This will lead to a spiraling effect- Fewer actual differences will lead to a lessening of socialized differences, which will lead to less actual differences, etc
I anticipate (and rather hope for) more differences. The main reason I would hope to see 'gender' differences to cease to be a significant concept is because people will explore whole swathes of new currently unthought of kinds of difference, relationship and community so that simple gender as we know it is lost in the crowd.
An ex girl friend gave me an anecdote on gender differences years ago. A woman tried a little experiment on herself. She wondered what it would be like to be a man, and just wanting a taste, she just boosted her testosterone for a day. And what a day it was. I believe she was some kind of tour guide, where she spent the day talking to and leading groups of people. Normally, she found herself rather wound up and anxious about pleasing the group, and not wanting to assert herself and what she wanted. But with a boost of testosterone "she just didn't care". That was the defining result of the experiment for the author, and my ex girl friend as well. Testosterone was a magic elixir that dispelled worries and enabled assertiveness because "she just didn't care".
Did that increase the utility she gained? That the tour gained? Could be true either way. Could be both. Could be neither. I could say that about any of the various "improvements" to either sex you suggested - there are plenty of people who would take them the other way, And as the anecdote suggests, it may be more of a case of trade offs than independent dimensions. Once she lost her empathy and "just didn't care", her assertiveness went up, and depression went down.
Even if everyone chose to go transgendered, there's no real reason to expect us to meet in the unisex middle based on shared utility functions. It's the differences in our values that makes possible mutually beneficial exchange.
Step 2: Give the tour guide a second shot of testosterone (saline),
Step 3: Give the tour guide a third shot of testosterone (estrogen).
Step 4: Compare the results from Step 2 and Step 3 with that of Step 1.
Upvoted!
I think this is the most compelling argument so far.
It reminds me of the Sibfox "experiment": Russian scientists were domesticating foxes (in order to make getting their fur easier- "Let's turn them into pets, so they will trust us, so we can kill them easier!" ugh...But anyways) In the process of selecting for domesticity/trust, etc, they ended up with foxes that were dog-like: They barked, had floppy ears, and mottled fur. The fur mottling was lucky for them, since it meant that they couldn't fulfill their original purpose, and instead are being used as pets.
I can definitely see that humans would similarly have trade-offs rather than independent dimensions as well. And I can also see that those independent dimensions are not necesarily "good" or "bad" themselves. However, I do think that people will be more likely to choose to be located somewhere in that dimension-space that isn't currently inhabited by the gender of their chromosomes. (aka women in positions of authority might choose to have more testosterone, and no one would think that is "weird" or "unfeminine")
I would also surmise that most the people who desire the current two-gender system to persist are men (and therefore used to being the dominant gender, and therefore not personally feeling a reason to change it).
Although this may be true, I would be very surprised if more than 5% of the population would want to eliminate the two-gender system. If you were trying to campaign for a single gender, you'll have to focus on appealing to both genders.
As for the one-gender society question, current social values indicate it will be a century or two before this idea could seriously enter the mainstream views of the world.
For the foreseeable future, I predict the slow decrease of gender roles in society.
Your comment about aggression being bad seemed off to me. Aggression is a useful strategy. Maybe you meant irrational misplaced aggression...
Gender is pretty useless. I see no reason that we would opt to keep it around once we have control of our bodies. Assuming that everyone gets one body and it's rather permanent (which is a pretty big assumption), either we all figure out what the optimal physiology is and converge to that, or we decide that we like diversity or something and invent vast hordes of unique bodies, or some mix of both. I see no reason to keep a binary (which we don't exactly have in any case). Analogies can be drawn to fashion; there would likely be popular mainstream body characteristics, and vast numbers of subcultural variations.
I think you are vastly underestimating the reach of transhumanism, given that 'it occurs'.
Edit: Natural selection hasn't substantially applied to much of anything for the last few thousand years, and will be totally thrown out when we get access to our source code. Evolution is in our origin but not in our future.
Yes, and in the long-run I do have to wonder how this sort of thing will impact people who have very standard identities for both sex and gender but wouldn't mind being more fluid. I for example am pretty close to a 0 on the Kinsey scale, but if there were a pill to make me bi would probably take it. Similarly, part of me has strong "ick" feelings about changing my gender identity, but at a meta level if I could first self-modify to not have that reaction and then make the modifications temporarily I'd consider it.
Edit: I'm also curious why Daenery's post is being voted down. It seems like a reasonable topic at multiple levels, and voting down someone with three large dragons at their disposal is not in general a good idea.
Should transhumanism occur, it will eliminate the maladaptive differences. We can make people less aggressive and not depressed.
You could, for example, make them take Prozium) or forcibly rewrite their DNA. The "we can make" I am uncomfortable with. Who are 'you' to make me not have a trait that I am perfectly content with? The potential for more fundamental invasive interference is not something I would eagerly anticipate.
