With apologies for not commenting more on your other points until I've read the thread more closely:

I suggest avoiding changing your estimate of a person's character, or assuming bad faith, just because "someone compared X to Y".

I don't know if there's a formal name for this fallacy, but it never fails that when someone compares A to B regarding characteristic Y, someone else interprets them as implying A is also comparable to B regarding characteristic Z.

I can't think of a real example at this hour of the night, but I did read a post a while ago where a mathematician tried to model the memetic spread of popular religions like Mormonism using equations from epidemiology. If you treat the religion as a disease which gets spread from a "case zero" to their close contacts and so on to their close contacts, then maybe you can use epidemiology to predict how quickly the religion spreads. I don't remember if it worked or not but it was a clever idea.

But imagine some Mormon reading that and saying "Atheist mathematicians at liberal universities are writing papers explicitly comparing Mormons to bacteria now. I guess the next step is to recommend we get eradicated to 'cure' the 'disease'".

(sorry to pick on the Mormons, it was the first example that popped into my head)

Yeah, they're comparing Mormonism to a disease, but only along one limited axis, not in general, and not in a way that implies what the objector thinks it implies.

I don't trust anyone including myself to avoid this, so I try to avoid accusatory "he's comparing X to Y!" statements. If someone is really digging themselves into a hole - if they say something like "Jews should be eliminated like vermin" - then you should just say "he said Jews should be eliminated like vermin!" and not the weaker "he compared Jews to vermin". Yeah, occasionally you make a type ii error - if Hitler says "Jews are as common here as cockroaches" then he's trying to imply something beyond just numbers - but usually you have more evidence against those sorts of people than just one comparative statement.

I haven't seen anyone calling transsexuality a delusion, only people examining the possibility, and people (who agree with the standard pro-trans positions on policy) declaring the question meaningless. The closest is knb's claims about autogynephilia, which look like an independent reinvention and are thus pretty interesting evidence. In particular, I haven't seen any claims that transpeople should be denied anything.

It sounds like you're offended when people ask "Is transsexuality a delusion?", not just when they say it's one. That's not good at all, for the obvious reasons that if you can't attack n idea you can never prove it, that politics is the mind-killer, etc.

I'm aware of Bad Things that can happen from simply asking questions - they tend to prime you emotionally, even if you don't consciously notice and have the best intent in the world (and even if you're a Martian and thus immune to this effect it affects onlookers). So if you see people sneaking in evil connotations, please complain.

But I'm trans, so if I (in particular, or along with all transpeople) am deluded, I sure as hell want to know.

Either:

1) the audience of LW changed significantly in the half-year interim;

or 2) the lack of personal input in the second post caused people to more freely voice their true opinions, rather than those they suspected I would take offense at.

Some more alternatives:

3) A couple of different people chanced to participate in the latter thread when they hadn't participated in the former thread. In short that you generalize from one example.

4) That the latter thread began with your comparison between transsexuality and otherkin, thus anchoring transsexualism to the low status of otherkin - if anything you're fortunate people didn't explicitly compare transsexuals to "stupid role-playing trolls" (the current status that otherkin have in my mind)

I wasn't going to say anything, but I was disappointed by most of the comments to that post. "How is transgenderedness different from otherkin?" is a blatantly wrong question. It should be answered with "What question are you really asking?". The question could be standing in for any of these:

• Is transgenderedness "legitimate"? Is otherkin "legitimate"?
• Should transgender people be respected or ridiculed for their identity? How about otherkin?
• Is it okay to fire an employee just because they're transgender? Just because they're otherkin?
• Should we treat transgendered people the way we treat members of the gender they identify with? Should we treat otherkin like... (like what? There wasn't any discussion about how otherkin want to be treated.)
• Should health insurance plans cover gender-reassignment surgery? I can't think of an analogous question pertaining to otherkin.

