The Boyfriend's Introduction to Feminism by Gideon W. Stone is a free ebook. It's a quick read: it has a funny, conversational writing style and it's around 100 pages. The author is a man and the book is aimed particularly at young men.
The book’s author said this about my blog post:
Thanks! I appreciate your careful read and critique.
I read the book earlier this week (at Elliot’s suggestion) and overall was glad I read it. I liked that it was usually fairly clear about definitions and the main points it was making. Particularly I feel like I have a much clearer idea about what patriarchy is and why it is bad. I’m particularly sympathetic to the idea that controlling other people is bad and we should want to avoid doing that and resisting it. I also found that I could identify some examples of patriarchy that I couldn’t before (now that I knew what to look for).
I have a lot of thoughts on the book and will break these up over multiple posts.
From my notes, I noted at least 4 definitions/descriptions of patriarchy:
The name we use for social inequality against women and girls is “patriarchy”. Second-wave feminists (along with third- and fourth-wave feminists) want to smash patriarchy.
The core of patriarchy is control over women and girls’ sexuality, but it cannot tolerate the healthy development of boys’ sexuality any more than it can girls’.
Feminist writers adopted ‘patriarchy’ to refer to power dynamics in modern society more broadly
2 and 4 appeal to me particularly (because I do not like control over others and power dynamics embedded in social dynamics).
Two common examples of patriarchy I noted down were:
god > husband > wife > children that I’ve seen mentioned by a number of redpill type influencers. (I’m not religious but one can replace god with a moral standard that is primarily interpreted by husbands and then applied or imposed on the rest of the family.) I was sympathetic to this only insofar as I would settle for a traditional relationship over no relationship, but it isn’t my preference. (I’m single atm and had been thinking about this on and off for the past year or two)Yeah, I liked the point about how some men see being feminist as a “noble sacrifice”, which implies they’re losing out on something.
It reminds me of how democrats sometimes claim voter ID laws discriminate against minorities because minorities have some trouble getting ID (even though they don’t), which exposes some racist views. (The similarities being that the men and democrats both claim to be virtuous based on views that have underlying bigotry issues.)
One thing I did not like about the book was chapter 4 (gender) which felt like postmodern gender ideology / trans ideology was being forced in there. There are numerous issues with this IMO.
For one: the (deliberate?*) coopting of language to serve an ideological agenda.
* I don’t mean GWS (the author) is doing this deliberately, but that gender activists (including academics) might be doing it deliberately.
The word ‘gender’ was literally synonymous with ‘sex’ until the 60s or so. Webster’s 1913 has “2. Sex, male or female. [Obs. or Colloq.]” (and similar in Webster’s 1828).
From my own research, it seems like sex is a slightly older word than gender (late 14c. vs early 15c.) for referring to male/female. (“Gender” meaning type predates both to about 13c. according to the linked source)
‘Sex’ was the main word for male/female until the (late?) 1800s when it also began being used to mean intercourse which explains why gender became the more common term.
I’m opposed to the coopting of the word ‘gender’ to mean something new and different. Typically it seemed like we used noun phrases to be specific when we wanted to talk about something gender related that wasn’t gender itself (e.g., gender roles, gender identity, etc).
Contemporarily, it seems like ‘gender’ is now used interchangeably and ambiguously to refer to something like gender identity but less restrictive and amorphous.
I think one can demonstrate this issue by considering all uses of ‘gender’ in a work like BFITF and replacing every instance with something more specific: ‘biological sex’ for male/female, and ‘gender roles’ or ‘gender identity’ for the other instances. My prediction is that this will show inconsistencies in BFITF (and other TRA* content) including ‘bait and switch’ type tactics where someone starts by referring to biological sex and then switches to a different meaning.
* TRA = Trans Rights Activists; I maybe use it too generally to mean any new-gender ideologues
Personally I separate (in my head) usages of gender into the traditional definition and ‘genfeelia’* (a word I made up to mean “how one feels about ones gender”), and so it makes it quite obvious when this kind of bait and switch happens.