(While the references are just fictional evidence with respect to how the future may be the are actual evidence and illust...
A higher level of egalitarianism between the sexes increases utility.
I haven't looked at the literature in a long time, but I seem to remember there being an inverse relationship between sexual equality and self-reported happiness (particularly among women in developed countries). Is this not true? Of course, even if utility for women decreases it might be made up for by increases in utility for men, but I am unaware of any such phenomenon.
EDIT: I had something like this in mind, but remember it having cross-cultural comparisons, so this probably isn't exactly it.
On the other hand, feminist relationships seem to be happier.
If both results hold, it could plausibly be that feminism and unhappiness are both caused by something else at the country-wide level (the collapse of traditional meaning and values, perhaps,) or that feminism improves intimate relationships while worsening other aspects of life (by increasing labor supply, perhaps,) or that feminists make things worse for non-feminists (by not laughing at their rape jokes, perhaps.)
I didn't mean to suggest that a single, slightly related, research paper demonstrates causation between the two variables, merely that it is a piece of disconfirming evidence for the statement I quoted.
I would also surmise that most the people who desire the current two-gender system to persist are men
I would bet against that. I anticipate that preference for current gender system to be approximately the same across the sexes (and also fairly widespread).
It's also the case that having two genders that specialize in different things was adaptive in the ancestral environment and might still be adaptive in the current environment.
Edit: Why is this being downvoted?
I'm horrified by the prospect of someone or something eliminating maladaptive differences between humans.
Also, your post misuses the word "adaptive". If you tried to design a human male who was evolutionarily adapted to the modern environment, you wouldn't end up with a less aggressive male.
You wouldn't want to pass "maladaptive differences" to your children, if it was a possibility, would you?
It depends on which differences we're talking about. In the modern environment, fertility and intelligence are inversely correlated. But I wouldn't want to get more grandkids by making my kids stupider.
I am mildly frustrated that both you and the original poster seem to be using the word "maladaptive" as if it were a synonym for "bad" with a convenient veneer of scientific objectivity, like saying "see, evolution agrees with me that such-and-such qualities are morally undesirable!" Ha ha. Evolution, including human evolution, can be horrible. A week ago we had a discussion post about how an actual population of humans regressed to chimp-level intelligence due to evolution.
Maybe related: You'll get more than pretty butterflies.
It continually amazes me that people can read EY's Azathoth metaphor comparison or sort of understand how evolution works and still end up basically falling for the naturalistic fallacy!
I shared a link to that post since I hoped it would spark the same kind of gut feeling that no evolution really isn't your friend in others.
Maladaptive =/= unwanted
Adaptive is a technical term with a precise definition.
There are plenty of maladaptive traits that I wouldn't want eliminated. For example I think people are currently maladaptivley altruistic and evolution is selecting against that because the benefits of kin selection are much reduced in our atomized society.
My best guess in a Friendly singularity:
Gender relations have been pretty generally broken for a while now. Clearly once we're actually grown up, we owe ourselves a few centuries of fix-fic (warning, TVTropes) before we abandon the concept completely.
Can someone remind me how much I am now required to donate to Singinst for having wasted time speculating on CEV's output?
I think you could have been clearer on when you're talking about physical sex and when you're talking about psychological gender. Are you advocating the elimination of psychological Gender Identity, or the elimination of Sexual Dimorphism?
As someone who has already successfully hacked himself to become Agendered, it is my belief that the former is entirely environmentally caused anyway, and a deep cultural change is what would be needed to address it. However, while I would strongly advocate seeking a future in which each and every individual can have exac...
For example-Women have better social skills (good!), but are more prone to depression (bad). Men are better self-promoters (good!), but are more aggressive (bad).
Wouldn't keeping these two examples symmetrical be better? Depression while it does affect others primarily hurts the person who is depressed, inappropriate aggression while it does affect the person engaged in it, primarily hurts others. Implicitly this affirms the axiom that average women are more valuable than average men, which is ingrained in us to a surprising extent.
There are plenty of examples of male traits that hurt men. Higher suicide rate for starters.
Several commenters have pointed out that you are misuing words like "maladaptive," when traits like aggression are often highly adaptive. And that's a problem. But I don't understand how you think what you're calling evolution would even work.
What exactly are you refering to when you talk about natural selection? To invoke Sagan, the secrets of evolution are time and death. Evolutionary reasons for the way we are are made up of ancestors who passed their genes on. Your edits emphasize that this would be a voluntary process, but if the people who ...
I agree normatively with "postgenderism" but have little reason to put particular stock in the predictions above.
Should transhumanism occur, it will eliminate the maladaptive differences.
Transhumanism is a set of values, not an event. (One would not say that Humanism has happened.)
