yesterday at 4:28 PM
I agree with everything in this article, but there are a few things that make me go hmm.
* The reference to / advertisement of obscure online communities (Agor? Darkworld?)
* The quoted tweet about bloodlines. There are no lines worth speaking of in biology, there are webs. You are not the last one in a very long line, you're a twig on a very big tree. People who talk about their bloodline are often a bit iffy.
So why do I make an issue of it, when I agree with everything they say anyway? Because I actually agree with a lot of what lots of weird sects say - in public. The advertising pitch is often very reasonable even for groups like Mormons or Scientologists, which are 50-250 years out of touch with the trends of the times. This post is very sensible, but it feels like a pitch for something which isn't quite as easy a sell. Maybe this Agor thing.
yesterday at 4:50 PM
> The quoted tweet about bloodlines. There are no lines worth speaking of in biology, there are webs. You are not the last one in a very long line, you're a twig on a very big tree. People who talk about their bloodline are often a bit iffy.
A fun thought exposing the silliness: every woman without a daughter is the end of a chain of mothers going back millions of years.
yesterday at 4:46 PM
As an only child being the "last of my bloodline" has given me a great deal of anxiety. Evidently out of ignorance. Where can I learn about lineage being more of a web than a line?
yesterday at 5:03 PM
You already know about it, just in different terms. You have one father and mother, but two grandfathers, four great grandfathers, four great grandmothers, etc. Which of these is your "bloodline"? Either all of them or none. Each of them is likely (in the general case anyway) also a grandparent to many other children with other intermedaries. Which of these is their descendant bloodline? If you get rid of weird socially contingent criteria like "first son", the answer is obviously none of them. It's just a big web, going back thousands of years at minimum. Billions of years back to the first sexually reproducing eukaryote, if you want to think of it that way.
yesterday at 5:22 PM
Just track your genealogy. Go up like 3-4 nodes from your parents and then expand the tree from there.
The expansion gets even more extreme if you start your expansion further up the tree, as the average number of children per household goes up dramatically as you go further back in time.
https://populationeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/a...
Genetically, you're just about as close to your great-great-grandfather as his second daughter's son's third daughter's nephew is.
Unless you've been in some sort of clan war for generations or your family has been the target of small-scale genocide, you're unlikely to be the 'last of a bloodline'.
At a complete guess, that may be inaccurate because I don't know you? What you possibly have is a biological imperative to reproduce, perhaps some social expectation or personal desire to have a family, which combine to create the anxiety. Then the anxiety manifest as magical thinking about "being the last" in a way to drive attention to the underlying issues. Is it 'being the last' or 'being alone' that's the real driver?
yesterday at 5:10 PM
Id argue that it’s not ignorant, it’s socially constructed.
yesterday at 4:47 PM
Count your blessings; I’m extremely pleased to be the last of my bloodline.
yesterday at 11:47 PM
[flagged]
today at 11:36 AM
There is no "place" reserved for theoretical (or actual) sons (or other children).
Your children will exist. They will have no children. But these two facts will have little to no intersection with each other, other than your comment above (which doesn't appear to have any purpose other than to attempt to make someone else feel bad about their choices.)
today at 6:09 PM
Oh, don’t worry. No one—especially not a random internet stranger—could possibly make me feel bad about this particular life choice.
yesterday at 5:06 PM
Webs are made of lines. A twig has a path back to the root. And you are only a leaf node until you reproduce, after which you are a branch and perhaps a shared part of this “web.”
yesterday at 5:48 PM
In other words, is your issue with the usage of the term that it mistakes a set of O(2^n) bloodlines for 1?
yesterday at 5:33 PM
>People who talk about their bloodline are often a bit iffy.
On the other hand though, people who don't are often as an aggregate group destroying a lot of twigs to the detriment of the tree, all the while pretending their love the tree in general that's why they don't care for their twig.
yesterday at 11:46 PM
Yeah people who are quick to denounce any talk of bloodlines, especially using language such as "weird", "iffy", or "not worth speaking of" are very suspicious.
They usually want you to not care about your own.
today at 5:07 AM
My own what, exactly? Y chromosome? Skin tone? Those are both doing fine. Dynasty of power and wealth? Never had one of those in the first place.
yesterday at 4:57 PM
One of those articles that's entirely reasonable, and I find myself nodding along, but there's something that feels vaguely off about it I can't quite put my finger on. I think it comes from the inciting observation from the author's friend:
> I feel you’re on stronger ground, Duncan, when you say that the status quo is unfairly blocking some people from activities they spontaneously want to do and (you argue) safely could in a different society.
