An Egoist Faith
People mostly don't do things. They really don't. In order to defy fate …
Posts published by: Zack M. Davis
Comment on a Scene from Planecrash: "Crisis of Faith"
Realistic worldbuilding is a difficult art: unable to model what someone else would do except by the "empathic inference" of imagining oneself in that position, authors tend to embarrass themselves writing alleged aliens or AIs that just happen act like humans, or allegedly foreign cultures that just happen to share …
Gaydar Jamming
In my high school journalism class back in the mid-'aughts, there was this fat Latino boy, L., who had distinctly "feminine" mannerisms. (I'm not even sure how to describe it in terms of lower-level observations, as if the memory is encoded as the category rather than the precepts. You know …
Link: "Nonbinary Runners Have Been Here the Whole Time"
The New York Times reports on nonbinary divisions in competitive footraces. (Archived; hat tip Steve Sailer.)
The piece is impossible to parody, but in a way, the absurdity is—clarifying. I always want to ask trans-inclusion-in-sports people what they think the point of sex-segregation in sports is (as opposed to …
Backlog Metablogging, April 2022
I feel like I've been pretty lazy for the last—ten months? A laziness born out of resignation and despair, a sense that I've outlived myself, that my story and my world is over, and I'm just enjoying a reasonably comfortable afterlife in—the time we have left. I may …
Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War
There was a brief, beautiful moment from 2014, the first year of my life (that I feel comfortable admitting to), until mid-2016—a year-and-a-half long moment when I didn't have to fight a desperate and obviously hopeless ideological war of survival against a Society that's trying to kill me.
(Technically …
Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal
Go, Soul, the body's guest,
Upon a thankless errand:
Fear not to touch the best;
The truth shall be thy warrant:
Go, since I needs must die,
And give the world the lie.
Summary
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In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's …
Links: Amy Wax Bloggingheads Appearances
Watching a few of her appearances on the Glenn Loury show and one opposite Adam Serwer, is it weird if I admit that I find something about Amy Wax incredibly attractive? I mean, on a spiritual level—as a female intellectual with no patience for the Egregore. No patience!
Link: "Never Smile at an Autogynephile"
This song is an interesting cultural artifact of the strategy of stigmatization. Lyrics—
Never smile at an autogynephile
No you can't get friendly with an autogynephile
Don't be taken in by his narcissist grin
He's imagining how well he'll fit within your skinNever smile at an autogynephile
Never meet …
Link: "Blood Is Thicker Than Water 🐬"
Ha ha, those Less Wrong guys sure love dolphins for whatever reason! (Alternative viewer.) Note that the "root of the causal graph" argument here for the relevance of phylogenetics is equivalent to the case that sex chromosomes are a good way to operationalize sex in humans—it's not that anyone …
I Don't Do Policy
Something about my writing that tends to confuse people, that I need to clarify briefly: people keep expecting me to come out with some sort of policy prescription, whereas I see myself as trying to describe what's actually going on in the world without being delusional about how much control …
There Should Be a Closetspace/Lease Bound Crossover Fic
I want to use the platform of my comparatively ("comparatively") obscure blog to tell you about two comparatively obscure webcomics I like, that display some striking parallels, and whose readerships probably anti-correlate—overlapping less than two arbitrary webcomics of similar comparative obscurity.
Closetspace is the story of a boy named …
Amulet
After some recent Twitter and Discord discussions, I'm still amazed at how well my "only Nixon could go to China" effect continues to hold up: everyone is respectfully sympathetic to the poor self-hating trans woman even when her whole bit is specifically about explaining why that frame is delusional. (When …
Interlude XXI
"Obviously I socially gender him as male as per his preference."
"I wouldn't call it a preference exactly—"
"I gender him male as per his philosophical commitments."
Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems
I'll write my way out
Write everything down, far as I can see
I'll write my way out
Overwhelm them with honesty
This is the eye of the hurricane
This is the only way I can protect my legacy—"Hurricane", Hamilton
So, as I sometimes allude to, I've spent basically …
Point Man
Chinese legend tells of a eunuch named Zhao Gao, a chancellor to the Second Emperor. The power-hungry Zhao Gao wanted to arrange a coup, but was worried that the other members of the imperial court wouldn't cooperate with his designs.
One day, Zhao Gao announced a horse was being given …
Link: "See Color"
Here we are in the future
Here we are in the future and it's wrong—"Who We Are", Steven Universe: The Movie
Whether or not you support the ongoing ideological transition from late-20th-century individualist "content of their character" liberalism to the successor ideology, it is imperative that students of literature …
You Are Right and I Was Wrong: Reply to Tailcalled on Causality
Friend of the blog Tailcalled responds to my 2016 response to Ozy on autogynephilia!
Summarizing—Ozy had claimed that the concept of autogynephilia is conflating three things: ordinary female sexual behavior (cis women also have female bodies in their fantasies!), a manifestation of gender dysphoria, and "true" autogynephilia without concomitant …
Link: "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"
Sorry for the off-topic linkpost, but I want to point to a fascinating new mathematical philosophy-of-language post on Less Wrong (alternative viewer)! You really have to admire thinkers who can devote so much energy to probing the intricacies of such abstract topics without having any kind of pragmatic ulterior motive …
Liability
I'm not a coward, I've just never been tested
I'd like to think that if I was I would pass
Look at the tested and think "there but for the grace go I"
Might be a coward, I'm afraid of what I might find out—"The Impression That I Get …