Two of my favorite recent posts of yours are "cons of polyamory" and "casual sex," I am therefore inferring about myself that I like casual personal anthropological studies.
I think there's plenty of territory here, for example around how people feel about (any of the) recent EA controversies; though I can imagine there are other reasons for you not to write about such things.
Hi Ozy! I love your writing and have been really enjoying the Substack!
A post I'd really enjoy seeing is a retrospective/reflection on the Bay Area community side of the rationalist project ("the village"). My sense is that ~a decade ago, there was a lot of excitement in the ratsphere about building a community that was based around this common set of ideas and interested in trying out different ways of living (polyamory, group houses, psychedelics, circling etc.). And my sense is also that this effort has ended up succeeding in some really big ways (lots of people have found good relationships, made amazing friendships, had big impacts etc.), but has also not lived up to all those dreams. Many people came to the bay and didn't find the community they were looking for, and efforts to improve their experiences (e.g. project Hufflepuff) didn't seem to change that. And there were also more serious problems: Leverage seemingly turning into a cult, the incident at the 2019 CFAR reunion, the suicides of individuals in or adjacent to the community, and accusations of sexual harassment/assault by people in/adjacent to the community.
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on pretty much any aspects of community history, but a few particular questions might be:
- Are there particular living arrangements, community institutions, or traditions that have worked especially well (or poorly)?
- What advice would you give to community builders in other cities based on the experience of the Bay area community?
- How has the rationalist community's experience compared to that of other intentional communities?
- The rationalist community is uniquely accepting of people with severe mental illnesses, relative to other communities (such as universities) that tend to try and exclude mentally ill people, often for the purpose of avoiding bad PR. Is part of the negative perceptions people have of the rat community's experience just the result of not being willing to screw over people for PR purposes?
Very random request; I posted the following on twitter. Would like to hear your take on speculation about sexualities of fictional characters (and on Sam and Frodo specifically):
Some people speculate that Sam and Frodo were gay and drawn to each other. Others see this as a complete betrayal of JRR Tolkien's vision, injecting modern views of homosexuality into what is a deep traditional friendship (one that reaches across class lines). Since these characters are entirely fictional, and Tolkien never wrote them as gay, they cannot be gay.
I think the "others" are correct - this is reading modern views into a traditional story where they were not intended.
But I think that "some people" are also correct. Not necessarily correct to jump straight to "they were gay", but to point out that hobbits are basically humans (like most fantasy creatures), and their societies are very similar to human societies. Humans have sexualities and sexual desires, and our societies are built around these facts; if hobbits don't have these urges, their society makes no sense. Notice that for all Tolkien's imaginative world-building, the social structures are very conventional.
So, hobbits are humans, humans have sexual desires and sexualities, and Tolkien's world-building confirms this. So speculating on their sexualities is entirely legitimate. And we can use their book-described behaviour as a legitimate guide. For instance, Tolkien never wrote Aragon as explicitly straight; however, he loved a woman, married her, and she bore him children, so I think we can agree that the text at least hints that Aragon was sexually attracted to women.
So, I'll now add my own uninformed speculations. I think that Frodo was essentially asexual - due to the ring and the wound from the Nazgul, maybe. Though he seems pretty asexual from the very beginning (unlike Bilbo, who seems more classically gay).
Sam is more complicated. He married Rosie with great enthusiasm, had a lot of kids very fast, so he seems clearly drawn to the ladies. And I don't think he had any sexual attraction to Frodo. But I do think he loved him. And not just in the philia/good friends sort of way. Love for an admired benevolent superior - I don't think the relationship between Frodo and Sam was ever equal.
Oh, man, this brings back memories of my days in middle school on Library of Moria... People used to call penises "manhoods" and then realized that, clearly, people who weren't Men wouldn't have manhoods, so we were forced to endure an endless series of "elfhoods", "hobbithoods", "dwarfhoods", "Maiahoods", etc.