Why expect most of the change to occur with the removal of maladaptive differences, rather than by increasing adaptive differences? Why expect us to make women more more confident than men?
Your links are, sadly, not properly formatted.
Adding hyperlinks to posts does not work like adding links to comments.
Seasoned users: Is it possible to do [brackets-parentheses) links in articles,
or does one have to do it via the clumsy, user un-friendly WYSIWYG interface?
I think we will eventually end up in either a genderless society, where the sets of attributes that define gender no longer exist and humans are free to adopt whatever attributes they desire, or in a patriarchal dystopia. The dystopia will come about through "voluntary" changes that will not be explicitly forced, but will be the only option for non-men under patriarchy. The game will be more rigged than it already is.
Feminist theory has held that gender (the set of memes that people with penises behave in certain ways, and people without penises...
Feminist theory has held that gender (the set of memes that people with penises behave in certain ways, and people without penises behave in other ways) is both socially constructed and socially enforced.
Many (and probably most) animals also have gender in the sense that individuals with penises behave in certain ways, and individuals with ovaries behave in other ways, despite not having memes.
One cached thought in the rationalist community that isn't often questioned is that natural selection, rather than higher-level social pressures, cause certain things.
I'll take it you haven't been paying attention to the discussions of status on OB and LW. In my experience rationalist are much more willing to consider explanations based on social pressure, then feminists are to consider explanations based on natural selection.
In general, it seems strongly that some aspects of gender are social constructs and others or not. The most helpful way of distinguishing them is to look at differences across different societies. If some difference in gender behavior exists in all or almost all societies then the degree of social construction in it is likely to be small. If some gender aspect only exists in some specific times and places then it is a gender construct. Let's look at examples which are relevant to modern society. In the United States, and much of the Western world, it is taken for granted that pink is a feminine color and blue is a masculine color. Indeed, we start this with a very young age, giving clothes of the appropriate colors to infants. Many people in the US consider this to be an obvious universal. But in fact, this color distinction is very modern. However, now consider for example aggressiveness. In pretty much all societies, males are considered to be more violent and aggressive than females.
Aside from looking at other cultures, there are other methods. For example, one can look at children who were genetically male but had surgery at a very young age that made them anatomically female....
In general, it seems strongly that some aspects of gender are social constructs and others or not. The most helpful way of distinguishing them is to look at differences across different societies.
There are however two huge pitfalls when engaging in this sort of reasoning.
The first is the tendency to conclude that since aspect X of gender apparently doesn't exist in society Y, it is therefore a social construct, and it can be eliminated by changing some particular aspect of the existing society in isolation -- ignoring the possibility that any such change necessarily entails making the society look more similar to Y in other ways, which would be seen as unfavorable even by most people who are negatively disposed towards X per se. This of course sounds like a clear fallacy when spelled out like this, but the fallacy can often be found at the core of many gender-related arguments, and countering it is often impossible without making arguments of the sort "lack of X leads to Y" that sound insensitive and offensive when stated explicitly.
The second is the failure to realize that aspect X of gender can be a stable equilibrium for collective behavior, like driving on the ri...
Feminist theory has held that gender (the set of memes that people with penises behave in certain ways, and people without penises behave in other ways) is both socially constructed and socially enforced.
Many (and probably most) animals also have gender in the sense that individuals with penises behave in certain ways, and individuals with ovaries behave in other ways, despite not having memes.
One cached thought in the rationalist community that isn't often questioned is that natural selection, rather than higher-level social pressures, cause certain things.
I'll take it you haven't been paying attention to the discussions of status on OB and LW. In my experience rationalist are much more willing to consider explanations based on social pressure, then feminists are to consider explanations based on natural selection.
Many (and probably most) animals also have gender in the sense that individuals with penises behave in certain ways, and individuals with ovaries behave in other ways, despite not having memes.
I think this is a cached thought. It's very easy to anthropomorphize; if scientists can do it for the concept of natural selection itself, they can certainly do it for animals. The scientific community is much less neutral than we would both like it to be, and as such, it will support findings that are more in line with the social status quo. This is something tha...
Upon reading Eliezer's possible gender dystopias ([catgirls](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xt/interpersonal_entanglement/), and [verthandi](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xu/failed_utopia_42/) and the other LW comments and posts on the subject of future gender relations, I came to a rather different conclusion than the ones I've seen espoused here. After searching around the internet a bit, I discovered that my ideas tend to fall under the general category of "postgenderism", and I am wondering what my fellow LessWrongians think of it.
This can generally be broken down to the following claims:
EDIT- Due to some really insightful comments;
I replaced men being prone to aggression as a negative, with men being prone to suicide.
I made the verbiage a little more explicit that no one would be *forced* to change, but would seek out the changes that transhumanism would have available.