 If this is just a weasley way of trying to apply two trans identification, a greater standard for justification than exists for any other term or concept. Any time anybody ever uses a word in the definition, it leads to an infinite regress. Something that's cool is something that's cool. I don't think you're going to find a better definition than that. I've heard a lot of trans activists say, well, if you can't define chair, then we don't owe you a definition of man or woman. There would be no Shakespeare. We would all be limping like zombies through the streets. Not only is it circular, it's viciously circular. I think there is utility in referring to trans men as men purely for harm reduction purposes. But I also think it's true. I think that, in fact, the reason there's utility in it is because it is true. The only thing that I care about is the argument from self-identification. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I don't think it's circular. It turns out, most definitions, if you get to the root of them, are pretty impossible to nail down, right? You've probably heard of, or maybe even seen the Vsauce video, what is a chair? Turns out nobody can define what a chair is. By nobody, I don't mean not just internet people or people who do the debate circuit. I mean, nobody, like it's not possible to, because our understanding of a chair is so socially constructed. It's a matter of what's useful to us. Okay. So are you endorsing this self-identification? I know you mentioned you don't see it as circular. So a man could be somebody that identifies as a man? Of course. Okay. So I will address the argument from circularity first. So while it is true that at a certain point, we run out of words to describe things, and this can be seen if you ask somebody, well, what does that mean? Well, what does that mean? Well, what does that mean? At a certain point, we run out of words. And when we do run out of words, what we do is we point to things within reality, as we just start pointing to particulars. Let me try to derive a universal, like with triangles. We start pointing to acute obtuse triangles and trying to see what they have in common. That is how we take that idea. Now, the problem with saying a man is somebody who identifies as a man is that not only is it circular, it's viciously circular, because if somebody were to ask you, Vosch, a man is somebody who identifies as a man, what is that? What is a man? I could point to myself. I'm a man. I could point to other men. There are billions of them. I could point to lots of them. I love pointing to men. Okay. So if somebody asks you, what is a man? I don't think you would need to point, because you seem like we still have words left to give. So if they were to point to two men, like, these are both man. What do they have in common? Would you do this with a chair? I think we would do that with anything. That's how we come up with categories is that we look at what things have in common. But the chair argument, I would say, I've heard a lot of trans activists say, well, if you can't define chair, then we don't owe you a definition of man or woman. The first thing I would contest with that is, well, you're the one that made a claim about men and women. When I never made a claim about a chair, I never claimed a stool as a chair, I never claimed a bed as a chair. Yet, trans activists do claim that trans men are men and trans women are women. So when you do claim for the truth of something, you do need to define it. The second argument is that just because something like a chair doesn't really have something that we give thought to. If you're engaging in this debate, you're engaging in the gender discussion, I'm going to assume that people have given thought to it. We didn't give thought to the gender thing either. I don't think it's particularly important, but you're also making a claim. I could be out in the park. I could point to the bench or maybe a bit of a stone outcropping that I could sit uncomfortably and say, ah, a chair. You could insist rigorously that it is not a chair, that it is a bench or an outcropping or some other thing that is like, but not like a chair. And we could have an argument what a chair is. The only consequence of this would be the calories we burn by yelling at each other. It's a meaningless discussion because at the end of the day, a chair is just a general term we have to describe a thing we sit on. People's specific boundaries will expand or contract based on their preferences. It's like arguing whether or not a pop tart is a sandwich. They're deliberately meaningless questions. This is why I do not like the circularity argument definition in a purely like linguistic sense at the root of all things. They're all circular. We generalize a concept and the worth of a term is how specific an image we can evoke. How useful is it? But there's no truth value in any of these terms. We make the terms. If we want, we could split the term chair and just say the term. Terms can have true value. Like for example, before humans came into existence, were homo sapiens came into existence. Do you think gravity existed? Well, sure. Do you think gravity as a concept existed before the word gravity existed? Yes. We gave term to the concept. Yeah. So we just recognize that concept, some force among these large masses of objects and we put a word to it. So that's with any concept. But that's a concept first of the word itself, not created. But that's a truth value to a universal concept, not to the word. The word gravity, the truth, if one were to say, for example, no, gravity can refer to this, that the other, but not