For a bit of context: I generally consider gender to be the social/cultural angle on males/females and sex to be the chromosome/physical body angle. (I can get into atypical chromosomes later if anyone wants).

General thoughts

I more or less am indifferent about the idea of gender. I think on one hand, some people are very firm about "This is how men should act, and this is how women should act," in a traditional sense, while others, in a more modern sense can be equally inflexible in a different way. Ex: "If you exhibit these traditionally feminine or masculine behaviours you should change your gender identity to match them."

I don't particularly empathize with either outlook as I feel that any person should do what 1) Makes sense in any individual situation, and 2) Should do what makes sense within their personal tendencies and abilities. For me personally, most talk about gender identity feels unrelatable in its entirety.

That said, by default I recognize "male/female" as sex, and will default to that when talking to someone. If they have an ambiguous look about them or specifically request it, I'll address them differently. Even if it doesn't particularly mean anything to me, or can be counter-intuitive to my world-view, I will try to be considerate because I realize it means something to them.

Regarding why we have gender stereotypes, and what genuine differences there are between the male and female sex: I think that because of typical physical differences in the sexes (pregnancy, breastfeeding, muscle mass, height, eyesight and so on) we've had a pragmatic division of responsibilities and specialization that tended to make sense along those lines in most cultures. (And it's likely that this has been a two-way evolutionary balance).

While I think some of the most clear-cut " on average" differences in men and women are in their bodies, the least clear are mental. In a very general sense it's difficult to evaluate even hard physical things like brain shape/patterns and to be able to claim that culture/social upbringing within a society hasn't affected those things in some ways. While I'm amenable to there being some differences in the mind, it's difficult to say what adult brains without the influence of culture (and thus concepts of gender) would look like.

Essentially, my view is that there are some inherent average differences between the sexes that lead to some different, on average behaviours, but that those differences aren't so strong that we should be heavy-handed about telling people, particularly in a modern non-tribal society, how they should act, or how they should identify. We should let individuals do as they please without having to concern themselves about the idea of being a man or a woman in any way.

I understand a lot of people probably don't emphatize with my views, but that's more or less what I think.

One thing I would note is that it wasn't all that uncommon for the women to handle the finances in my family, and it's a thing I've heard is frequently the case. You also get a lot of situations where "officially" the man of the house is "in charge" but everyone knows who is really running the show. I think there was probably a lot more subtlety/nuance/individual variety than we give credit for. Then again my ancestors are largely celtic and if you know anything about celtic women...

I'm going to make a longer comment with some of my more personal thoughts later but the one part that caught my attention initially was the ~15 years part.

Now I'm not going to be a stickler about precise time ranges but certainly in the 90s there were significant discussions about male/female gender roles.

While discussions about trans/gender identity topics only really picked up steam in I would say the last ~7 years these sorts of things were pretty common discussions in feminist academic circles for quite some time even before that, so it's likely that the discussion would have happened sooner or later, even if in a different way than it did.

Last comment about timing - I suspect politics had something to do with it. More cynical analysis might say it's been used as a wedge between the American right and left (as passion for fighting over, say, gay marriage has lessened) and there's a cynical argument to be made that both parties actually want it to be a contentious issue because it helps then to differentiate and appeal to their base in different ways.

Some equally cynical analysis from the left specifically associates the rise of gender as a topic (and several other social issues) as a way to distract the new left from economic issues (ex: occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders-esque stuff). While I don't think most on the left would claim the aforementioned social issues are unimportant they would claim that they're of secondary importance when a great number of people are struggling just to get by with the situation only slowly getting worse.

I'll make a separate post later on my personal feelings more on-topic.

I like to leave these a few days but I'm surprised nobody touched on the concept of play / practice as one of the reasons for fun (basically being able to learn things in a way that feels low-risk and casual - lots of studies on play, which relates to fun, showing such).

Other obvious function would be relief from stress / taking a break from things being serious in life. (Giving the mind a way to unwind and relax). Feels like there's benefit in that for everyone as well.

