Transhumanism and Gender Relations

It might also be worth comparing the results with those from other mind altering drugs.

How does one go about boosting one's testosterone for just one day? Wikipedia fails to enlighten.

Wikipedia provided quite a few enlightening possibilities, I thought. In any case, you can rule out injections & pellets as lasting more than a day, buccal for being strange; this leaves essentially pills and gels. Testosterone gels like Androgel seem more common than pills, so I'd guess it was a gel dose.

yes you are right. I should have made clear I was talking about biological evolution by natural selection. I assume that is also what the OP was talking about, given the reference to selection of mates.

By source code I mean genetic code. Once we have access to that, the human timescale modification will so totally dwarf any natural selection that it's basically not there. Can you elaborate on your position?

After thinking more I have developed a hypothesis: there have been some large scale discussions of gender issues here that have lead to the LW equivalent of flamewars. As far as I can tell, those are about an order of magnitude more polite than the equivalent would be in most areas of the internet. But I suspect that some people are responding to something marginally connected to that and thinking "oh no, this isn't a subject we need more of" and downvoting to express that.

Please do edit it, no reason not to, and it stands out pretty clearly.

Sounds interesting. Thanks for the link.

I didn't mean to suggest that a single, slightly related, research paper demonstrates causation between the two variables, merely that it is a piece of disconfirming evidence for the statement I quoted.

Do you have any way of finding that poll and linking to it? An actual poll would very much outweigh a half-remembered unverifiable source.

Number of Google Results

• Postgender- 1,004,100 Transhuman- 841,000

• Postgenderism- 77,000 Tranhumanism- 1,340,000

Google scholar

• Postgender- 1,330 Transhuman- 4,720

• Postgenderism- 10 Transhumanism- 1,910

So even though people considering postgenderism are apparently a slightly smaller minority than transhumanists, it's not a completely undiscussed topic: Both topics are being discussed both in scholarly and in non-scholarly modes.

I can see how you would assume that because the transhuman community doesn't do much discussing of postgenderism, that it must not be that popular, but in fact it is just that they are pulling from a different pool of adherents. Postgenderism has its roots in feminism, masculinism and transgender movements.

There's a fairly large segment of the LGBTQE community which probably would if they knew about the idea jump at it. See especially the subset that identifies as "genderqueer" or talks about "genderfucking".

just two, should multiple-specialization prove desirable.

I considered mentioning the caste systems that were prevalent in most societies until the modern era.

You wouldn't want to pass "maladaptive differences" to your children, if it was a possibility, would you?

It depends on which differences we're talking about. In the modern environment, fertility and intelligence are inversely correlated. But I wouldn't want to get more grandkids by making my kids stupider.

I am mildly frustrated that both you and the original poster seem to be using the word "maladaptive" as if it were a synonym for "bad" with a convenient veneer of scientific objectivity, like saying "see, evolution agrees with me that such-and-such qualities are morally undesirable!" Ha ha. Evolution, including human evolution, can be horrible. A week ago we had a discussion post about how an actual population of humans regressed to chimp-level intelligence due to evolution.

Maybe related: You'll get more than pretty butterflies.

Maladaptive =/= unwanted

Adaptive is a technical term with a precise definition.

There are plenty of maladaptive traits that I wouldn't want eliminated. For example I think people are currently maladaptivley altruistic and evolution is selecting against that because the benefits of kin selection are much reduced in our atomized society.

Theres something wrong here and I can't quite articulate it. I am confused.

I still use male pronouns simply because there is no gender-neutral pronoun in the language and I am physically male, and I don't think it's sane to include attachment(or unattachment) to a gender-pronoun in one's self-concept.

What is the extent of this mind hack? How did it work?...How did you do it?

It wasn't something I did in an afternoon or anything, so I'm not sure I can give useful instructions or explanations...

It began as a quest to identify and purge all of my Cached Thoughts that were sexist or had sexist connotations, not just about other people but also about myself. I discovered two things in doing this, first, that there is a LOT more sexism that goes unquestioned in our culture than I originally thought there was, and second, that in my own mind, without those Cached Thoughts there to complete the pattern, there was nothing intrinsically male(or female) left. I had dissolved my gender identity. Explained it away.

I'm not sure if this is something everyone could do, but it sure seems like it would be.

What is it like throwing out the concept of gender?

Subtle, but pervasive. You start to notice those little sexist Cached Thoughts in others, even those who self-identify as not-sexist. You start to notice little false beliefs about your own personality, things you assumed were there but aren't, or things that are there but that you made excuses for. It makes knowing yourself easier, definitely. And spotting these assumptions in yourself helps you notice when you try to make similar ones about other people, as well.

I make myself think of myself as a human rather than as a man (that is, I deliberately do not think of myself as male, which was difficult to actually do at first, like breaking a bad habit); sex is a feature of the body no different than height or skin color. (height is a better analogy, because that has obvious physical consequences that are a lot harder to not care about if what you have isn't what you want, like sex.), and gender identity was a bad habit which I broke. It can be a significant shift to one's perspective.

Agender means not having a gender at all; dissolving the entire category, not just occupying a neutral position within it.