* One argument against ‘genfeelia’ is that it’s perjorative, which I don’t think is true, but I can see how some trans people might see it that way because they’d see it as reducing something fundamental about themselves to simply ideas in their head (which is what it is, but they want it to be more than that). GWS’s argument actually supports this to some degree with the points about similarities in brain size.
I can’t remember anywhere that BFITF swaps out ‘sex’ for genfeelia, but that’s a common thing that happens with TRAs, e.g., “sex assigned at birth”. Sex is not ‘assigned’ (except maybe in very rare intersex cases, but AFAIK most intersex cases aren’t that ambiguous and the body is still dominantly organized around one kind of gamete even if there are some developmental anomalies). Gender-as-genfeelia can be assigned, but talking about it like that makes it very obvious that we’re talking about a psychological thing not physiological.
(Note: in my notes I refer to the author as GWS rather than Stone. I can change if it’s problematic but I don’t think it is.)
GWS also doesn’t address the conflict with TERFs, who are usually gender critical* as far as I understand. TERFs don’t like patriarchy but reject the idea that you can switch gender however you like. (TERFs are feminists like JK Rowling and possibly best known for opposing men being allowed in women’s bathrooms and changing rooms.)
* Gender critical is the main school of thought opposing trans ideology from logical, physiological, psychological, and philosophical bases.
The fact this conflict exists is a strong argument against including #1 in the list, IMO.
- Humans have two genders, ‘men’ and ‘women’.
While this does seem to be a foundational idea of patriarchy, so are lots of ideas about family and sexual reproduction and the like. It seems like the list is meant to be the smallest set of controversial ideas which is why lots of other foundational ideas of patriarchy aren’t included (because those ideas are shared with feminism and other -isms etc more broadly).
I think #2 is problematic also:
- We can reliably tell men from women by their biological, psychological, and social traits.
Yes, of course, because ‘man’ and ‘woman’ describe biological sex. It is typically trivial to infer which gamete type a person’s body is organized around.
This only makes sense as a point if #2 does not consider biological sex, but rather considers genfeelia, gender roles, and gender self-identification. This is a sneaky bait and switch. If it were put more correctly, then its nature would be more obvious, e.g., we can reliably tell how someone feels about their gendered expressions by their biological, psychological, and social traits.
I have more thoughts on all this but will need to write them up later. Also I realize I’ve mostly talked about the points in ch3 instead of ch4, but ch4 depends on all this pretext.
The “Show Full Post…” expansion on the forum is pretty glitched for this specific post. I don’t know why. You can read the post on my blog though.
Just to be clear, when you say “Yes, of course” do you mean that you agree this #2 item is a bedrock of patriarchy, or are you saying you think that the quoted sentence is true?
I am guessing you mean that you think it is true, based on the second sentence of yours that I quoted, as well as the next paragraph.
This seems confused to me.
Since trans people exist, isn’t #2 still false even if you are considering biological sex? I think there are many contexts where you could look at someone’s biological, psychological, or social traits and then you might infer their biological sex incorrectly. You could see breasts or a vagina (biological), see them being agreeable or nurturing or sensitive (psychological), see them wearing a dress and makeup or have long hair styled in a feminine way (social). All of that could lead you to infer that they are a woman. But actually they might have XY chromosomes, so your inference was wrong.
I think this reveals a big problem with your insistence that man & woman are terms that primarily pertain to biological sex and chromosomes. It seems like the terms man and woman correspond just as much with gender expression in society.
In general I think your assessment of “postmodern gender ideology / trans ideology” is a bit confused and incorrect. There are a few more specific things you said I might want to argue with, but let’s start here. I may have misunderstood you.
Just adding one more comment on this specific assertion, feel free to respond to whichever comment you like.
If we look at the intersex cases you are referring to, I think we can see something interesting. It seems you agree those are cases where a child might have their sex “assigned” at birth.
