We are approaching the end of the Transgender Intellectual Turing Test submission period! Remember that submissions will not be accepted after March 1st. If you’re considering participating, please finish up your submissions soon!
In addition, I’m uncertain about whether the polls should allow the participants to specify whether they believe in gender identity, the Blanchard-Bailey theory, or neither. In the previous ITT, social justice people and anti-social-justice people generally agreed on their assessments of any given post, which is a point in favor of not bothering. In addition, while many of my readers legitimately do not believe in either theory and would be excluded if I didn’t have an “other” option, y’all are a bunch of special snowflakes and whenever I offer an “other” option for anything you will take it even if you are J. Michael Bailey himself. On the other hand, if we don’t divide up the categories, a post might win on the basis of catering to the stereotypes of one particular group, even though it isn’t actually a good impersonation of that point of view. So discuss what I should do in the comments.
I’d say have options for each side and other/I don’t know, and just encourage people to consider if their position rounds off to one side? Even if people agreed last time (for the ones where you measured) they might not this time and it’d be interesting to see if and why that happens.
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I think the polls should allow your readers to specify what they believe in, because it seems plausible to me that there will be a bigger difference in the two side’s understanding of each other than we saw in SJ.
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Yeah, this. As someone who doesn’t have a good grasp of the Blanchard-Bailey theory, and is looking forward to reading these to learn more, I’d definitely want to know which of the posts were written by actual proponents as opposed to people guessing/playing to stereotypes.
The PhilPapers surveys use the word “lean towards”, which I think is nice for people who have an inclination towards one theory but don’t feel it perfectly describes their thoughts. Maybe options of “I lean towards finding the Blanchard-Bailey theory more convincing”, “I lean towards finding the Gender Identity theory more convincing”, and “I’m too confused about the topic to have any inclination either way”?
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Or: I’m not aware of any convincing evidence to prefer one over the other. Although arguably this is ‘confused.’
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My intuition (as someone who became a Blanchardian five years after I came out, so control for like mind bias) is that identitiarians will on average have a really terrible grasp on what Blanchardians believe, even relatively knowledgable identitarians, but it won’t be as strong in the opposite direction because most trans/pre-trans people who have taken up Blanchardian viewpoints did it after being into the whole identity thing for a really long time. (Cis Blanchardians are another issue entirely and skew TERFy.)
I like mayleaf’s suggestion as the least-bad option we can have. It would still exclude, say, the ‘transsexualism is caused by ghost possession’ dude, but you can’t win them all.
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Do you find a lot of cis TERFs genuinely ignorant about the identitarian position? In my experience “people who read a lot of articles about the construction of gender on the internet” is a super set of “women who go on to stumble across radical feminist texts and find them much more compelling”. A TERF genuinely confused (rather than comprehending but repulsed) by the use of “trans woman” for MTF rather than dysphoric DFAB, that’s hard to come by.
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It’s not so much, on average, that they don’t intellectually understand identitarian positions than they don’t emotionally understand them. (I think there must be a better word than ’emotionally’ here, but I can’t think of it.) They know the general beats of what people believe, but can’t/don’t synthesize that into why those people believe it, and instead go ‘trans women must be fetishists because I do not possibly understand how or why someone raised as male would become female otherwise’. They also, in my observations, reject the idea of androphilic trans men having sexual motivations equivalent to those of (most-but-not-all, though I’m a real outlier amongst Blanchardians for that one) gynephilic trans women.
Specifically, I’ve had androphilic detransitioned TERFs get really upset at me for suggesting the possibility of autoandrophilia.
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Right, same intuition here. I’m not a Blanchardian (I don’t buy their stated cause-effect relationships, for example, and I could believe that “AGP” and “HSTS” have a similar etiology), but I suspect “reality has a Blanchardian bias” or in other words, the Blanchard-Bailey theory is probably the one that gives us the most accurate predictions.
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I’d go for six options. Allow the answerer to specify which of the two theories they feel *most* sympathetic towards – I think you are gonna have to force question-answerers to round themselves off to an ideology to get any useful data out of it, or everyone will just pick ‘Actually, I am a unique thinker with very nuanced views’
As for the ideology being guessed at, I’d give three options – one for ‘I think the author truly supports blanchard-bailey’, and one for ‘I think the author really supports gender identity’.
But I’d also add one for the ambiguous case, where you think you do know the author’s true worldview but you have no idea whether *they* would think that worldview counted as pro- or anti-. That was a major problem in the SJ ITT, where even if I thought I knew what the author’s true position was, I had no idea which category they’d claim that position was in. Lots of people who could either be ‘highly noncentral anti-SJ with lots of sympathies to SJ ideas’ or ‘highly noncentral SJ with lots of criticisms towards mainstream SJ’ dependent entirely on which set of labels they liked more that day.
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Sorry – if it’s not clear, I meant 2 possibilities for the ideology of the guesser, 3 possibilities for the ideology of the author, so 2×3 = 6 possible combinations, each with its own poll category.