> I feel less comfortable when you dig for reasons that other people’s aversions to touch or sexual activity or whatever might be “unhealthy” (against some standard I’m not sure you’ve made a case for the universal healthiness of).
It's easy to work backwards from harmful, biased, or just plain wrong conclusions to a strong and reasonable core principle (and vise versa, for that matter). Without knowing the details of what led the friend to say that, it feels a bit, I don't know, manipulative? for the author to present only their strong core principle as a defense of a position they only allude to, when from that quote it sounds somewhat tangentially related and perhaps a little less universally reasonable.
yesterday at 6:02 PM
This may be unfair, but it's very easy for me to imagine this synopsis coming out of a debate around statutory rape laws. That would explain why the topic itself has been completely obscured. And getting to have sex with young girls (not women) is also something the (largely male) libertarian crowd seems obsessed with.
yesterday at 5:01 PM
One thing I appreciate about rationalists is that they have such a distinct writing style that I already got strong suspicion of reading the blog of one after the second paragraph, even though the inevitable LessWrong link is much further down the page.
(The pun in the blog name might also have been a hint)
As usual, some good practical advice (try to understand the societal context your navigating in; don't attempt to fix a problem before you have understood it in depth) which leads to some questionable conclusions (don't try to fix bad situations at all and just learn to accept the injustice because alternatives could be worse?) and then shifts into weird otherworldly stuff where I'm not sure if I'm dealing with scifi literature or things people are actually believing. (darkworld, Agor).
The whole thing has an unpleasant vibe to it that reminds me of the way "pickup artists" used to talk a decade ago.
yesterday at 5:56 PM
The vibe that I get is that the author is trying to write down as much of their idea as possible without violating social taboos, such that what is written down is not exactly what they think, but the maximal intersection between what they think and what they perceive they are allowed to say.
yesterday at 6:09 PM
Like how he somehow fails to mention that he is indeed gay.
yesterday at 6:13 PM
>The whole thing has an unpleasant vibe to it that reminds me of the way "pickup artists" used to talk a decade ago.
I found it quite odd and a bit unsettling as well.
He says
>“Something like 9 out of 10 people that I’ve met who had strong touch aversions were also visibly maladjusted in the same way that you would expect from the stereotype of an animal that was cringing away from normal touch (e.g. from other members of its own species).”
In an article where he clearly has a touch aversion. Another post of his describes physical intimacy as "slimy pushups" and clearly has an issue with sex. It just feels like a call for help or nod to issues he's dealing with when he says that people with touch aversion usually have other issues while he rights a lot about touch aversion.
In terms of the pickup artist vibes he talks about orgasms (not sex) as incentivizing him to "Try to convince some other cool and interesting person to drop all of their cool and interesting activities to do some slimy pushups with me"
This whole thing is much weirder yet: https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/on-puberty-identity-and-s...
I sympathize. It just gives the writing a feeling of beating around some bush that we cant see.
yesterday at 5:10 PM
Flutes are not girly. In the first book of paradise lost, the hosts of hell march at the sound of "flutes and soft recorders". Of it's good enough for Satan's army, I say it's good enough for a highschooler.
yesterday at 5:20 PM
The point of the article is that a specific social group thought that they were. It doesn't make any claim about the general truth, just that certain things have social stigmas that may not make sense objectively, but one still lives in that social group so one has to cope with that stigma in one way or another.
There could have been a dozen other examples. Perhaps dancing, or cheerleading, or computer nerding, or whatever else. All of which have had various social stigmas in various groups at various times.
yesterday at 5:37 PM
I'd argue that flutes are characteristically masculine what with their phallus-in-hand-demeanor. Though that is perhaps why Manly Men aren't meant to play them.
But perceptions are certainly different.
Several studies [0][1][2] have found significant differences in gendered participation in various instruments, and the perception by others of people playing instruments typically played by other genders.
Further, at least one study [4], has found that this variance vanishes or flips in queer ensembles.
Anyway, I wanted to check because Paradise Lost was a long time ago. Men were the first to wear high heels, after all. I figured there'd likely be a drift from times where flutists were male because ensemblists were male to now where anyone can be seen as gay for just about any reason.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264200609_Musicians...