When that happens, do the doctors typically “assign” the sex that corresponds to the child’s chromosomes? I will go ahead an assert an answer: they do not. They assign sex based on the gender expression they can identify in the infant. Of biological, psychological, social traits that signal gender expression, only one of those really comes up much in infants: biological.
For example, someone with XY chromosomes and complete androgen insensitivity will be assigned “female” at birth. Because they will develop a vulva and other biological traits we associate with “woman.” They will not be assigned the sex or gender that corresponds with their chromosomes.
When things are ambiguous, doctors consistently assign the gender and sex that they intuitively guess best corresponds with the biological expression of the infant. The infant’s chromosomes do not significantly influence this decision, they base it on things like external sex characteristics.
I’m not sure why you think this. (I have some guesses. I have seen some biased coverage of this issue, so think that maybe you listened to that. Or maybe you have personally had easy experiences, and think that it is the same for all people in all states.) I am replying with some general points that apply to this issue, without a lot of detail, since I’m not really sure where your disagreement lies.
One issue is that it’s harder for lower income people to get IDs. This isn’t direct discrimination against minorities, but it does disproportionately affect minorities. That includes things like DMV offices being in locations that are inaccessible by transit or walking, keeping very short hours, making it hard both to schedule an appointment or do a walk in, and having extensive ID requirements that are hard to meet. There are also issues that affect minorities more, like having fewer offices, or offices with worse hours, in areas with high minority populations.
People also end up in a catch-22 where they need a birth certificate to get a photo ID, but they need a photo ID to get a birth certificate. People have had issues with their older birth certificates not being accepted, or having a hospital issued certificate that wasn’t a real birth certificate, but not realizing that. And if they don’t have a photo ID, it can be hard to get a copy of their birth certificate. This kind of issue will generally be harder for low income people to deal with, since the bureaucratic processes can require both time and money to figure out how to navigate the system.
There is another issue which specifically applies to African Americans who were born in the segregated states during the Jim Crow era (so, before the mid 1960s). Many people were denied access to proper hospitals because of segregation, so were born at home. Some of those people did not have their births properly registered for various reasons (including illiteracy, lack of knowledge and poverty, but also barriers and resistance from government officials to register their births). So there are black people alive in the US right now who don’t have birth certificates because of the explicit legal racism that existed at the time of their birth.
I don’t think that it is “racist” to recognize that these kinds of issues exist, and that some of them specifically apply to black people (or potentially other people of color born during segregation), while others have a disproportionate effect on minorities.
I meant the second, though I agree with the first one too. If we couldn’t easily tell, then patriarchy as described wouldn’t work very well. It would probably rely a lot more on what roles one was given / grew up with, making it much more arbitrary and unjust (like a caste system).
Only if you accept a definition of men and women that is not dependent on biological sex.
Also, since the ‘trans people exist’ argument is fairly common: I don’t dispute that they exist, I just disagree with TRAs about what ‘trans’ is. I think it’s purely psychological and learnt and is probably more about / similar to sexuality than gender. By learn in this sense I mean something more general than like being taught (though I think being taught happens to some young trans kids). It’s memetic. Or at least most cases are memetic. Brains and minds are complex so I can’t reasonably claim to know enough to cover all cases. But I think the vast majority of cases (~75%+) are memetic.
The trouble is that we, as humans, are both the producer and product of our ideas. We cultivate the ideas that give rise to our expressions, beliefs, values, etc. These, in turn, influence the cultivation. It’s a very tight loop if we don’t take efforts to slow it down and inject more information. (Though that injection is in turn the result of certain ideas / rational memes.)
One consequence is that one could induce being trans in oneself if one tries and/or is pressured or affirmed into it. (I think this (inducing) is possible for many mental illnesses and also stuff like romantic feelings)
Like, within a gender ideology world view, I’ve long thought that the logical implication was infinite genders (which GWS mentions too). The problem with that is that they’re all meaningless and made up. IMO that’s demonstrated by all the neo-pronoun nonsense. I know someone who identifies as an AI for example. Not just a single AI but a system of them (so uses plural pronouns, too). I am not sure how anyone can seriously see that as anything other than mental illness. I feel sympathetic in that I think living in a fiction like that is a bad way to live and that the person in question is trapped by bad ideas. The political and social stuff that’s associated with affirmation only makes the situation worse and harder to escape.
