I am going to be honest, if you asked me pre-Jan 6 "how many people would be shot if they attacked en masse the Capitol with Congress in session" my guess would have been much higher than one. This isn't a case of protestors just doing their business in a public street and getting into some heated argument with police that degenerates into a fight. It was an attempt to interfere with government, and possibly a direct threat to the life and safety of elected officials. Even if you think it was warranted you would be an idiot to think it would be safe. You don't storm the Bastille and expect no fire in return. A State's whole thing is a monopoly on violence, it's entirely expected that an attempt to violently subvert that State's own internal mechanisms would be met with violence in return.

I don't really, I don't feel like I know the data well enough, I was just talking about this on the assumption that what the post describes (looking for a community) is what's going on for at least a non-insignificant amount of people. My point was just, if what's happening is simply people who are looking for a community, then obviously it's worse if they find a community which requires them to undergo medical procedures than if they find one that doesn't (since unnecessary medical procedures are always a net negative, and the benefits would be the same anyway).

I don't think social contagion is like, an impossible concept. People seem very fixated on some things being ontological truths about you, but even if dysphoria is innate (it seems to be), it hardly seems impossible that if you have some kind of psychological hangup you may misidentify it as being trans, just as you describe the opposite, of being trans and misidentifying it as something else. The latter used to be far more common in the past because of course being trans was a thing no one would really talk much about and generally framed negatively. It still suffers quite a lot of discrimination but also has more positive discourse and more public communities so I think it's entirely possible for either direction to happen, though probably the "am dysphoric/trans but stay in denial about it" is still more common. That doesn't mean it needs to straight up become an epidemic, which for me would entail something like, not only a few non-trans people mistakenly think they're trans, but so many of them doing so that they then convince more non-trans people that they must be trans, and the community is straight up dominated by non dysphoric people who just memed themselves into believing they're trans. I don't think that's happening and I don't think that sounds likely. But a few sparse episodes of lonely people who are just desperate to fit in somewhere and end up persuading themselves that the one community where they're being accepted might be where they belong in other ways too? That probably happens, it feels like it's just a common human thing.

Creative careers like "artist" are incredibly depreciated because supply vastly outstrips demand. There's not a lot of art you need; people don't get their walls painted with frescoes any more, they don't get portraits. All art is highly reproducible in one way or another (e.g. art for games, art for book covers, etc). Meanwhile it looks fun or at least somewhat fulfilling, definitely more stimulating than doing some boring drudgery, so ton of people try. As a result anyone who wants art, especially at a low-ish level, has an embarrassment of wannabe artists to search for the lowest price (which sometimes can be "zero" - the infamous "exposure" or even negative!).

I wouldn't really know the numbers. My general point is what I said, that to acknowledge/consider yourself as trans seems like a necessary step to actually transitioning. There's gotta be people who have dysphoria and simply never really think about that option, misunderstand it for some other sort of malaise and live with it without realising it. Anyone who transitions isn't just dysphoric, they went through the additional step of realising it too.

To what degree do you think simply asking "am I trans?" actually causes someone to be more likely to medically transition?

So first, while I wrote it like that in the post, it was in the context of joining a community, so I actually meant probably something a bit more advanced than just literally idly wondering whether you are trans (something I've probably done at least once in my life myself), even just to answer in five seconds flat "nah, I'm not".

But second, mathematically speaking, yes, I still think that is obviously causative. There are two groups of people: those who have asked themselves at least once, "am I trans?", and those who never have. Those who never have have no reason to ever medical transition. Those who medical transition all must at some point have asked themselves "am I trans?". Furthermore they must have answered that question with "yes" the last time they asked it, obviously. And obviously the path to any medical transition always starts with asking yourself "am I trans?" and answering "yes"; it is a necessary albeit not sufficient condition.

So yes, obviously there's a causative link there! I don't know how strong but it's logically inevitable that there is one.

But that B statistically does not "cause" C because the full strength of the correlation is explained by the dysphoria variable, A (cf The Book of Why).

If you have dysphoria but never ask yourself whether you're trans, how are you going to even get to medical transition? Suppose having dysphoria and living in a civilization that somehow has the capability for medical transitioning but lacks completely a construct of "transness" (let's say they use the technological capability only for farfetched purposes like some deep cover infiltration or such). So you can have dysphoria in this society but also never ask yourself "am I trans?" because the word and concept don't exist. Wouldn't that make you less likely to medically transition?

If you're willing, could you elaborate on this argument? It sounds like you think there is a causal connection (not just a correlation) between "maybe I'm trans" and medical transition. Is that right? If yes, I would be really interested to hear how quantitatively strong you think the causal relationship/evidence is.

I mean, I'm just comparing it to virtually any other community. The vast majority of communities do not require or encourage surgery to join or fit in (exceptions: some religions, and maybe if you're like, in a body-mod centred community). Obviously not all trans people medically transition, but all who medically transition are trans? I'm a bit confused by the question because obviously there is a causal connection. If there wasn't a casual connection you'd expect equal odds for a cis person to just up and go medically transition for no reason whatsoever.

Maybe I'm way too pessimistic, but for many people, it may be very difficult (or even impossible) to otherwise satisfy this desire.

To be fair, does that say more about our society right now than anything else. Be it due to gender roles or general social norms, this degree of tight connection that some groups (like trans communities) seem to form shouldn't be that alien to us in general or require any particular sexual orientation, and yet.

I see phrasing like this a lot, I don't mean to pick on you in particular, but in general I think there is a level of rhetorical alarmism with language like this that isn't justified by the medical reality, and IME people using phrasing like this rarely have a gears-level understanding of trans medicine (I don't know if that's true for you or not).

To be fair, virtually any kind of medical intervention at all seems too much if all your goal is is "find a group within which you can fit and feel loved". Most groups don't require that. Not saying being trans requires it as some kind of ritual - in fact afaict people in this sphere tend to be very accepting of all degrees of transitioning, including only social - but rather that if you decide "maybe I am trans" you will be more likely to undergo such medical procedures than you would ever be if you decided "maybe I like cosplay" and hung out with that community.

Agree with you that as a transhumanist one shouldn't really see mutilation per se as a tragedy, though it obviously is the kind of thing that's high stakes - if you're wrong then you lose something that's not recoverable. So I can buy the argument as far as "this is the kind of thing you really need a very low false positives rate on".

<insert Austin Powers 'RUN, IT'S GODZILLA!' scene>

For what it matters, I still use an MP3 player. I've had people look at it a bit bemused. It's still the most useful way of listening to music I can imagine. Super simple, doesn't stop working when my train is inside a tunnel, and isn't as desperately battery-hungry as my phone (which I generally need charged for more useful reasons anyway). That's an obvious case of a piece of tech that was really convenient and useful and only got phased out because it was a pain from the seller's side to support (it would have been easy if anyone had said "fuck it" and started selling DRM-free music but of course can't do that, what if you copied it).