But when I read the thread, only a very few commenters, such as cousin_it, alluded to this approach. I am disappoint.

referring to the discredited autogynephilia (sexual fetish) theory

I haven't yet checked out the new thread, but my general response to this would be to refer them to the appropriate sources that state consensus among experts on this. Scholarships is a virtue.. Or present the arguments that convinced you the theory is bunk. If the arguments are sound I can't imagine anyone being hostile towards you for doing so, you'll probably be up voted or thanked.

If not then LW may indeed have a problem.

People throwing accusations all over the place, calling transsexuality a "delusion",

Aw c'mon, that's a bit unfair, the context was this:

You could go LW-extreme and say that delusions are always bad (i.e. a man who thinks he's a woman isn't any better than a man who believes in god, no matter the emotional implications of either belief). Or you could apply the reasoning Yvain used in his "diseased thinking" post, and ask whether society is better off accepting this or that deviation from the mean, or trying to "cure" it.

"Delusion" was used only used in a hypothetical that was immediately followed by a better alternative, there's not much use getting hung up over that particular word - cousin_it even apologized for his choice of words afterwards.

There might be quite a number of people who feel pretty indifferent about the subject and thusly don't comment on those threads. I am one of those people, and when I read through the comments, a quote from EY came to my mind:

People go funny in the head when talking about politics.

(http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/)

While this is not exactly politics, it might trigger similar mechanisms - those which also cause males to be homophobic, and the like. I'm not trying to say that everyone in the comments went funny, but some of the comments certainly are not a product of reason alone.

Also, I felt that some people were confused about the question - is it a blegg or a rube??!

It seems to me that the second post led to such confused, funny-going minds more than the first post.

To me, quite the only relevant question here is "should we accept and respect this kind of behaviour?" and my answer is a definite yes.

In a totally unrelated question, I'd be interested in where exactly you see a kind of "singularity-worship". Where do you see problems? What is it that makes you flinch? Where are we going too far?

I'm not sure what you expected when you started the conversation by comparing transexuality to otherkin. Upvoted so this post doesn't fall off viewability, but I think being confrontational about this sort of thing is taking the wrong message away. If you want to discuss a topic you have to be open to people with views that you may not agree with, and be able to see how they can come to those views.

When you talk about transexuality as a mental state, of COURSE it is comparable to other examples of mental states, and you have to be open to talking about it all if you want to be able to differentiate it.

My hypothesis: in the first thread, you were talking about personal experience and looking for something akin to Feeling Rational, and so people (rightly) focused on being supportive over theorizing. The second thread was phrased in a way that invited theorizing, and being analyzed from outside always feels like an attack.

I'm not quite sure what's offensive about the comparison to people who form religious beliefs. I mean you do realize religious experiences are often real and have biological causes in the brain? As long as they don't impose very large costs on others or themselves I fail to see why we should be less accepting of such religious people than say transsexuals.

So to add a third possible explanation, I find it more likley that "religious" and "religion" are much less of a boo light than half a year ago. The vocabulary has shifted.

Edit: For reference I don't think my opinions on transsexuality and your first entry have changed since half a year ago.

I don't know which possibility to lean towards, but if previously I only suspected LW was the wrong community for me (what with the singularity-worship that I don't share), now I'm almost convinced in this.

That's a shame. I hope that your dissonance with the community doesn't stop you reading and benefiting from the articles that don't touch on these subjects.

I also feel that you may have got a biased sample of LessWrong opinions, since those with stronger views are more likely to post. If you went to a meet-up and found similarly upsetting opinions to be the norm then that would be stronger evidence that the LessWrong community isn't for you. Again, I emphasise that you can benefit from LessWrong without identifying with the community. Just read the posts and remember the content which you find useful.

I'm a little worried by that a post essentially consisting of saying "come on, don't be jerks" was apparently downvoted to negative.

What do you mean by "lack of personal input"?

It's kind of frustrating how my comment got downvoted but nobody explained what was bad about it.