I didn’t mention chromosomes (deliberately) and I think using XX or XY to determin sex/gender is a bit reductve. Rather, there is almost always a gamete type (small for sperm, large for eggs) that is the dominant causal factor for the organization of ones biology. Using XX/XY chromosomes as the determinant is a crude approximation for that. So it’s not about the particular sets of genes themselves but rather their expression combined with biological development. (This explanation also handles situations like XXY.)
Well there is some correspondence, particularly because most contexts involve cis-gendered people. I disagree that it’s “just as much” these days (but that depends on how you define man/woman). Luckily, though, the terms trans woman for trans-identified males, and vice versa, seem more common* than woman/man (and describe much more specific expression too). I say luckily because otherwise the words become mostly meaningless. e.g., “I’m attracted to women” would cease to be correct for the most people who would say that (and vice versa) if we relaxed the definitions. Most people would need to say something like “I’m attracted to cis-gendered biological females” instead. We’d need the ‘biological’ qualifier because TRAs are pushing for stuff like having M/F changed to F/M on their passport/ID next to ‘sex’, which would be the complete erosion of any meaning of these words and a total break from the biological meaning.
* trans-identified (fe)male is much less common as a term and I’ve only heard it from gender critical people.
I also think the TRA’s opinions about this are sexist because they see gender as a costume — that it’s more important how you act than what you are; that men can understand what it’s like to be a woman just by dressing up.
(That said, if one can pass then one probably can learn some things. VladNCL (i think) on YouTube is a big Russian guy who has learnt to dress up very convincingly. He has some eye opening videos about sexual harassment women face (videos of him in Cyprus and Vegas come to mind). Those kind of videos do more to convince me that there are salient issues around sexism than any pro-trans content.)
As an aside re the terms trans woman and trans man, I think it’s curious that the adjective modifies the noun in the way it does. From a grammatical point of view, ‘trans man’ should be synonymous with trans-identified male. The postmodernists won that one though. (And I use the word ‘won’ because that’s how they see it, which kind of forces the rest of us to play the same game. Everything is political when one problematic group of intellectuals makes anything and everything political. (thinking) hmm, maybe that’s unfair to say and just an excuse to impose my views on others.)
I would like to be wrong because I feel a lot of negative emotions about how things are and I don’t think that’s good for me or healthy.
I wouldn’t like to be erroneously convinced that I’m wrong though (which would be like living in a fantasy).
You’re probably right. I have some personal second hand experience but don’t know many people who would actually be disadvantaged because I don’t spent much time in the places that would expose me to those people (and I haven’t looked specifically for videos that would prove me wrong).
Edit: sorry I misread what you wrote. The second hand experience I’m talking about is talking to some black Americans but there’s bias in my sampling. With regards to my own experience, yeah it’s been easy.
Some of the content that comvinced me that there was some racism from some Democrats is interviews with people that i assumed were registered democrat voters (or of the same ilk)
Okay, you’ve convinced me that I don’t know enough about it. Solving those sort of things should be a priority for the US govt. I note that this did not happen during 12 years of democrat presidents, though 
That said, a few thoughts:
how is the electoral roll managed? If someone has no birth certificate then wouldn’t the natural consequence be that they’re absent from government databases entirely? (I’m not familiar with how US voting works in this regard. Surely people have their name marked off a list at least so that trivial voter fraud is detectable? Countries with no ID requirements sometimes pick up voter fraud after the fact when looking for people that vote twice (and there are smarter ways to do voter fraud in any case))
how does this work with all the ICE / deportation stuff? Isn’t there a risk that a person with no birth certificate looks like an undocumented immigrant? I guess they would claim to be a US citizen which hopefully slows down the process enough to prevent deportation.