to this particular phenomena. Actually, gravity doesn't specifically refer to the way, say matter interacts with dark matter or the way light bends around black holes. We're going to re-term this. It'll be a different word. There would be no truth value with that because again, we made the word gravity. The fundamental universal concepts remain the same. Biological sex remains the same. But experiential phenomena, the way we term and define things, we build those boundaries. And when it comes to, especially when it comes to something that's defined relationally, socially, like gender, there is no discovery of gender. Our understanding of it has changed enormously over time and between cultures even today. So the idea that we're discovering and giving name to some kind of fundamental truth is just not the case here. We're all winging it. And I don't think we should wing it in ways that are exclusionary or harmful. If we are having a discussion on an arbitrary concept, we should lean towards ones which give greater understanding and lesser harm. Yes. So with the man as somebody who identifies as a man, lessening harm or whatnot, I would still argue that when you say a man is somebody who identifies as a man or anytime anybody ever uses a word in the definition, it leads to an infinite regress. Whereas if we don't have words at all, like say we both couldn't speak or communicate, we would still have our senses to point to things. So that's discreet. Right? At a certain point, all you can do is discreetly point to things. Whereas if you define a man as somebody who identifies as a man, who identifies as a man, who identifies as a man, it ends up being infinite. There's no way to ever come to a close there. This doesn't mean anything. What does it mean to be cool? See, you can find synonyms for what it means to be cool. You can find lots of them, in fact. But in reality, at the end of the day, we all learn what it means to be cool by being shown examples. And despite that, the examples we're shown are the highest level of arbitrarity. What was cool 50 years ago is not cool today. And what is cool now will not be cool 10 years from now. So we're talking about a concept, coolness, which everyone has some understanding of, which exists all over the world, which is fully social and which can be referred to only through direct example. I don't like, see, there's infinite regress thing. This is something that I did not learn from reading linguistics, but I did learn from the internet debate pro circuit. I think this is just a weasley way of trying to apply to trans identification, a greater standard for justification than exists for any other term or concept. Because I just don't think that we do this for other things. The infinite regress of coolness, who cares nerd? What's cool is cool. Yeah, so what other word besides man and woman do you define, who use the word in the definition? Use the word in the definition? What do you mean? You said a man is somebody who identifies as a man, which uses the word man in the definition of man. So what other words besides man and women do we use to define themselves? We could just say like a man is somebody who identifies with the gender role associated with masculine behavior, but not exclusively. If you want to like avoid the word man, that is purely a semantic argument. Okay, because I can construct an infinite number of definitions for man that adhere to my understanding of what a man is without actually using the word man. That's just a word game. But if you talk about like how much are we actually advancing or understanding of the concept, well, whether or not you have synonyms because cool has many synonyms, they're only synonyms. And a synonym does not give you an understanding of a word, right? Like you don't learn what cool is by learning what the term rad means. And because when you read the definition for rad, it's like, oh, rad. Oh, that means that something's sick. Well, we're not learning anything. We're just finding extra words here. Would you say that something is cool if it identifies as cool? If it's identified to be cool, then certainly. Identified or identifying? Well, something can't identify as cool because coolness is a concept, not a person. So it would have to be identified from outside. Yeah, I think that's just comes into my other thing. Like there's no feature of reality you obtain simply by identifying as having such. So I don't know why this thing wouldn't be true for man. But that's not the infinite regress argument. Now we're talking about whether or not self-identification is a valid metric for social claims, but infinite regress is something that would apply to the term cool as well. Because outside the description of synonyms, you kind of have to just point to real life examples. Well, is it cool to do this, is it cool to do that? I think we identify things as cool if we show some type of enthusiasm or friendliness towards it, towards the noun, then we call it cool. That's not what cool means, and you know it. I think that's like the literal definition. Being enthusiastic. Yeah, I mean, I can check really quick, but I think that's actually the definition. Wait, wait, do you think that people use the term cool by looking up the definition of cool and going, oh, well, I mean, I can look really cool. Yeah, well, enthusiasm just means that it brings you some type of amazing sense. It doesn't have to be like enthusiasm in the way that you're describing it. When you describe something as cool, you just have a preference towards it. You like it. But liking something and it being cool are not even remotely the same thing. And