Also, how too much of things that are normally fun start to lose their appeal (suggesting there's a limit to what's useful fun). And obviously what becomes of people who have no fun at all.

I feel like this covers a significant part of fun, but maybe not all of it completely: Ex hanging out singing songs around a campfire with people you love is fun. (In this case you could even say it's fun because it's comfortable and familiar).

I feel like the kind of fun you speak to here is increasingly common and may be the only type of fun some people actually have but I feel like the idea of challenge doesn't capture all possibilities.

I think the question here would be "Is a dopamine hit both the necessary and sufficient condition of fun?" In other words, even if a dopamine hit is always part of fun, is that all it is? Why does it give us a dopamine hit? What behaviours is it encouraging and why?

I would agree that there were some things people were far too angry about that barely mattered. The excessive fighting over the mask thing was definitely the biggest.

That said, in BC rules were so strict at several points that you couldn't see anyone outside of family living with you, regardless of how you did it (ex: meet up in a park and stand 2m apart? Not good enough. Realistically? Near-zero risk). Rules regarding parents in old folks homes were so draconian that parents passed away without their children being able to see them. Quite a few people offed themselves too.

Staying in Japan I was able to, short of bigger social events, avoiding travel to major centres (I did once to buy a car) and wearing a mask, live reasonably similarly to how I did pre-Corona (in a city of ~90,000). So the contrast was quite stark when I heard about how things were in the west.

Right, so I think you could push it even further than what I said. Maybe something more qualitative like "What are you willing to give up to help others?"

That said you can also go too far the other way and say that a very rich person who does or doesn't give away things hadn't really giving up much, but we certainly would want to say a rich person giving away 90% of their disposable income is still doing something good. (And practically speaking it's going to have almost as good of an outcome if they gave to the point of diminishing their well-being).

Your angle here is actually getting really close to Peter Singer's Famine, Affluence and Morality. (Personally I stop a little short of where he's at, but I think your position more closely resembles his).

I think part of the former may be a matter of culture and translation. In many languages and cultures the common sense interpretation of the former is equivalent to including the latter. (I would read the latter as how you would word a written rule or law people are going to try to get around). Some might suggest that "love others as you would love yourself," is of such weight that it automatically includes not doing obviously bad things. I tend to favor "laymen's" interpretations over "letter of the law," style, particularly since in the original context of the golden rule the people who were the problem themselves (Pharisees) were of the latter type.

I think that's probably the standard sentiment but I do think a "somewhat less strict approach in some cases," might have been better.

There's this sort of thing in leadership/negotiation where if you show that you feel people are untrustworthy and you're too strict with them, a good portion will essentially tell you where to go and how to get there by completely ignoring your demands. I feel as though there were at least some areas where we could have borrowed at least a little from that idea.

Personally I don't mind upvotes as much as downvotes. I think if you get rid of the latter it gets rid of a lot of toxic behaviour. (Upvoting your comment for fantasy league points).

I wouldn't quite go that far, but I would focus more of my efforts where more results are to be had. There are still some genuinely open-minded/genuinely confused adults out there, so you can't give up on them entirely and you should still make some efforts, but a lot of what people spend a lot of time doing is basically throwing grass in the wind.

Simple but reasonable.

I half understand how you feel but with how a lot of people are with anything even remotely controversial the downvote button really has become "This is an opinion I don't like intuitively."

Ex: On that other platform I can say something perfectly reasonable one place, get a ton of upvotes, in another, a ton of downvotes, and that can make for really samethink "only say safe things," kinds of communities which frankly is extremely boring. I can get why it's a thing.

Maybe the wording could be tweaked a little if it's coming off as talking down to...but there are a lot people who could at least use a reminder to think about things a little more charitably even when they disagree with them.

Interesting if you look at the beginning of the pandemic the Democrats and Republican positions were reversed, (ex: on masks) but COVID hit democratic states hardest first (being by the ocean) and that changed pretty quickly.

Had Trump still been president when the vaccine rolled out (he was highly in favour of a "light speed" recovery) I highly suspect that we would have seen a lot of left-wing people suddenly being far more skeptical (if not conspiratorial) - not because of anything to do with the science, but because of the person telling them to get vaccinated.