[1] https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/vrme/vol5/iss1/3/
[2] https://theath.ca/arts-culture/instrument-gender-bias/ (mentions a different study)
yesterday at 6:20 PM
> I'd argue that flutes are characteristically masculine what with their phallus-in-hand-demeanor. Though that is perhaps why Manly Men aren't meant to play them.
Traditionally, Manly Men are not supposed to put phallus-stuff into their mouths.
yesterday at 8:29 PM
If you put a flute in your mouth you're doing it wrong.
yesterday at 5:50 PM
I would like to point to Ian Anderson.
yesterday at 5:16 PM
Ultra masculine homosexuality is a real thing, there can be real animosity towards feminine or stereotypical homosexuality, both within and without. Don’t assume if someone is super masculine that it’s because they are straight.
yesterday at 4:26 PM
I was thinking the other day, "why do we have kids?"
The most noble, selfless reason I could think of is "so that they try again". I say, the "most noble" because people have plenty of more selfish reasons: "they'll make me feel better", "to make me a better person", "to keep up with the expectations of my friends and family", "they'll give me comfort when I'm old and frail", "they will care for me". And then no-reasons such as "it's the way things are", and "everybody does it", and "god wants it".
But I prefer mine: "so that they try again". Try what? To right the wrongs, to succeed where we failed. But that is a mirror: if my kids inherit the world of my failures, can I look back into my soul and say that I tried hard enough? When the day they lose something precious comes, and they understand this world is mostly darkness, will I be able to look them in the eyes and say that I tried hard enough to beget the light they crave?
yesterday at 5:13 PM
I think the answer is pretty simple--life is beautiful. And it's great to share that beauty.
yesterday at 4:52 PM
> can I look back into my soul and say that I tried hard enough?
Imagine, if you will a large endless expanse. Clear skies above, but as you look to the floor you realize it's made of people. Compacted like tetris pieces, as far as the eye can see. You're standing there, presumably atop some people right then and there. What do you do? Do you walk forward? You'll step on the bodies; the people. Do you stand still? Won't that invalidate your life? Aren't you allowed to live?
Making that decision is trying hard enough. We all had to do it, and luckily, we did it at an age we can no longer remember; right when we were born. We decided to venture forth and try. You tried hard enough because you tried, period. That is enough.
yesterday at 5:29 PM
Nah, I just want to create my own team, a bunch of people who care about each other, together exploring this beautiful world.
yesterday at 5:37 PM
Give life
yesterday at 5:21 PM
If you don't hate existence, raising children can also just be seen as paying back for yours. I like that view.
yesterday at 5:44 PM
Unless they want humanity to end, a childless person has to hope other people don't agree with their lifestyle. If everyone had 2 kids everything would be fine. If everyone was childless humanity would end.
yesterday at 11:47 PM
> And then no-reasons such as
These are the reasons, which don't start from an egocentric perspective, but try to reason about it from an absolute point. Why wouldn't they be reasons?
today at 12:53 PM
Two of them are not reasons, as in cause, but mere observations. The last one, involving god, needs a person to believe in a good god. A person who doesn't believe, or who would use reason to deduce that a putative god is evil, would find it as an anti-reason.
yesterday at 6:04 PM
We reproduce to perpetuate human life. Life is the only good thing in the universe, and humam life is the best (pending future discoveries.)
yesterday at 4:49 PM
There's definitely a cluster of personalities overrepresented in the population of parents.
Historically, there has been a lot of pressure to reproduce, but in the modern era this doesn't always make as much sense. I wish there was more research to clarify this phenomena.
We'd potentially be avoiding a lot of grief and angst during young adulthood for those who choose not to be parents if they more clearly understood why it doesn't "feel right". That grief and angst from choosing "wrong" potentially translates to cases of mental illnesses in the children at best and domestic abuse at worst. Even when couples choose not to have children, they can still be very unhappy. It's as much a matter of social justice as it is health.
yesterday at 4:43 PM
Coincidentally I just received my (Irish) flute today and started learning to progress from the tin whistle. I can barely get a note out of the damned thing but I love how they sound so I will persist.
yesterday at 4:29 PM
I feel like there is something I am supposed to know that would help the author make more sense about the flute playing. But I don't really understand what he is talking about?
Was this episode in childhood and now he is a young adult? Did he attend public school?
yesterday at 5:16 PM
I guess flutes and to a lesser extent clarinets were seen as "girly" (or maybe gay) instruments and boys were bullied for playing them.