So, I think that this comes down to a matter of interpretive lenses. Tolkien clearly intended Frodo and Sam to be a deeply loving relationship. I'd argue he drew on his own experiences as a friend to C. S. Lewis and-- especially-- in WWI. We know that the suffering in the trenches created a kind of deep emotional intimacy. I think there is no reasonable interpretation of the text in which you don't interpret Frodo and Sam as sharing a love that is one of the most important in both of their lives. I also believe the class element is very important: Sam is Frodo's subordinate but their relationship transcends the mere master/servant relationship and becomes something far deeper and more profound.
On the other hand, the "Frodo and Sam were gay" reading strikes me as pretty legitimate. Until recently, our culture rarely depicted queer people. People who wanted there to be queer characters in stories "read queerness into" text-- often in ways that the creators themselves intended. (See the excellent documentary The Celluloid Closet.) "Ha ha ha these men love each other, they're GAY" is despicable, but (say) a queer man reading a story of profound love between men and finding his experiences in it? I think that's a classic example of "applicability not allegory," as Tolkien himself wrote. (I'm reminded of Terry Pratchett's reaction when he was told that a lot of trans people relate to Discworld dwarves: he didn't intend them that way at all, but was pleased that his work spoke to people in that way. Is it too much to argue that such a compassionate man as Tolkien, if exposed to the modern evidence about gay people, might feel similarly about Frodo/Sam shipping...?)
As to my own speculations: I think your interpretation is a very reasonable interpretation of the text. But I have to profess myself fond of the idea that Sam and Frodo held and touched each other for comfort and strength to go on in the hells of Mordor. And perhaps at some point it went farther, not even in a way we would necessarily think of as sexual, but as a way of expressing affection and affirming life and finding some measure of joy even in that horrible place. I don't think Sam (especially) would ever identify as queer, but stranger things happen in extreme situations!
We disagree strongly on a lot of our premises but I always appreciate your curiosity, empiricism, uncertainty, and willingness to change your mind as new evidence comes in! I also appreciate your work as one of the few people doing any good or informative sexological research at all.
I tend tentatively to believe in "innate gender identity." (I know! I know! Normie of me. But it does match my own experiences.) I think your point is well-taken that "innate gender identity" is a spectrum. The historical evidence also seems to match this: afab nonbinary people who seventy years ago would have been butch lesbians, etc.
It seems reasonably plausible to me that both autogynephilia and gender conservativism (in individualist societies) reflect innate gender identity. Innate gender identity seems deeply tied to sexuality (perhaps for evolutionary reasons). And in addition to political/subcultural beliefs (causing potential preference falsification in both directions), gender conservativism seems to me to reflect some kind of "comfort with gender roles" that more accurately gets at the gender-identity-rrelevant thing than most masculinity metrics. I'd be interested to see a post where you try to separate politics from broader comfort with gender roles-- difficult, I know! I think your comment about "Macho" at the end gets at this.
Incidentally, I really enjoyed your linked comment about the difficulties of measuring masculinity! Very insightful.
Unrelated notes:
-Oh, I didn't know you knew Justis! We went to school together. :)
-What are your pronouns? I keep mentally calling you "she" because of the icon but [gestures at context] this might not be correct.
"We disagree strongly on a lot of our premises but I always appreciate your curiosity, empiricism, uncertainty, and willingness to change your mind as new evidence comes in! I also appreciate your work as one of the few people doing any good or informative sexological research at all."
Thanks! Appreciate your response.
I guess unfortunately, Blanchardian activists tend to misrepresent their opponents opinions, to doxx the people who disagree with them and falsely accuse them of crimes, and Blanchardian researchers tend to publish fraudulent studies and try to misrepresent trans women's sexuality and manipulate things to make trans women look delusional for raising criticism, so Blanchardians tend to try to undermine research in the area.
"I think your point is well-taken that "innate gender identity" is a spectrum."
😅 Yeah I actually picked this up from the non-Blanchardian sphere. That part of my post was mainly trying to get ahead of Blanchardians who have gotten into a tendency of dismissing my method of work by saying that I'm not picking up on the "real" cases and everything is just noise.
