I don’t know what man-made horrors beyond my comprehension I just stubled upon, but this person really really really needs psychological help and possible to be forced out of their self-hatred jesus christ
God it feels so fucking good not knowing who any of these idiots are, time to ruin that feeling forever
^F David Gerard
Imagine one day David Gerard of /r/SneerClub said, “Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist!” And you replied: “No, I’m not! That’s a lie.” And imagine E.T. Jaynes was still alive…
I‘m impressed at the way you still manage to live rent free in these chud’s heads. The bogeyman is real if you’re a rationalist apparently & his name is D.Gerard.
Three major thoughts here: 1) this is the epitome of toxic individualism, 2) holy hell this person really needs to leave rationalism for their own health and happiness, 3) I love the idea that anyone can insist on quoting Ray “doesn’t believe in bisexuality” Blanchard while calling themselves a person focused on truth
This person is clearly struggling with who they are and has decided they don’t get to be themselves and is working back from there
And I just want to clarify my beef with Blanchard. It’s not just that he’s wrong about me and people I care about in ways that are hurtful, prejudiced, and used to cause harm. It’s also the fact that he’s held up by a certain type of person because they can’t be bothered to understand us or science. Sometimes in science one lone person speaks truth to a field that irrationally digs in their heels and refuses to see reason. I understand that. But sometimes some jackass looks identical to that and just happens to be wrong and using terrible methodology and because people outside the field don’t understand shit they latch on because the field is saying things that go against their preconceived notions and that person sounds kinda right.
Ray Blanchard is the Andrew Wakefield of sexology and a certain type of people insist he’s Galileo in that story that’s usually oversimplified because it makes for a better story than telling it truthfully.
jesus christ
104 minutes! Not today satan.
A ctrl+f on ‘sneer’ shows me a lot of talking about sneerclub, but guess he didn’t actually check reddit and notice that it is no longer there.
And of course the guy is some weird anti pronouns person. (‘But somebody might look how you not expect them to look!’)
not going to waste my time on a random terf, but i’m happy to see said terf to waste ten times more to write and meticulously cross-reference all that crap.
Not so much a random terf as someone who appears to have been trying to use lesswrong struggle sessions in place of trans conversion therapy for a while now.
Or at least that’s my diagonal impression, and I’m also not going over that entire maelstrom just to make sure if they are a rotten egg or not.
Zack seems to want to transition, has detailed logic as to why not to, and is determined to make it everyone else’s problem
The hilarious part to me is that they imagine Eliezer moderates himself or self-censors particularly in response to sneerclub. Like of all the possible reasons why Eliezer may not want to endorse transphobic rhetoric about pronouns (concern about general PR besides sneerclub, a more complex nuanced understanding of language, or even genuine compassion for trans people), sneerclubs disapproval is the one that sticks out to the author. I guess good job on us? Keep it up!
I’m amazed that the random shitposting of a bunch of nerds who band together purely to dunk on terrible rationalist takes weighs so heavily on their minds. Aren’t they supposed to be above that kind of thing?
This is not healthy.
ya dont fucken say
If I were to transition today and didn’t pass as well as Jessica, and everyone felt obligated to call me a woman, they would be wireheading me: making me think my transition was successful, even though it wasn’t.
This is the same fuckin’ diseased mentality that gets cis women harassed in changing rooms for having jawlines that are slightly too heavy.
The math is also weird and unclear in that way which feels like a person reaching for grandiose Theories Of It All without any experience solving more mundane problems first.
Someone asked in the comments that Zack clarify wtf the claim is, and Zack posted this abstract:
Does this help? (159 words and one hyperlink to a 16-page paper)
Empirical Claim: late-onset gender dysphoria in males is not an intersex condition.
Summary of Evidence for the Empirical Claim: see “Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies” by Anne Lawrence, published in European Psychologist. (Not by me!)
Philosophical Claim: categories are useful insofar as they compress information by “carving reality at the joints”; in particular, whether a categorization makes someone happy or sad is not relevant.
Sociological Claim: the extent to which a prominence-weighted sample of the rationalist community has refused to credit the Empirical or Philosophical Claims even when presented with strong arguments and evidence is a reason to distrust the community’s collective sanity.
Caveat to the Sociological Claim: the Sociological Claim about a prominence-weighted sample of an amorphous collective doesn’t reflect poorly on individual readers of lesswrong.com who weren’t involved in the discussions in question and don’t even live in America, let alone Berkeley.
so this is a two-hour post about Zack’s arguments with unnamed Bay Area rationalists. Today, in posts that should have been a Discord chat.
(the paper he names is a Blancharding ramble)
One day, when Zack is a little older, I hope he learns it’s okay to sometimes talk -to someone- instead of airing one’s identity confusion like an arxiv prepublish paper.
Like, it’s okay to be confused in a weird world, or even have controversial opinions. Make some friends you can actually trust, aren’t demanding bayesian defenses of feelings, and chat this shit out buddy.
And the arguments seem to boil down to them saying “if you wanna transition, just do it”, and Zack is all like “nooooooo you must convince me not to via Rationality!!!”
(sorry if I’m being flippant, this person seems to be in a lot of mental distress, but they’re also kinda big deal in the community? Like fucking gwern weighed in a bit sarcastically?)
Who knows? They seem to know all these people personally, so I guess they attend rationalist cuddle puddles in SV or something.
I ran into them online a year ago when a Twitter follow shared their last essay with some acerbic comments about the lengths (both in the mental & absurd word count senses) they were going to do deny their desire to transition & they appeared in the comments after I made a snarky remark along the lines of “methinks the lady doth protest too much”. Still quite proud of that one.
