that (and probably offend Brian and people around them quite a bit, in the process), and that you feel uncomfortable being around people who do what you consider to be the wrong thing... it's hard for me to grok. Code-switching into the terminology that's comfortable for the environment you're in and people you're with is incredibly common and ordinary, we do it all the time.

Why is that particular thing so fundamental and important?

The Catholic priest example doesn't make sense to me. You might tell the priest that if he asked, but if you were having a friendly conversation with the priest and he said "have a blessed day!", would you stop and go "Actually, God's not real, and I won't call you Father, Dave, because I don't believe in Catholicism"? I'm Jewish, and I'd probably call a priest Father and the pope Your Holiness, because it's polite in that context. It's not an admission that I accept Jesus, at least, not to me.