"It seems reasonably plausible to me that both autogynephilia and gender conservativism (in individualist societies) reflect innate gender identity."
This does seem like the big question mark. I did even get a slight correlation between autogynephilia and gender progressivism, which is somewhat in accordance with that theory. Though that could also be preference falsification etc.
Which makes it hard to get good statistical power for assessing it.
The ideal would be if one could pin down some of the remaining variance in gender identity - though of course from the "innate gender identity" perspective, really none of the variance has been pinned down (as autogynephilia and gender conservativism would be indicators rather than causes of gender identity), and none of it would be expected to get pinned down, so it's mainly a job from the psychosocial perspective to find ways of pinning it down.
I have a study on the way among gay men which finds a whole bunch of interesting findings. For instance gay men don't seem to have the same gender conservativism/gender identity connection that straight men do. I suspect that this difference explains some of the fights about the typology in the trans community; if the finding extrapolates from cis men to trans women, then gynephilic trans women would be massively more gender progressive than average, whereas androphilic trans women would be about as gender conservative as average. This presumably connects to various questions of interest like "what sorts of appearance is acceptable for a woman?" or "what sorts of trans women are legitimate?".
"-Oh, I didn't know you knew Justis! We went to school together. :)"
Two of my favorite recent posts of yours are "cons of polyamory" and "casual sex," I am therefore inferring about myself that I like casual personal anthropological studies.
I think there's plenty of territory here, for example around how people feel about (any of the) recent EA controversies; though I can imagine there are other reasons for you not to write about such things.
Already on the list. :)
Hi Ozy! I love your writing and have been really enjoying the Substack!
A post I'd really enjoy seeing is a retrospective/reflection on the Bay Area community side of the rationalist project ("the village"). My sense is that ~a decade ago, there was a lot of excitement in the ratsphere about building a community that was based around this common set of ideas and interested in trying out different ways of living (polyamory, group houses, psychedelics, circling etc.). And my sense is also that this effort has ended up succeeding in some really big ways (lots of people have found good relationships, made amazing friendships, had big impacts etc.), but has also not lived up to all those dreams. Many people came to the bay and didn't find the community they were looking for, and efforts to improve their experiences (e.g. project Hufflepuff) didn't seem to change that. And there were also more serious problems: Leverage seemingly turning into a cult, the incident at the 2019 CFAR reunion, the suicides of individuals in or adjacent to the community, and accusations of sexual harassment/assault by people in/adjacent to the community.
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on pretty much any aspects of community history, but a few particular questions might be:
- Are there particular living arrangements, community institutions, or traditions that have worked especially well (or poorly)?
- What advice would you give to community builders in other cities based on the experience of the Bay area community?
- How has the rationalist community's experience compared to that of other intentional communities?
- The rationalist community is uniquely accepting of people with severe mental illnesses, relative to other communities (such as universities) that tend to try and exclude mentally ill people, often for the purpose of avoiding bad PR. Is part of the negative perceptions people have of the rat community's experience just the result of not being willing to screw over people for PR purposes?
Is part 2 out somewhere? I know this was a while ago but I'm interested and couldn't find part 2 https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2019/11/12/polyamory-survey-the-results/
You might be interested in this post I just wrote: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mvQjpu7iFnqQ47Lbp/autogynephilia-discourse-is-so-absurdly-bad-on-all-sides
Might be of interest to you, a review I wrote: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nqkFcjP6wtQrQMiN2/book-review-autoheterosexuality
Very random request; I posted the following on twitter. Would like to hear your take on speculation about sexualities of fictional characters (and on Sam and Frodo specifically):
Some people speculate that Sam and Frodo were gay and drawn to each other. Others see this as a complete betrayal of JRR Tolkien's vision, injecting modern views of homosexuality into what is a deep traditional friendship (one that reaches across class lines). Since these characters are entirely fictional, and Tolkien never wrote them as gay, they cannot be gay.
I think the "others" are correct - this is reading modern views into a traditional story where they were not intended.