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For what it’s worth, I think there are a hell of a lot more people who can be labelled as ‘might be on the moderate bit of either side of this political issue with a lot of overlap’ than who can be labelled as ‘might believe something that amounts to a hybrid of two mutually exclusive theories that you need to be at a certain level of trans-awareness to even know are competing with each other’.
I did not explain the second bit as well as I could have and I realized that before sending, so let me retry: There aren’t that many people where you cannot be sure if they count as an identitarian or a Blanchardian, because there are not many ways you can fuse those ideas and come out with something even slightly reasonable.
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In the SJ/anti-SJ ITT, most people either do agree with SJ or do not agree with SJ. In this case, “rounding off” is less likely to work. To use an actual example I’ve seen proposed in apparent seriousness (but that I don’t know that you have any commenters who believe), what does someone who believes people transition because they’re possessed by a ghost of the opposite sex “round off” to?
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(not that I’m being particularly serious here…)
That seems closer to GI than BB? If only because it seems to be based on the ghost’s identity, rather than on sexuality.
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I was going to say it looks a little more Blanchardian, in that it’s a conjecture in which gender identity is secondary to some other separatable-from-the-original-person factor rather than an innate sense that could not possibly be caused by anything else or affected by other conditions. (I’ve found people are on average more resistant to the ‘gender identity is secondary to X’ aspect of Blanchardianism than the ‘X is a paraphilia*’ aspect.)
*I prefer to taboo ‘fetish’ and ‘paraphilia’ in these discussions, but in practice that’s not always possible.
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ITT: People briefly confused about what ITT stood for.
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For me “Intellectual Turing Test” is the most normal expansion of “ITT” and on the rare occasions when I’ve seen a different usage I’ve gotten quite confused.
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“y’all are a bunch of special snowflakes and whenever I offer an “other” option for anything you will take it even if you are J. Michael Bailey himself”
Specifically, in addition to the snowflake aspect, I can see social desirability bias (yes, yes, I know) coming into play so Andrea James ticks ‘identity’ without a problem but Anne Lawrence goes back and forth on if she really counts as a supporter of the theory she dedicated her life to.
For what it’s worth, I’ve seen people outside of this blog ridicule the idea of an Intellectual Turing Test in which people do not mention which side of the debate they’re on when responding to it, so that’s probably an important part.
One thing I noted when reading through the last one was that a lot of the comments were “well, this absolutely sounds like something a hardline SJW/crazed neoreactionary would believe, but there can’t be too many of those who read Ozy’s blog, so I’m voting insincere”. That seems to defeat the purpose of an ITT. (It also meant most of the best fakes were less interesting, in that they were ‘good simulation of the beliefs of a rationalist moderate who you will never meet outside of this specific part of the intenet’ rather than ‘good simulation of how most people think and feel on the topic’.) To use an example, SJ #7 was a masterpiece with one fatal flaw — the author used ‘cismale’ where he should have used ‘cis man’. Were he that slightest bit better at his shibboleths, he’d be a perfect imitation of half the people I’ve met in my life. But that half of the population does not read Thing of Things, so he was detected as a fake.
As a result, I think it would be worth pretending the ITT entries are from the least convenient possible world where Ozy is extensively read by hardline SJWs and crazed neoreactionaries. I’m not sure how significant that is to this specific ITT, but it could still hold true.
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To be fair, all of the crazed neoreactionaries were, in fact, actually crazed neoreactionaries and not fakes. So if you’re going with the “there aren’t any crazed neoreactionaries that read Ozy’s blog” methodology, you’re going to be wrong.
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I recognize that was a weird example, but I needed a theoretical reverse of the phenomenon I did observe of ‘the specific type of left-wing this person claims to be is not a type of left-wing I would expect to meet here, so they must be lying’.
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I don’t think that not asking has any benefits over asking with an other option.
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One question for Ozy: how long a gap do you suspect there will be between the deadline and the first entry being put up?
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One or two days.
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If there is a decision to require votes to say which theory we lean toward, I certainly favor some neutral option. Not because I’m a special snowflake with a more nuanced, sophisticated view (that’s usually the case, of course, but not here) but rather because I don’t feel like I understand this issue well enough to have a justified opinion; most of the evidence I’ve encountered has served only to confuse me more. And I try to avoid taking positions when I don’t know what’s going on. But perhaps that just means I shouldn’t vote.
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I wish I could participate but most of my submission would be “I’m not familiar enough with these issues to actually have an opinion.”
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I’m really curious about whether people without opinions on the issue will have opinions on whether an entry is real or fake, and if so whether those opinions will tend to be correct.
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I am totally open to running another ITT if you can suggest two groups of people who disagree with each other and both read my blog. 🙂
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Deontologists and consequentialists?
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@Protagoras, I’d love that idea! I’m a staunch deontologist, and I would enjoy participating in that.
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