What worked for me may not work for you, but what I did was carefully examine the pieces of my mind that were male and trace out how they got there. In my case, they were all simply Cached Thoughts I had absorbed from the environment, and never questioned before.

As I've already explained to two other commenters, the first step was digging through my own mind for every piece of myself that was male and tracing how it got there. This took over a year to actually do, but all of those pieces turned out to be Cached Thoughts I had absorbed from the environment.

Another way to look at it, is that in social contexts a person's body is a lot like a costume that comes with a role to play. I found that gender is purely a function of that role, at least in my case. I would hypothesize that dysphoria, at least in part, results from an individual having an especially clear concept of the body they wished they had, and subconsciously trying to play the role attached to that body instead of their own.

I had my own breakthrough when I learned to recognize and differentiate the role from myself and detach myself from it, so that nothing in my personality depended on my body(I could freely want a different body without it affecting who I see myself as). Ironically, I think role-playing in online games played a large part in my learning to do that.

Many (and probably most) animals also have gender in the sense that individuals with penises behave in certain ways, and individuals with ovaries behave in other ways, despite not having memes.

I think this is a cached thought. It's very easy to anthropomorphize; if scientists can do it for the concept of natural selection itself, they can certainly do it for animals. The scientific community is much less neutral than we would both like it to be, and as such, it will support findings that are more in line with the social status quo. This is something that we admit for everything that we've changed our minds about, and it doesn't seem surprising to me that we'll continue changing our minds.

I'll take it you haven't been paying attention to the discussions of status on OB and LW. In my experience rationalist are much more willing to consider explanations based on social pressure, then feminists are to consider explanations based on natural selection.

In my experience, almost all "status" conversations are based upon a hackneyed post-hoc evolutionary just-so story. Most prominent feminists are not in fact scientists, and this is the fault of our society for not being more scientific in general, not feminism specifically (what political movements are led by scientists?).

Additionally, I think when you use the word "consider," you mean "accept." Feminists do consider explanations based on evolution; they just reject them because they think another explanation is more probable. The fact that they reject them isn't very useful; what would be interesting is why, but you don't bring that up.

I think this one section also displays fairly bad mind-killing -- even if my team is bad in some way, that isn't evidence for it being wrong, and it isn't evidence for your team being right.

In general, it seems strongly that some aspects of gender are social constructs and others or not. The most helpful way of distinguishing them is to look at differences across different societies.

There are however two huge pitfalls when engaging in this sort of reasoning.

The first is the tendency to conclude that since aspect X of gender apparently doesn't exist in society Y, it is therefore a social construct, and it can be eliminated by changing some particular aspect of the existing society in isolation -- ignoring the possibility that any such change necessarily entails making the society look more similar to Y in other ways, which would be seen as unfavorable even by most people who are negatively disposed towards X per se. This of course sounds like a clear fallacy when spelled out like this, but the fallacy can often be found at the core of many gender-related arguments, and countering it is often impossible without making arguments of the sort "lack of X leads to Y" that sound insensitive and offensive when stated explicitly.

The second is the failure to realize that aspect X of gender can be a stable equilibrium for collective behavior, like driving on the right side. There is nothing (more or less) that objectively favors either the left- or the right-side driving to be the universal rule, and different conventions exist in different places, but this doesn't mean it's a good idea to start telling people that since the direction of traffic is a social convention, they should now choose freely which side to drive on. (This also relates to the first problem, since unlike the direction of traffic, different stable equilibriums in gender-related norms may in fact have far-reaching broader social implications.)

(And all this is even ignoring the common tendency to report information about other societies in distorted and biased manner in service of ideological goals, which introduces further dangers and greatly multiplies the amount of nonsense on this topic that is circulating around, even in prestigious venues.)

However, now consider for example aggressiveness. In pretty much all societies, males are considered to be more violent and aggressive than females. ... But the claim that gender as a whole is a pure social construct is empirically wrong.

Not all attributes of gender are transient; not all of the things commonly attributed to one gender or another would be totally gone in a genderless (non-transhumanist) society. But that doesn't mean that the category of gender cleaves thingspace at the natural edges.

Aside from looking at other cultures, there are other methods. For example, one can look at children who were genetically male but had surgery at a very young age that made them anatomically female. Even when they are raised as "female" they [frequently develop habits, attitudes, and play interests] that are considered to be masculine.

This isn't a good experiment unless the people involved have no knowledge of the child's birth sex. Also, as far as I'm aware, there's about one prominent case study describing this, and as such I think it's misleading that you use the word "frequently". The one time I know of this happening, you're right -- the person eventually transitioned back to masculinity. But that's not much to update on.

I didn't give any distribution for the two option-clusters I outlined. I think it's more likely that we'll end up in a patriarchal dystopia for a variety of reasons. I think that the enlightenment ideas that transhumanism claims to champion are meaningless in a patriarchal context (or a context devoid of feminist analysis).

I think you're being very eager to disagree with me, which isn't unsurprising, since politics etc..

Utility functions are only well-defined up to scaling, thus taking the average of two utility functions isn't mathematically meaningful.