But I think that "some people" are also correct. Not necessarily correct to jump straight to "they were gay", but to point out that hobbits are basically humans (like most fantasy creatures), and their societies are very similar to human societies. Humans have sexualities and sexual desires, and our societies are built around these facts; if hobbits don't have these urges, their society makes no sense. Notice that for all Tolkien's imaginative world-building, the social structures are very conventional.
So, hobbits are humans, humans have sexual desires and sexualities, and Tolkien's world-building confirms this. So speculating on their sexualities is entirely legitimate. And we can use their book-described behaviour as a legitimate guide. For instance, Tolkien never wrote Aragon as explicitly straight; however, he loved a woman, married her, and she bore him children, so I think we can agree that the text at least hints that Aragon was sexually attracted to women.
So, I'll now add my own uninformed speculations. I think that Frodo was essentially asexual - due to the ring and the wound from the Nazgul, maybe. Though he seems pretty asexual from the very beginning (unlike Bilbo, who seems more classically gay).
Sam is more complicated. He married Rosie with great enthusiasm, had a lot of kids very fast, so he seems clearly drawn to the ladies. And I don't think he had any sexual attraction to Frodo. But I do think he loved him. And not just in the philia/good friends sort of way. Love for an admired benevolent superior - I don't think the relationship between Frodo and Sam was ever equal.
Anyway, those are my highly informed thoughts :-)
Oh, man, this brings back memories of my days in middle school on Library of Moria... People used to call penises "manhoods" and then realized that, clearly, people who weren't Men wouldn't have manhoods, so we were forced to endure an endless series of "elfhoods", "hobbithoods", "dwarfhoods", "Maiahoods", etc.
So, I think that this comes down to a matter of interpretive lenses. Tolkien clearly intended Frodo and Sam to be a deeply loving relationship. I'd argue he drew on his own experiences as a friend to C. S. Lewis and-- especially-- in WWI. We know that the suffering in the trenches created a kind of deep emotional intimacy. I think there is no reasonable interpretation of the text in which you don't interpret Frodo and Sam as sharing a love that is one of the most important in both of their lives. I also believe the class element is very important: Sam is Frodo's subordinate but their relationship transcends the mere master/servant relationship and becomes something far deeper and more profound.
On the other hand, the "Frodo and Sam were gay" reading strikes me as pretty legitimate. Until recently, our culture rarely depicted queer people. People who wanted there to be queer characters in stories "read queerness into" text-- often in ways that the creators themselves intended. (See the excellent documentary The Celluloid Closet.) "Ha ha ha these men love each other, they're GAY" is despicable, but (say) a queer man reading a story of profound love between men and finding his experiences in it? I think that's a classic example of "applicability not allegory," as Tolkien himself wrote. (I'm reminded of Terry Pratchett's reaction when he was told that a lot of trans people relate to Discworld dwarves: he didn't intend them that way at all, but was pleased that his work spoke to people in that way. Is it too much to argue that such a compassionate man as Tolkien, if exposed to the modern evidence about gay people, might feel similarly about Frodo/Sam shipping...?)
As to my own speculations: I think your interpretation is a very reasonable interpretation of the text. But I have to profess myself fond of the idea that Sam and Frodo held and touched each other for comfort and strength to go on in the hells of Mordor. And perhaps at some point it went farther, not even in a way we would necessarily think of as sexual, but as a way of expressing affection and affirming life and finding some measure of joy even in that horrible place. I don't think Sam (especially) would ever identify as queer, but stranger things happen in extreme situations!
Cool, thanks.
Is there evidence that Tolkien was particularly compassionate?
If it's not too spicy, I would like to know what you think of my study here.
https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2022/10/12/towards-a-comprehensive-study-of-potential-psychological-causes-of-the-ordinary-range-of-variation-of-affective-gender-identity-in-males/
We disagree strongly on a lot of our premises but I always appreciate your curiosity, empiricism, uncertainty, and willingness to change your mind as new evidence comes in! I also appreciate your work as one of the few people doing any good or informative sexological research at all.