One thing I forgot to mention earlier about ch4, I am not sure it was really necessary or added anything (besides TRA appeasment). It’s notable because there are other things I would have preferred to read about over gender stuff.
Like GWS points out that we only have evidence for patriarchy emerging 7000 years ago. The overwhelming majority of human progress has thus been made under patriarchy. GWS also describes European society prior to this as stangnant and sex egalitarian. I’m not sure about the egalitarian bit, but stagnant sounds right.
If it were the case that society had a choice between anti-patriarchy or progress, I would choose progress (to be clear, I don’t think this is the choice, but some people (redpill and aligned intellectuals/influencers like WhatIfAltHist or hoe_math) definitely talk like that’s the choice). I’d like to have seen some arguments about why this dichotomy is false from the same level of emergence. (I can argue against that dichotomy from more foundational objectivist principles for example, or CR/CF epistemic principles)
One reason for choosing progress (assuming it was either/or) is that we need to be a rich, powerful, and wealthy civilization to be able to pursue things like dismantling patriarchy that aren’t as relevant to survival as e.g., mass famine.
On the note of WhatIfAltHist and hoe_math, I still think they make some good points against feminism / liberal ideology even if I don’t agree completely with either of them.
I don’t dispute that there are racist democrats or democrats that say racist things. But the actual quote I was replying to was not about democrats saying things that were racist. It was this:
That seems to be saying that just having the view that voter ID laws discriminate against minorities itself exposes some racist views.
I’m not sure if you have a specific point about the Democratic presidents not solving the issue. There are lots of issues they haven’t solved. One of the issues is that both parties spend a lot of time fighting each other. A lot of people on the left are pretty disillusioned with the democrats, and a lot of people actually argue that the democrat vs republican dichotomy is flawed, because neither one is actually on the side of the people.
Regarding fixing the problem - I’m not an expert on US civics at all, but I think that one of the issues is that the ID stuff (birth certificates, driver’s licenses, etc) is the responsibility of the individual states, not the federal government. So I think that there are a lot of things that would be overreach for the federal government to do.
Even right now, the federal government passed some laws about Real ID. That took 20 years to finally come into effect. There isn’t actually a federal system for people to get Real ID compliant driver’s licenses or state IDs. (Passports are federal and are Real ID compliant though.) The federal government set the rules for what is required for an ID to be compliant, but each state has its own system, so the rules for getting a Real ID vary by state.
In the US you have to register to be on the voter list. They don’t keep a database on their own: it is an opt-in system. And states actually remove people from the voter list for various reasons, including if you haven’t voted recently. The voter lists are also based on where you live, not where you are born, so it wouldn’t make sense to just put birth certificate info into a database. Each state is responsible for its own voter lists, and they all have their own rules.
One way they protect against fraud is that the voter registration lists are publicly available in most states. You can access the voter lists, which include things like names, addresses, party affiliations, and voting history (just whether they voted or not) of registered voters. (You might notice when people commit a high profile crime, the media will often find their info on the voter list, and say if they were registered as a democrat or republican, and if they voted recently.) This makes doing certain types of voter fraud, such as voting as a non-citizen, or voting in more than one place, risky and a matter of public record that anyone could look up if they wanted to.
Yes. That is one of the complaints that people have about what is happening right now.
There was a Mexican Repatriation that happened in the US in 1930s. According to Wikipedia, between 300,000 - 2,000,000 people repatriated or were deported, and 40-60% of those people were US citizens. Some people are worried that this current push will also end up deporting citizens, since there are US citizens who are not easily able to prove their citizenship.
One reason people are so worried about what is occurring is because it could end up with the wrongful deportation of citizens. There are claims we don’t need to give illegal immigrants due process because the constitution doesn’t apply to them. I don’t agree with that, but even if it were true, then some of the people denied due process would inevitably be citizens who never get a chance to prove they are citizens. There is no way to fully deny illegal immigrants due process without accidentally denying due process to some citizens or legal immigrants.