anyone who uses the English. That's why I defined it as having friendliness or enthusiasm towards a noun. That also isn't really how we use towards a noun. What do you mean? Like noun is person place thing idea. So like, wait, thinking that like liking a thing would mean that thing is cool. Yeah, you could call it that. Absolutely. If you like a water bottle, that water bottle is cool. Do you do you really think that's how people like people's understanding of the term cool is just a sit in him for when they like a thing? I I didn't just say when they like a thing. I said, when they show enthusiasm towards a noun. Show enthusiasm. Give me a can you give me a counter example? Sure, absolutely. We can acknowledge that things or people are cool, despite not liking them like the cool kids in school, who we actually quite dislike because they're unapproachable and standoffish. We can say that things are cool, even though it's an act and like the act is not something you personally enjoy. Like I think that skateboarding is cool and a kind of like post ironic like sunset overdrive. Wow, look at how hard you're trying sort of way. But I have no personal affinity for it and find skateboarders quite annoying, actually, what is or isn't cool is an incredibly see the interesting thing here. And I think that anyone watching will understand that when they think of the term cool, it goes beyond, you know, liking a thing. Is that by trying to concretely define coolness, all you've done is robbed it of its coolness, you've taken a worthwhile and useful English term and you've crippled it in a in an attempt to bring it in line with the absurd standards you hold for gender definitions. In reality, if you were to similarly cripple every word of the English language, we would all be dead men. There would be no Shakespeare. We would all be limping like zombies through the streets. The fact that these words are fluid, that they have meanings and definitions that we kind of pick up on and pull and twist and play with. That's not only English. That's literature. And to have all of that white decide in going, no, a man has to be. No, it can't be regressive. It has to have this specific definition. We don't we don't apply these standards to anything outside of scientific technical definitions, like what grain of soil constitutes an acceptable range for like apartment construction, stuff that we decide the boundaries for. We don't do this narratively. I would say like with cool, we don't define something that's cool if it's called cool. Now, to make the use mentioned distinction a little bit clearer, cool must refer to something, right? Maybe it's maybe it's not something we like. Maybe it's just something that we attribute to something other people like either way, notice how when I said that I didn't use the word cool because using the word in the referent creates an uninformative definition. See, we're dead men right now. This is death. You're killing cool right now. It's a murder. And this is evidence for the police. Well, no, no, no, I know I know I mean it. I think we can move off of it if you want. But like, no, but I mean it, though, like, I don't think you believe what you're saying, right? Because like here, you know what's cool in American culture? Black people, AAV, slang that black queer people come up with that gets taken by black women, that gets taken by white women that gets taken by white gays that gets brought into the general public. But American culture broadly doesn't find black people or black behavior cool. In fact, hegemonic American culture is mostly committed towards attacking black culture, ghetto culture, their fashion, their aesthetic, their way of speaking. And then 10 years later, everything they were doing becomes mainstream. So there's something countercultural about coolness. Something has to be brave, daring. It has to be evocative. It can't just be likable. Likeability, likability is Mr. Rogers. Okay, if you want to call it evocative, that's fine. It still doesn't mean cool is something that identifies as cool, something that is said that is cool. Well, I'm only talking about the infinite regress argument, not the identification argument. That's a separate thing. Infinite regress comes with using the word in the reference. So a woman is somebody who identifies as a woman, a man is somebody who identifies as a man. Something that is cool is something that people prescribe to be cool. Something that's cool is something that's cool. I don't think you're going to find a better definition than that. And trust me, linguistics have tried. I mean, linguists have tried. You can find papers on this stuff. These are not ideas that can be baked into a single definition. Do you think that, like, murder could be called cool? Absolutely. Yeah, there are tons of... Go read history. There are some metal goddamn murders that have happened throughout history. Yeah, they killed Julius Caesar, 57 people, stabbing him all at once. I don't know, that seems kind of cool and countercultural. Hell yeah. So I think maybe you show enthusiasm towards that idea and concept, but many others don't. And that's the way we define it. But there are lots of things that I think are cool that I don't like, for example. The Hugo Boss Nazi uniforms are widely regarded as being fashionable in the whole, like, evil, Sith, dark empire, black leather kind of thing. I don't find Nazis even remotely cool. If anything, that's more like cosplay. That's larping is cool. That's like, how do we make our horrible death soldiers look cool? But an effort was made, right? There's a reason they paid out for those leather uniforms.