And because Americans just like to be partisan and contrary (I apologize to reasonable Americans in the audience).

I would actually say I've seen this go both ways too - I was in Japan in 2020 and there were very much in denial about COVID likely in part because it happened just before the Olympics were supposed to (economically disastrous for a country already struggling).

Conversely, once they started to actually have public policy on it, their restrictions were significantly more moderate than in most places in Canada - in my prefecture aside from an initial month of lockdown I never stopped working, as a teacher, in-person, teaching hundreds of students a week. I could still go eat food with colleagues most times, and our infection numbers rarely exceeded double digits in the whole prefecture. How did we do it?

Our prefecture took more of a laser-focused approach to things - when infections started upticking they would make rules like "no eating at restaurants open after 8pm" and had 5 levels of very oddly specific rules about things you could and couldn't do in public. They often targeted shutting remotely resembling nightlife first because a lot of infections would come from anything that looked like that. Looking at some places in Canada which were being far more draconian (and doing worse) from a public policy end it felt that the Japanese "Don't ask for more than people can do," was more successful. (Of course this was less the case for places like Osaka, Tokyo, etc but even they were on the whole less strict than, say BC).

Would a more Japanese approach have worked in Canada? Hard to say, but I think there is a case to be made that some restrictions were asking for more than a lot of people were willing to give. Essentially, knowing people and good public policy isn't necessary the same as understanding science, because you have to consider what people are willing to comply with, and what is asking too much, whether certain things will backfire, what downsides there are to policy, etc. and it's reasonable for us as citizens to have objections (one way or the other) - I would even go so far as to say that's part of our civic duty.

I'll keep it simple and say that I'm in general a fair bit more skeptical about authority, politicians and overreach (particularly during emergency situations) than you are. I don't think the conclusions that authorities/media come to about science or how they choose to portray it should be accepted without question, nor should those who didn't be silenced (and this was the case even among some professionals). They have self-interests which don't necessarily at all times align with the public good.

I think people are right to have felt that some things were off, even if they were wrong to wholesale believe some particularly questionable explanations. I believe the average person has reasonably good intuitions but often gets the details wrong when the underlying factors that need to be understood are more complex and that's where they end up making themselves look foolish.

Sorry I had to. 😂

• and even what remains of the CBC is like that meme with the guy peaking at the other person's paper. Just a lot of copy-pasting the American narrative, which is often little less than a panicked frenzy insisting that the end of the world is nigh, make sure to vote for <your team> to prevent it. Sadly even Canadians who I would expect to know better lap it up.

I will share my skepticism about that goal as this is also something I heard last time they won and here we are with a Biden administration. Where I can agree is that American democracy has as a whole gone downhill, even just in terms of the quality of candidates they're offering. (Did anyone think any of Trump, Hillary or Biden were particularly appealing compared to even relatively recent alternatives?)

The way I'd put this in technical terms is "What percentage of your disposable income is going towards helping others?" $50 for someone making minimum wage is probably more than $1 million coming from a billionaire.

Any party that doesn't attract the "You agree with me or you're my enemy," types would get my attention. I think a party that focuses more on smart policy that's good for the people at large as opposed to empty ideology and vote posturing over contentious issues would attract me. We need people to run the country, not win some kind of high school popularity contest.

I would say as far as my genuine feelings I feel a bit torn about this one. I would say the people you describe definitely are a chunk of the people out there.

But just on principle alone it's more interesting if I argue for a different angle:

Just as much as you get people saying "do your own research" you get people saying "trust the science," usually people who themselves haven't actually looked at the science and are just copy-pasting media headlines. (And as I'm sure you've heard, a lot of what makes it into the public conversation is the media twisting or exaggerating scientific findings beyond the certainty they actually show).

So in this context, "do your own research," actually makes sense - for instance, when Corona started I got way ahea of the game by actually talking to my friend who was at the time doing his PhD in immunology, he recommended some videos on YouTube (which a paltry few thousand views) that were just lecture recordings of a professor talking about and breaking down to a class what had been discovered about Corona already.