I know that “trans people exist” is like a slogan or something in the trans community, but I did not really intend to signal that. I don’t mind signaling it, so I did not make effort to rephrase the sentence… but I was just making the claim literally, as a demonstration of why I disgreed with you. Your statement did not make sense to me, because trans people exist.
The sentence in this case is more like if you said “people don’t eat pumpkins” and I said “pumpkin pie exists.” That isn’t any big societal assertion about the validity of pumpkin pie. It’s just a statement of fact, and that statement of fact contradicts the prior claim. I will go into this more in a sec.
Whether or not being trans is purely psychological or memetic or genetic or some combination is, as far as I can tell, totally irrelevant to all the stuff I said.
My guess is you are bringing this up because it is an unusual/controversial perspective on being trans compared to the normal mainstream view, and you are assuming it will be important. But I’m actually already familiar with this attitude, since it fits within a cluster of related similar views that have often been held by people in the TCS/BOI/FI communities for decades. I don’t entirely agree, but I also don’t really think it matters.
Can you explain why that topic is relevant? I think it will end up being a big tangent if we try to explore that. I was making a narrower claim that doesn’t rely on transness being caused by any particular thing. We can leave the root cause of transness an unknown for the purpose of this discussion.
I don’t really understand how this is relevant either. Why do you think focusing on gametes solves the issues I laid out?
Let’s review… I am going to add bold to your quote below, to help us focus in.
I think this statement is wrong. Both sentences are wrong, but I want to focus especially on the bold sentence.
To try to demonstrate why it’s wrong, I said this:
I think there are many contexts where you could look at someone’s biological, psychological, or social traits and then you might infer their biological sex incorrectly. You could see breasts or a vagina (biological), see them being agreeable or nurturing or sensitive (psychological), see them wearing a dress and makeup or have long hair styled in a feminine way (social). All of that could lead you to infer that they are a woman. But actually they might have XY chromosomes, so your inference was wrong.
I don’t think the argument here is changed in any meaningful way if you swap out the reference to chromosomes with a references to gametes.
Why do you think reframing it to gametes matters?
I’m wondering if my argument above isn’t clear enough? I can try to rephrase it a bit.
My point is that some people (such as trans people, but others as well) make it so that, to the extent it is trivial to infer whether someone is a man or a woman, it is not trivial to infer which gamete type a person’s body is organized around.
If you see someone with breasts and long hair and makeup and soft skin wearing a dress and carrying a baby and speaking softly… you will likely infer that is a woman. But you actually do not know anything about that person’s gametes. They might be a trans woman on hormones. Even if you see them naked and they have a vulva, it might be surgically constructed. Or they might have a vulva but no womb or ovaries due to being a “male” with androgen insensitivity.
There are multiple possibilities. You can infer that they are a “woman”, because they are showing biological, psychological, and social traits are culturally associated with women. But your inference that they are a biological female could be wrong. Its chance of being correct is going to be related to how many of those other types of people happen to exist in the same area as you, or something.
I have a LOT more disagreements with the rest of your post. I think it’s hard to keep up, because from my perspective the post I initially replied to had many more errors on many more topics than I was willing to engage with immediately… and now, in this more focused discussion, you continued to introduce a bunch more stuff I disagree with. But most of it is not really related to the argument I was making, as far as I can tell.
So let’s try to get through this section first. Did my rephrasing help to clarify what I was saying?
Maybe you could do a separate topic presenting an example of what you would consider good points from these people?
I am familiar with both of them. I think they are both some combination of really stupid and really evil that is quite bad. I think they are in a category of people who are a big net negative. They are doing real, measurable harm to society and to the minds of many people. That doesn’t mean they have never said anything that was true, of course.
But I am skeptical that they provide any significant value. I am skeptical that whatever good points they have ever made were particularly unique or insightful. And I am curious what you would cite as their good points.
I just want to make sure I’m being clear about those two things, since they are different types of things.