The association isn't new, see the related slur for gay people.
yesterday at 4:58 PM
I think the main point is that
1. it's unfair that boys who chose to play flute got bullied for it
2. it's not good that his brother essentially took his choice from playing flute by reinforcing #1
3. #2 is actually simultaneously the way to minimize the negative effects of the authors choice of instruments
So in spite of those first two things individually being pretty shitty, they actually give you an optimal outcome (socially) in school. Ideally we get to a place where #1 stops happening, but you won't solve it by going against the grain, you'll just be a martyr for nothing.
yesterday at 5:52 PM
> they actually give you an optimal outcome
The author got grief for playing the clarinet too, and from poking around at their other articles I think they'd have had a lousy time regardless of what instruments they might have chosen, if he hadn't got bullied about the flute he'd have gotten bullied about something else.
today at 9:53 AM
In my experience, you go against the grain because you want to, despite the grain. The thing you get by going against the grain is the thing you want, despite the socially imposed friction.
OP could have gotten to play the flute, despite the bullying.
It’s not being a martyr for nothing, it’s being a martyr for your own sake.
today at 3:24 PM
Speaking from the perspective of an ameteur musician, I play the saxophone. If I were to get bullied for it and have my social life ruined in high school, I would have switched instruments and be just as happy playing trumpet or clarinet or whatever, the actual instrument I play... doesn't matter that much to me, music brings joy regardless of what you play. Maybe that's not true for others, but IMO I would prefer to have a good social life and play a different instrument, than play my particular flavour of wood/metal tube and be ostracized from my peers. Just my opinion though, others may not feel this way.
yesterday at 4:46 PM
This was about a middle school kid choosing their instrument for band class, in their case they played through high school.
yesterday at 4:12 PM
Interesting article. Reality can be discouraging at times, but accepting that truth definitely helps to achieve your ends (or reduce frustration when you can't).
yesterday at 4:17 PM
> they left me in the least wrong situation that was actually available, given all of the constraints
This feels like a leap. Is it impossible to support your sibling's self-expression and teach them emotional resilience? And even if not, the long term psychological impact on the younger sibling of feeling alienated and controlled in their own family must be taken into account.
yesterday at 4:49 PM
When was the last time you were a 13yr old boy and had even heard the phrase "psychological resilience"?
yesterday at 7:31 PM
You don't have to use the name to teach the concept.
yesterday at 9:53 PM
You may be overestimating the empathy capacity of most 13yr old boys.
today at 10:57 AM
Interesting that you say "13 year old boys" not just "13 year olds". Are you suggesting boys are less empathetic than girls?
today at 12:43 PM
Most wars are fought by men, yes.
> Are you suggesting boys are less empathetic than girls?
Let me leave this for you:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33846514/
Girls exhibit greater empathy than boys following a minor accident Joyce F Benenson et al. Sci Rep. 2021.
ABSTRACT
Hundreds of studies find that girls and women report feeling greater empathy than boys and men in response to adverse events befalling others.
[...]
These behavioral results suggest that an adverse event produces different subjective experiences in females than males that motivate objectively different behaviors, consistent with findings from self-report measures of empathy.
today at 2:47 PM
> Most wars are fought by men, yes
Plenty of reasons for this other than feelings of empathy. Amusingly, history shows that queens are statistically more likely to start wars than men (not that I think this is particularly relevant to the question): https://qz.com/967895/throughout-history-women-rulers-were-m...
> Let me leave this for you
That's mostly behind a paywall; from the abstract I can't see how it distinguishes between experiencing empathy vs reacting to social norms or expectations of behaviour.
today at 3:59 PM
There are hundreds, maybe thousands of papers on this exact topic. I left a note from the paper mentioning this very thing.
It's up to you to explore this topic for yourself, if you choose.
---
Studies in nonhuman animals and younger human populations (infants/children) offer converging evidence that sex differences in empathy have phylogenetic and ontogenetic roots in biology and are not merely cultural byproducts driven by socialization. We review how these differences may have arisen in response to males' and females' different roles throughout evolution. Examinations of the neurobiological underpinnings of empathy reveal important quantitative gender differences in the basic networks involved in affective and cognitive forms of empathy, as well as a qualitative divergence between the sexes in how emotional information is integrated to support decision making processes.