From this I actually came to realize that the way the governments and media were portraying Corona in the beginning (we're talking March-May 2020 sort of time period) was actually extremely misleading. Ex: We knew the half-life of Corona in the air was like, 3-4 hours, and that it was reasonably likely transmission was occuring that way, and that transmission by touch was very unlikely, yet we were still hearing a lot of "wash and sanitize" (and we still see sanitizing stations) which very likely do nothing at all.

Anyway for the love of God let's please not have an extended Corona talk - the point that I wanted to get to here is that, compared to the information that was being publicly dessiminated by both governments and the media at the time, by doing my own (actual real) research, I got information I wouldn't have otherwise.

Similarly, if there's a topic that's really contentious, or "the science" I'm seeing seems a little suspicious or incomplete I'll suck it up and start looking at papers (which are linguistically and technically dreadfully inaccessible if you haven't done a lot of research / you don't know that field of science, but with persistence and a bit of extra learning you can get the gist of it). A lot of the time things in reality are at least a bit, if not a lot different than they're being presented. After all, the sources that control public access to science themselves have biases and interests.

This is why, I think that people who say "trust the science" can be just as bad as those saying "do your own research" because usually those "trusting the science" aren't closely taking a look at what they're actually trusting (which often ends up being "trust how the government/media is talking about the science," a far more precarious statement). To me, both groups smack of a lack of critical thinking - one group universally untrusting and the other the opposite.

Ultimately science is contingent on our rationality, and our ability to think critically - all the scientific instruments and research results in the world do no good in the hands of someone with poor reasoning or, for that matter, a lack of imagination (Einstein himself said it to be more important than a mastery of the rational side of the sciences - this is, after all, how we form hypothesis to test). That is to say, essentially, that if the way we reject, or accept science is in itself something resembling faith rather than considered critical thought, then we ourselves are not being scientific.

The last point I want to touch on is that I think, is that you can perfectly good science lead to bad policy. Not to beat it to death, but I think a lot of people feel governments overreacted / overreached with certain laws and policies, ostensibly based on good science, but without the science clearly pointing to that being a good practical way to handle people. (It's essentially the age-old list a bunch of sound premises and then an unrelated conclusion - to many people that will seem like an argment that leads to a conclusion, especially people who are feeling afraid and panicked).

So, in situations like this you can have people who intuitively feel "This isn't right," but can't put their finger on why, and then they get sucked into overtly incorrect conspiracies that confirm their feelings. (So their conclusion "This isn't trustworthy/objective/reasonable," is correct, but the theory they adopt to explain why is wrong). I think a lot of these things are fundamentally a little more complex than they initially seem, anyway, and most people at some level have a reasonable intuition that is correct that they're going on, but where it's leading them is not.

Personally, I have found that at least some "do your own research" people are people who genuinely doubt the public narrative (and with some good reason, ex: intuitively it lines up too conveniently with government/corporate interests) but they just don't know how to look for good quality stuff/where it is. While you're not going to get through to all of them, I think if you know someone who's skeptical but reasonable it's worth the time to sit down with them and show them a bit of what's going on "under the hood" so to speak.

Overall, taking a less combattive approach when possible is something I'd always like to see more of, so even if people are being unreasonable, it's important to extent grace and charity to them if you want to make things better. Be patient and find the people worth your time, and have a conversation about things, and be prepared to also be surprised that you might have not been totally right on some things you felt strongly about.

Invest in the future, not the past. For every moment of effort you spend on headstrong adults you could be having 10x the effect with youth outreach.

Tangentially related to the topic but of importance in the discussion - when the quality of choices available to us is low (Trump/Hillary/Biden or Trudeau/Jagmeet/Poillievre) it can have the effect of lowering our standards and expectations overall.

If I were to be cynical, I would say that maybe some element of the candidate selection process in various parties keeps things such that leaders who are -too good- (for the people, and who would be liked) are kept out of the spotlight so that leaders who will difficult abide by the parties desires and be easy to control will rise to the top.