The first group of people with older birth certificates or hospital issued certificates are able to get a real birth certificate. They might have some barriers in their way, like some states want you to have a photo ID to get your birth certificate, but if the reason you need the birth certificate is because you are trying to get a photo ID, that can be a bit of a catch-22 situation. Also in the US, the general process to get a birth certificate is that you go to the county you were born in to get it, which can be difficult. It is also possible to order most birth certificates online, but that is usually through a third party with extra costs and its own verification process, and that can take a long time.
The second group I was talking about – people who were born outside of hospitals and never registered their birth – don’t even have their birth registered with the state, so no birth certificate exists for them. There are ways they can potentially get one, but it can be a very long process, requiring a lot of work, finding old childhood records (e.g. school records, immunization records, other medical records, etc), going to court, etc, to get their birth registered with the state.
There isn’t really an easy fix for making sure that people whose births were never registered can get a birth certificate. This has also happened to people besides just black people during segregation, like people with “hippie” or “sovereign citizen” parents who just didn’t register their kids, or poor people who couldn’t afford a hospital birth and then for some reason also didn’t register the birth.
Ah, yeah. I can see how the way I quoted it might have been confusing. (I wanted to indicate that I’d read it and what kind of things convinced me without quoting multiple paragraphs.)
I appreciate you explaining both in a bit more detail, too. Some of those kind of things (catch-22s and administrative hurdles) I’m familiar with, but what you’re describing is much worse than anything I’ve had to deal with (and I have enough money that 3rd party services are an option).
Yeah good idea. It might be a little while (days, at least) until I can, but I am interested in criticisms of them / their ideas.
Another thing you could see it as is a coping mechanism. In general, you shouldn’t be picky about how victims cope.
Patriarchy harms women and men. Both “traditional” gender roles are toxic. So, trying to escape harm and stereotypes, people may not want to identify as a woman or a man.
Also “identifies as an AI” could mean a wide variety of things and play a wide variety of roles in someone’s life. It could be similar to “AI” = “robot” = agender = not man and not woman. It could be about being or trying to be less emotional. It could be a big deal that affects a lot of their life or a minor rebellion that only affects some intellectual conversations or a sort of mantra to remind them of a few of their values.
“living in a fiction” sounds bad but it’s what everyone inevitably does all the time. We’re all fallible and have mistaken beliefs.
Both the “man” and “woman” gender roles could be called fictions too. You could see it as replacing one fiction with another instead of as a “mental illness”. You could see it as an attempt to get less fictional by having a more modern, scientific, technological concept instead of more of an old, biblical Adam and Eve story.
Also, in some sort of Popperian/Deutschian epistemology sense, AIs are just people. They’re just intelligences like we are (so are intelligent aliens). They aren’t special. They aren’t a fundamentally new category of thing. Their minds wouldn’t work fundamentally differently than ours. But this goes both ways. If AIs are like us, then we’re like AIs. So maybe it’s not so weird for someone to reject our culture’s artificial distinction between “natural” and “artificial” intelligences.
People generally have all sorts of beliefs that aren’t strictly logical. What stands out about this view is that it’s unconventional and you’re interpreting it as challenging a tradition you seem to want to defend. It’s widespread to have a negative attitude to outliers, dissent, non-conformity, fictions, myths, ideas that sound dumb, etc. These kinds of negative attitudes take many forms. I think they’re a major problem because they suppress both good and bad ideas, not just bad ideas, and they suppress debate, critical discussion and curiosity. And when these attitudes lead to dismissiveness and delegitimizing disagreements as non-disagreements, that gets in the way of learning and error correction even when the dismissed idea actually is incorrect.
We’ve had plenty of racism and superstition too. That doesn’t mean those things were helpful to human progress.
It’s also messed up for this one too:
Looks to be the same type of error? It produces the whole post and then correctly formats it. I just remembered thinking it was odd at the time but didn’t realize that was unintended.
Maybe there’s something similar to the two posts?