--
from: Empathy: gender effects in brain and behavior
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25236781/
yesterday at 4:20 PM
Isn't it one of those things impossible to know which is best?
yesterday at 4:36 PM
Results vary by charisma. I can assure you if a popular enough kid chooses to play the flute, not only will it not invoke bullying, it will redefine flute playing to become cool. And yes, when I was in school said kids would do this, partly as a flex, partly to increase proximity to girls. It worked.
yesterday at 4:49 PM
This would definitely only happen in certain locales.
yesterday at 9:21 PM
I read thru several other articles by the author. He seems to be a deeply weird person, which we certainly need more of, but unfortunately a rationalist, which we don't.
yesterday at 5:44 PM
The basic construction of "(a) you will get harassed for action X (b) I will forcibly prevent you from taking action X therefore (c) this is a good thing" has a certain flaw to it that should be obvious.
today at 4:15 AM
I wonder what the “sabiens” in the domain name is supposed to mean. At an rate it’s not Latin.
today at 4:16 AM
Sabien is the last name of the author.
yesterday at 4:20 PM
What a fascinatingly strange article. The two parallel trains of thoughts, only one of which arrives at a satisfying conclusion, but I suppose that is practicing what it preaches.
yesterday at 4:41 PM
The jump from flute playing to sexual touch is weird.
yesterday at 5:07 PM
Yeah, the entire piece feels like Madlibs for analogies, where one totally disregards the emotional aspect of the substitutions.
I think this is a piece by rationalists for rationalists that escaped the niche it was supposed to remain in.
There was a very interesting video? Article? About how the reason Twitter is so hostile is because it blends people who do not have shared contexts, so ideas are taken out or context and land poorly. This feels like that.
yesterday at 5:49 PM
It gets weirder:
Intimacy is great, but you’re fooling yourself if you think that doing
slimy pushups against each other is the optimal way to produce it. It
may (sadly) be one of the best ways in practice, given what nature has
left us with, but that’s very different from saying “yes, this is
definitely how a good designer would have designed this system from
the ground up.”
A literal actual majority of the people I’ve talked to about this
genuinely claim to believe that yep, this is the right way for
intimacy and pleasure to be created, it’s ideal, no actually better
system could exist, any major changes would be worse.
And they are deeply confused. You are deeply confused, insofar as you
are (probably) a part of that majority.
I’m quite fond of orgasms, as it happens. I wouldn’t write them out of
the universe. I just wish they incentivized me to do something that I
straightforwardly want to do, rather than incentivizing me to:
- Sit alone tediously massaging a body part, instead of doing anything
actually interesting
- Try to convince some other cool and interesting person to drop all
of their cool and interesting activities to do some slimy pushups
with me
https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/on-puberty-identity-and-sex-6...
yesterday at 11:56 PM
weird way to view the flute..
hell the Way Bill plays the flute is pretty manly imho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxNrC27xcaA
yesterday at 4:45 PM
Not a bad piece. Cuts right to the quick in a way I quite like.
People want to have kids, more often than not. We want to socialize, we want to find partners, we want to find happiness, we want to indulge in hobbies. We are a social species, even when individuals might be deeply antisocial.
Yet we built a society that robs us of agency to try things in private, because we must be advertised to constantly. We built systems that prioritize labor over the health - physical, emotional, mental, social, and otherwise - of the organism. We built media platforms that demand attention, reward controversy, and punish learning.
Like the author’s sibling, we rob our younger cohorts of the agency to decide for themselves the life they want to live by forcing them into holes we deem appropriate and reasonable. Only certain jobs are acceptable, only certain employers have prestige, only certain careers are valid, only certain schools are worthy. Everything you do, everywhere you go, everyone you meet, everything you touch, everything you buy, everything you watch or read or listen to or consume, tracked and logged somewhere for profit-motives. Not safety, not security, not enrichment, not health, and not growth.
Just profit.
And then when those good souls try to build something else - federated social media to break algorithms, private economies to bypass advertisers and payment processors, social circles hiding within encryption to duck government surveillance and identity verification - the cult of convenience and base of power punches down. When a cohort raised on the borderless lands of the internet finds someone they wish to spend their life with, they’re beaten down by arbitrary national barriers and the various -isms and -obias that keep people separate. Thus isolation is reinforced, and withdrawal amplifies.
It’s easier to not search for that thing that interests you but you’re embarrassed about, because then you avoid ads for it. It’s easier to not look for love, because you might find it’s two continents away in a country that hates you or your country hates them, or just hates immigration in general and slaps huge fees on the process. It’s easier to keep your head down working for a Big Tech company because it’s a recognized name even if it hurts your soul to see what it does to humans, and who knows, you might retire from it someday.
It’s easier to choose known misery over the risk of joy. That is the core problem.