(I would also highlight that there is some general public awareness of the selection process lacking which is why we got things like Sanders and to a lesser extent Trump back in 2016. I think it's likely the parties have aimed to control things even more tightly since then. I also like to point out to people who hate Trump that if someone like him looks good then what you're offering has to be pretty mediocre. Trump would never in a million years beat someone like Obama).

Conversely I've seen some very seemingly very logical people unaware that some deeper emotions are motivating their logic - people who can make what seem like very logical arguments, yet the conclusions of which immediately fail the "sniff test," of any reasonably empathetic individual.

I think that whole rationality is a necessary component of ethics, it alone won't ensure good ethical standards - someone who genuinely doesn't care how others or society at large feel well see it as rational to betray them when they can get away with it.

I would say generally there good reason for us to have various senses and that some people are better at one than the other, and an extreme weakness emotionally or rationally will impact one's ability to be a moral person.

My point of view would generally be that people who try to make things better, even if in individual cases make them worse, will, generally, overall learn from those mistakes and get better at their decision-making. (Similarly if someone who helps themselves at the expense of others accidentally helps them, they will "learn" from is as well, not making that "mistake" in the future).

I like the point about people being too tired - as much as that might have felt like a side point I think there may be something there - one thing I noticed in Japan is that when I did something nice that was not culturally required people would not only be really happy but actually surprised.

Japan is not only overworked to death, but also very strict on manners and social rules, so you're often required to pretend to be nice to someone and to follow your duty to others to the point that people start to lose the concept of doing nice things spontaneously.

As the vice grips tighten around the working and middle class, I think what you're describing has also been happening in the West not only since Corona but gradually over the last several decades. People concerned primarily with survival have less room to be kind. (That said, it means more when they are).

Good reply. I would highlight that the specific example you gave about whether you can be justified in killing someone would be a common example in the rules vs results based ethics debate. (Deontology vs Consequentialism).

Moral relativism is more the claim that morals are entirely dependent on a culture's or individual's idea of right. (Which means they would say yes to both, practically).

I should add that, in all fairness, the last, what 60-80 years have been an exception relative to the entire history of humanity where we were having 6-10-15 kids (higher mortality rates but still). I really think this being a problem has caught society as a whole off-guard.

Also keep in mind that policymaking from the 80s, 90s etc. when it was really becoming apparent this was an issue was still not as, how shall I say, scientific as these days (because an adult of that time in power would have been educated in the 30s-50s). Plus, governments have always been bad for "kick it down the road, it's a later problem" looks.

*That said it's a lot easier to "anthropomorphize" something that is literally being programmed to act/look human, vs, say, anything else we'd normally consider to be part of that category.

Oh yeah, I dated someone I could get to feel sorry for teddy bears by giving them little voice narratives about how sad they were that they had sat on the shelf alone for so long. Didn't need a study to figure this one out, anyone who's spent time around teen/20s girls in their lives have seen it firsthand.

I don't see why it wouldn't be able to do at least some basic reasoning relatively soon, if it doesn't already have the rudimentary beginnings of it. That said they may have to really get past the "language model-driven" outlook and have competing inputs from completely different systems. I think that's probably a closer reflection of how our minds work.

Imo any attempts to control things are only going to lead to more, not less bad messaging. To me, as mentioned elsewhere, the key is to improve the judgement of the observer, not the information itself.

I think this point grazes by a very common discussion you get where some people will insist that anything that isn't outright lying is okay while others will say that anything that is broadly deceptive or misleading is impossible. (Maybe some people at the extremes who say you should tell the whole truth at all times).

This is just my personal approach but in an environment that's gossipy, I tend to refuse to answer all questions because I don't like lying, but if you selectively refuse to answer something like "Do you like x person," or "Do you know something about y situation?" but normally answer no, then yes is obvious. But if you consistently refuse to answer any kinds of these leading questions you can both avoid lying and giving away information you don't want to. (Imo few people realize that in addition to truth and lie there is refusal/silence).