I tend tentatively to believe in "innate gender identity." (I know! I know! Normie of me. But it does match my own experiences.) I think your point is well-taken that "innate gender identity" is a spectrum. The historical evidence also seems to match this: afab nonbinary people who seventy years ago would have been butch lesbians, etc.
It seems reasonably plausible to me that both autogynephilia and gender conservativism (in individualist societies) reflect innate gender identity. Innate gender identity seems deeply tied to sexuality (perhaps for evolutionary reasons). And in addition to political/subcultural beliefs (causing potential preference falsification in both directions), gender conservativism seems to me to reflect some kind of "comfort with gender roles" that more accurately gets at the gender-identity-rrelevant thing than most masculinity metrics. I'd be interested to see a post where you try to separate politics from broader comfort with gender roles-- difficult, I know! I think your comment about "Macho" at the end gets at this.
Incidentally, I really enjoyed your linked comment about the difficulties of measuring masculinity! Very insightful.
Unrelated notes:
-Oh, I didn't know you knew Justis! We went to school together. :)
-What are your pronouns? I keep mentally calling you "she" because of the icon but [gestures at context] this might not be correct.
"We disagree strongly on a lot of our premises but I always appreciate your curiosity, empiricism, uncertainty, and willingness to change your mind as new evidence comes in! I also appreciate your work as one of the few people doing any good or informative sexological research at all."
Thanks! Appreciate your response.
I guess unfortunately, Blanchardian activists tend to misrepresent their opponents opinions, to doxx the people who disagree with them and falsely accuse them of crimes, and Blanchardian researchers tend to publish fraudulent studies and try to misrepresent trans women's sexuality and manipulate things to make trans women look delusional for raising criticism, so Blanchardians tend to try to undermine research in the area.
"I think your point is well-taken that "innate gender identity" is a spectrum."
😅 Yeah I actually picked this up from the non-Blanchardian sphere. That part of my post was mainly trying to get ahead of Blanchardians who have gotten into a tendency of dismissing my method of work by saying that I'm not picking up on the "real" cases and everything is just noise.
"It seems reasonably plausible to me that both autogynephilia and gender conservativism (in individualist societies) reflect innate gender identity."
This does seem like the big question mark. I did even get a slight correlation between autogynephilia and gender progressivism, which is somewhat in accordance with that theory. Though that could also be preference falsification etc.
There are various ways in which it could be investigated further, but a lot of them run into intransitivity of correlation problems: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FaiHkDrakAA_xcS?format=jpg&name=medium
Which makes it hard to get good statistical power for assessing it.
The ideal would be if one could pin down some of the remaining variance in gender identity - though of course from the "innate gender identity" perspective, really none of the variance has been pinned down (as autogynephilia and gender conservativism would be indicators rather than causes of gender identity), and none of it would be expected to get pinned down, so it's mainly a job from the psychosocial perspective to find ways of pinning it down.
I have a study on the way among gay men which finds a whole bunch of interesting findings. For instance gay men don't seem to have the same gender conservativism/gender identity connection that straight men do. I suspect that this difference explains some of the fights about the typology in the trans community; if the finding extrapolates from cis men to trans women, then gynephilic trans women would be massively more gender progressive than average, whereas androphilic trans women would be about as gender conservative as average. This presumably connects to various questions of interest like "what sorts of appearance is acceptable for a woman?" or "what sorts of trans women are legitimate?".
"-Oh, I didn't know you knew Justis! We went to school together. :)"
😅 I only know Justis from LessWrong. LessWrong recently introduced a proofreading service: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nsCwdYJEpmW5Hw5Xm/lesswrong-is-providing-feedback-and-proofreading-on-drafts
And it is usually Justis who does the proofreading.
"-What are your pronouns? I keep mentally calling you "she" because of the icon but [gestures at context] this might not be correct."
Well so I mostly live as a cis guy (modulo the HRT) but it's fine for people to call me "she".