Yeah, very true. You need to teach them how to be diplomatic about disagreements (or to know when to keep their mouths shut because some people can't handle it). A decent number of people can do one or the other but few both. (I had to learn the merits of diplomacy the hard way and it took a while).

I think it's more likely we'll see things very gradually get a little blurry where it's like "This behaviour almost looks like reasoning more than just association," just given the way I've seen it developing in the entertainment end of things. It's still a long ways off though. For me the line is more "Is this at least convincingly able to interact like a person who's a little dumb?" (And when I say dumb I'm obviously not talking about rote knowledge but ability to reason and carry on a conversation).

The best way to combat misinformation is for critical thinking to be a core part of the education system. Otherwise there's always a danger that those "monitoring" misinformation themselves begin following based on ulterior motives.

I have mixed feelings on this:

On one hand I've seen stuff where AI makes confident assertions about things in my field of study (philosophy) that are just straight-up incorrect, but sound right enough to "trick" laymen. I'm pretty sure anything that actually requires any depth of reasoning, critical thinking or genuine creativity is still pretty far off. I think that's probably the stuff you have in mind.

On the other hand I think there is a lot of genuinely boring mechanical middle-level job type with that is in genuine danger, where it previously was just a bit too complex and human to automate but is at its core very repetitive and predictable. (One example I heard was someone who wrote descriptions of events or something similar). These are things where have perfect accuracy or high quality isn't vital and generally making associations and giving vague descriptions and a general idea is good enough. I think these jobs are generally in the most danger. (A lot of "low" level with requires physical interaction and wouldn't save much money to replace and high level work requires you to actually have a brain).

On the other hand, I think there will be a certain point where we see a significant breakthrough where we see something that starts to genuinely resemble critical thinking comes out.

Full disclosure I've been following the world's most popular AI streamer since shortly after her debut last year and having seen the leaps and bounds by which her general interactions with people and her environment have improved is pretty impressive. (Not to mention things like voice/singing etc.)

It's also really interesting to see how many real people interacting with her seem to forget that she's not a real person, letting themselves get rattled or thrown off more than you might expect. (Unlike your standard AI she can often be a sassy brat if not at times mildly unhinged). Even her creator gets genuinely exasperated when she decides to roast him.

Weirdly, the appeal for me is that I often find her to be more genuine than excessively scripted streamers who are really putting up a front, staying within a narrow persona and so on - and because she can say more or less whatever she wants she actually brings out a more interesting side in people agree collaborates with.

I would say in the case of this project, there's a lot of hands-on effort on the part of the guy running it and it only works because of how it interacts with people - there's a reason it's never taken off beyond this particular steamer. I'm really interested to see how this develops over time.

I'll make the devil's advocate argument: The mid to long-term problem is underpopulation: Pretty much every industrialized country has seen plummeting birthrates as they industrialize and become more urban - some countries like Canada and the US are managing to make a patchwork solution out of immigration, but as the world as a whole industrializes there will eventually be no more 'immigration solution.'

Essentially the long and the short of it is in a rural setting the kids could help out and the farm, in a smaller city space, at least, isn't at a premium and kids can still go play outside. In a big city space, and the cost of living in general is at a premium and city infrastructure can be outright hostile toward kids. (If you like at regional birth rates within a country they generally support what I'm asserting. Birth rates in Seoul are something crazy like 0.5 children per woman).

A lot of developed countries have tried to encourage people to have kids but none have really done enough to succeed in reversing the trends, and these have been ongoing - accelerating for decades now. Worse yet the further in you get the worse it gets. (Ex: If birth rates are 1 per woman and half your women have hit menopause then every remaining woman needs to have 2 children just to get into break even territory).

All of this is also not mentioning things like generational knowledge etc. that's lost by people who don't have kids - in many cases that could amount to a lot of useful information that's just never passed on. This also doesn't touch on the more immediate problem of the younger generations in many countries being overly burdened with caring for a historically unprecedented quantity of elders. And we're not even getting into the economic effects of basically not having a young population to drive consumption. The whole thing is a mess and it's going to get worse before it gets better.